NASHVILLE, TENN., DECEMBER, 1905.
With Trotwood
It is the unexpected in life, as has often been said, that happens. The rejected stone throughout the centuries has always been the keystone in the arch of fame, and genius and greatness always have and always will come from the bosom of Mother Earth. The best legacy a boy can have is an honest ancestry and a condition that forces him to work. And, therefore, I am always sorry for the young man who “has a fine start in life.” He has as many chances for failure as the “brilliant young lawyer” has for mediocrity and a bar-room clientage. Success despises assistance and fame hates caste and titles as the gods do salt water. Mediocrity, like a faint hearted hound, may always be found running up and down the river of his purpose, fearing to plunge and doubting the ford, while success plunges in and crosses, or dies trying. Two generations of idleness will breed crime, while two generations of shirt sleeves mean wealth. If the world would stop working a year God would have to destroy it with fire and brimstone.
Poetry should be brought back to the uses for which it was intended. The metaphysical school that is trying now to control it, and whose object seems to be to make it a science instead of a pleasure and beautiful way of expressing our thoughts, should be driven from our standard as they have always been from our hearts. We must go back to first and natural principles again, and by demanding imagination, simplicity, beauty and naturalness, make poetry a vehicle of the pure and the beautiful, and so simple that ordinary minds can read it with pleasure and understand what they read. The story age of Spencer, Shakespeare and Burns should be received and much of Browning’s stuff flung to the dogs, where it belongs. God has given us poetry to be enjoyed, to be understood, to make us wiser and better, to take to our hearts and firesides. Its principle is all but universal and there are few who do not, in some shape, enjoy it. It was not intended to be an intellectual puzzle, a metaphysical science to be gobbled up by a few abnormally developed protoplasms and denied to the world of yearning hearts. Imagine Homer reciting his glorious stories of Agamemnon and Ulysses, of “Ox-eyed Juno” and Penelaus, “tamer of horses,” to the Greek philosophers; imagine Shakespeare giving “Romeo and Juliet” in a barn to the learned of Europe. Of Burns lying in the dew of the haystack watching the morning star quiver like the soul of Highland Mary and then writing his deathless song for the ears of those people who live in palaces and never saw a morning star, nor felt the kiss of an honest love in their lives.
The world is wild for prose stories. The reason is obvious. The stories have been shut out of poetry by the metaphysical school, and, being unable to get them in the language of the heart, of the imagination, the world which must have them is taking them in the language of the commonplace. And thus is the true and the beautiful being destroyed to give way to the double meaning and the sensational. The so-called poetry of to-day is not new. The only reason a lot of metaphysical poetry has not been handed down to us is because it did not live to get to us. Five hundred years hence the people who will know Burns will have to hunt around in a sheepskin encyclopoedia of biography to find out who Howells and Henry James were. We must not forget that contemporary criticism placed Ben Jonson ahead of Shakespeare, Pope above Milton, Scott above Keats. And yet Pope and Scott did a world of harm to poetry. They helped to drive it out by disgusting people with the sameness of its flow and the smoothness of its rhythm. As if the wind roars ’round the house by a foot and a meter measure as Whitmore expressed it, as if the mountain looms up by a law of rising and falling, or the waves thunder like a church organ.
But the grave of truth is never the theme of fraud but for one generation—the next one finds truth on the monument and wrong in the grave. Let us get back to truth; though dead, she is a sweeter mistress than a living and bedecked and bespangled lie. As Romeo said over Juliet’s body, so with poetry:
“Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.