Disregarding the Coleridgean tradition, which seems to have come to an end with Mr. Woodberry, and the influence of the “new psychology,” which has not yet taken a definite form, the main forces that have influenced the present clashes in the American attitude toward literature seem to be three. There is first of all the conception of literature as a moral influence, a conception which goes back to the Græco-Roman rhetoricians and moralists, and after pervading English thought from Sidney to Matthew Arnold, finds its last stronghold to-day among the American descendants of the Puritans. There is, secondly, the Shavian conception of literature as the most effective vehicle for a new Weltanschauung, to be judged by the novelty and freshness of its ideas, a conception particularly attractive to the school of young reformers, radicals, and intellectuals whose interest in the creative imagination is secondary, and whose training in æsthetic thought has been negligible; this is merely an obverse of the Puritan moralism, and is tainted by the same fundamental misconception of the meaning of the creative imagination. And there is finally the conception of literature as an external thing, a complex of rhythms, charm, beauty without inner content, or mere theatrical effectiveness, which goes back through the English ’nineties to the French ’seventies, when the idea of the independence of art from moral and intellectual standards was distorted into the merely mechanical theory of “art for art’s sake”; the French have a special talent for narrowing æsthetic truths into hard-and-fast formulæ, devoid of their original nucleus of philosophic reality, but all the more effective on this account for universal conquest as practical programmes.
The apparent paradox which none of these critics face is that the Weltanschauung of the creative artist, his moral convictions, his views on intellectual, economic, and other subjects, furnish the content of his work and are at the same time the chief obstacles to his artistic achievement. Out of morals or philosophy he has to make, not morals or philosophy, but poetry; for morals and philosophy are only a part, and a small part, of the whole reality which his imagination has to encompass. The man who is overwhelmed with moral theories and convictions would naturally find it easiest to become a moralist, and moralists are prosaic, not poetic. A man who has strong economic convictions would find it easiest to become an economist or economic reformer, and economics too is the prose of life, not the poetry. A man with a strong philosophic bias would find it easiest to become a pure thinker, and the poet’s visionary world topples when laid open to the cold scrutiny of logic. A poet is a human being, and therefore likely to have convictions, prejudices, preconceptions, like other men; but the deeper his interest in them is, the easier it is for him to become a moralist, economist, philosopher, or what not, and the harder for him to transcend them and to become a poet. But if the genius of the poet (and by poet I mean any writer of imaginative literature) is strong enough, it will transcend them, pass over them by the power of the imagination, which leaves them behind without knowing it. It has been well said that morals are one reality, a poem is another reality, and the illusion consists in thinking them one and the same. The poet’s conscience as a man may be satisfied by the illusion, but woe to him if it is not an illusion, for that is what we tell him when we say, “He is a moralist, not a poet.” Such a man has really expressed his moral convictions, instead of leaping over and beyond them into that world of the imagination where moral ideas must be interpreted from the standpoint of poetry, or the artistic needs of the characters portrayed, and not by the logical or reality value of morals.
This “leaping over” is the test of all art; it is inherent in the very nature of the creative imagination. It explains, for example, how Milton the moralist started out to make Satan a demon and how Milton the poet ended by making him a hero. It explains the blindness of the American critic who recently objected to the “loose thinking” of a poem of Carl Sandburg in which steel is conceived of as made of smoke and blood, and who propounded this question to the Walrus and the Carpenter: “How can smoke, the lighter refuse of steel, be one of its constituents, and how can the smoke which drifts away from the chimney and the blood which flows in the steelmaker’s veins be correlates in their relation to steel?” Where shall we match this precious gem? Over two centuries ago, Othello’s cry after the death of Desdemona,
“O heavy hour,
Methinks it should now be a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon!”
provoked another intellectualist critic to enquire whether “the sun and moon can both together be so hugely eclipsed in any one heavy hour whatsoever;” but Rymer has been called “the worst critic that ever lived” for applying tests like these to the poetry of Shakespeare. Over a century ago a certain Abbé Morellet, unmoved by the music of Chateaubriand’s description of the moon,—
“She pours forth in the woods this great secret of melancholy which she loves to recount to the old oaks and the ancient shores of the sea,”—
asked his readers: “How can the melancholy of night be called a secret; and if the moon recounts it, how is it still a secret; and how does she manage to recount it to the old oaks and the ancient shores of the sea rather than to the deep valleys, the mountains, and the rivers?”
These are simply exaggerations of the inevitable consequence of carrying over the mood of actual life into the world of the imagination. “Sense, sense, nothing but sense!” cried a great Austrian poet, “as if poetry in contrast with prose were not always a kind of divine nonsense. Every poetic image bears within itself its own certain demonstration that logic is not the arbitress of art.” And Alfieri spoke for every poet in the world when he said of himself, “Reasoning and judging are for me only pure and generous forms of feeling.” The trained economist, philosopher, or moralist, examining the ideas of a poet, is always likely to say: “These are not clearly thought out or logical ideas; they are just a poet’s fancy or inspiration;” and that is the final praise of the poet. If the expert finds a closely reasoned treatise we may be sure that we shall find no poetry. It is a vision of reality, and not reality, imagination and not thought or morals, that the artist gives us; and his spiritual world, with all that it means for the soaring life of man, fades and disappears when we bring to it no other test than the test of reality.