Poetry is thus a genesis in the throng, then an exodus with the solitary poet, then—though this is too often forgotten—a return to the throng. At least it is so with the great poets. Not the poet, but the verse-smith, the poetaster, is anxious to deny his parentage in communal song, and to set for his excellent differences. He will daze the editor and force his way into the magazine by tricks of expression, a new adjective, a shock of strange collocations. In a steamboat on the Baltic I once met a confidential soul who told me of his baffled designs upon the vogue of modern fiction. He had written, it seemed, a novel without a woman in it; and he had printed this novel in red ink. "And I am not famous yet," he sighed. So with one kind of minor poet. He works through eccentricities and red ink. He is like Jean Paul's army chaplain Schmelzle, who, when a boy in church, was so often tempted to rise and cry aloud, "Here am I, too, Mr. Parson!" It is not so with the great poets, not so even with those poets whom one may not call great, but who know how to touch the popular heart. All the masters, Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, even Dante, win their greatest triumphs by coming back to simplicity in form and diction as to the source of all poetic expression. Or, to put it more scientifically, in any masterpiece one will find the union of individual genius with that harmony of voices and sympathy of hearts achieved by long ages of poetic evolution working in the social mass.
If such a range of poetic material is needed even in criticism, how strictly must it be demanded in any question about the art as a whole! One may turn from history to prophecy; but poetry must still be studied even more rigidly in its full range and with regard to all human elements in the case. Because the communal elements, once so plain and insistent, now elude all but the most searching gaze, that is no reason for leaving them out of the account. Hennequin saw that simply for critical purposes one must reckon not only with the maker of poetry, but with the consumer as well; and the student of poetry at large must go still farther. It is after all only a remnant who choose and enjoy great poetry, just as it is only a remnant who follow righteousness in private life and probity in civic standards.
But what of the cakes and ale? What of the uncritical folk? What stands now, since people have come indoors, for the old ring of dancers, the old songs of May and Harvest Home? Does the lapse of these mean a lapse in poetry at large? Or what has taken their place? How shall one dispose of the room over a village store, the hot stove, the folk in Sunday dress, and the young woman who draws tears down the very grocer's cheek as she "renders" Curfew Shall Not Ring To-Night? What of the never-ending crop of songs in street and concert-hall, and on the football field, verses that still time the movements of labor and the steps of a marching crowd? What of homely, comfortable poetry, too, commonplace perhaps, but dear to declaiming youth? Only a staff cut from Sophoclean timber will support your lonely dreamer as he makes his way over the marl; but the common citizen, who does most of the world's work, and who has more to do with the future of poetry than a critic will concede, finds his account in certain smooth, didactic, and mainly cheerful verses which appear in the syndicate newspapers, and will never attain a magazine or an anthology. If singing throngs keep rhythm alive, it is this sort of poets that must both make and mend the paths of genius. Commonplace is a poor word. Horace gives one nothing else; but a legion of critics shall not keep us from Horace, and even Matthew Arnold, critic as he was, fell back for his favorite poem on that seventh ode of the fourth book,—as arrant commonplace as Gray's Elegy itself. Members of a Browning society have been known to descend earthward by reading Longfellow. If minor poets and obvious, popular poems ever disappear, and if crowds ever go dumb, then better and best poetry itself will be dead as King Pandion. No "Absent-Minded Beggar," no "Recessional."
Whoever, then, will tell the truth about poetry's part in the world of to-day and to-morrow must not only know the course of all poetry through all the yesterdays, but must keep all its present manifestations, all its elements, sources, and allies at his command. Not only the lords of verse are to advise him; he shall take counsel with scullions and potboys. It is that poet in every man, about whom Sainte-Beuve discoursed, who can best tell of the future of poetry. The enormous heed paid to the great and solitary poets, as if there could be a poet without audience or reader, has distorted our vision until we think of poetry as a quite solitary performance, a refuge from the world. Is not poetry really a flight from self and solitude to at least a conventional, imaginative society? Poetry by its very form is a convention, an echo of social consent; with its aid one may forget personal debit and credit in the great account of humanity. Now, as in the beginning, poetry is essentially social; its future is largely a social problem. How far, then, has man ceased to sing in crowds, and taken to thinking by himself? What is the shrinkage, quality as well as quantity, in the proportion of verse to prose since the invention of printing? Is the loss of so much communal song in daily toil, in daily merriment, like the cutting away of those forests which hold the rains and supply the great rivers?
Waiting for complete and trustworthy studies of humanity which shall answer some of those queries, one may venture an opinion on the general case. Just as one feels that forests may vanish, and yet in some way the mighty watercourses must be fed, so with poetry. Nothing has yet been found to take the place of rhythm as sign of social consent, the union of steps and voices in common action; and whatever intellectual or spiritual consolation may reach the lonely thinker, emotion still drives him back upon the sympathy of man with man.
Human sympathy is thus at the heart of every poetic utterance, whether humble or great; rhythm is its outward and visible, once audible sign; and poetry, from this point of view, would therefore seem to be an enduring element in our life.