Doubtless there were singers, when Babylon was building, who insisted that a new poetry was necessary to celebrate the city, with its walls and towers and the efficient wonder of its sewer system, if it had one. Perhaps these poets, blinking in the glare of the furnaces and confused by the thunder of the shops whence issued the swords and spears and war-chariots, said to each other, “These are the supremest things, the worth-while things, and we must sing of them or be out of date.” And a paroxyst school was born.
But always the heart of man has yearned toward things other than the works of his hands. When the walls and towers and spears and chariots have returned to the earth from which they were fashioned, there still endured the love for those other things, and the joy in their artistic expression.
The springtime, banal as it is as a poetic subject, will remain forever more pleasing to the singer and his audience than can any paroxysm, of however “scientific technique,” proclaiming in “swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms” the clamor and clangor of an armor-plate factory or the din and danger of a textile-mill. The earth is our mother, and hers are our deepest yearnings, first and last. “She waits for each and all.”
And if the paroxysts seek for power—for power that overcomes and subdues, that smites suddenly or conquers slowly, and recreates again the same—let them look aside from their banging machinery, from all materialistic illusion—from “the poetry contained in modern cities, locomotives, aeroplanes, dreadnoughts and submarines; in a stock exchange, a Wall street or a wheat pit—and behold the power and the marvel, beyond all “scientific marvels,” of Nature, singing slow or fast as suits her business, chanting her inevitable rhythms through the ages, taking back into her patient bosom all the marring excrescence that man for a little while has reared thereon. What is New York or Pittsburg but an itching pimple on the face of the earth? There is much outside incorporate limits, and beyond the sound of mill-whistles and the scream of trains. The earth is scarce disturbed as yet.
“My love is like a red, red rose”—the same song that sang the enraptured Solomon, or whoever it was that indited the Canticle—will, I believe, outlast any paroxysm which records a “cinematographic vision of modern life.” This is possibly the idea of the paroxysts themselves, they to sing anew as the occasion demands, and keep their product, like that of the movies, down-to-now. But though the words of the love-song perish, some man will sing it again, for joy at sight of his beloved, when springtime urges on the rose. Sappho sang of love, and men search the sea-floor for her fragments.
However, if the paroxysts wish to see their notions expressed in proper relation to all things else, let them read Walt Whitman, who had room for everything, as he lustily proclaimed, in his sturdy chants.
The New Beauty: is there any such thing? Why the adjective?
SCRIBNER PLAYS
Robert Frank
By Sigurd Ibsen