Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre

by Voltairine De Cleyre

This coldness and quietness sound the doom of poetry. A people which shall be fully permeated with the spirit and word of Science will never conceive great poems. They will never be overcome long enough at a time by their wonder and admiration, by their primitive impulses, by their power of simple impression, to think or to speak poetically. They will never see trees as impaled giants any more; they will see them as evolved descendants of phytoplasm. Dewdrops are no more the jewels of the fairies; they are the produce of condensation under given atmospheric conditions. Singing stones are not the prisons of punished spirits, but problems in acoustics. The basins of fjords are not the track of the anger of Thor, but the pathways of glaciation. The roar and blaze and vomit of Etna, are not the rebellion of the Titan, but the explosion of so and so many million cubic feet of gas. The comet shall no more be the herald of the wrath of heaven, it is a nebulous body revolving in an elliptical orbit of great elongation. Love—love will not be the wound of Cupid, but the manifestation of universal reproductive instincts.

No, the great poems of the world have been produced; they have sung their song and gone their way. Imagination remains to us, but weakened, mixed, tamed, calmed. Verses we shall have,—and many fragments,—fragments of beauty and power; but never again the thunder-roll of the mighty early song. We have the benefits of science; we must have its derogations also. The powerful fragments will be such as deal with the still unexplored regions of Man's own internity—if I may coin the word. Science is still balking here. But not for long. We shall soon have madmen turned inside out, and their madness painstakingly reduced to so-and-so many excessive or deficient nerve-vibrations per second. Then no more of Poe's "Raven" and Ibsen's "Brand."

I have said that I intended to indicate a wider concept of literature than that generally allowed. So far I have not done it; at least all that I have dealt with is usually mentioned in works on literature. But I wish now to maintain that some very lowly forms of written expression must be included in literature,—always remembering that I am seeking the complete composite of Man's Soul.

Here then: I include in literature, beside what I have spoken on, not only standard novels, stories, sketches, travels, and magazine essays of all sorts, but the poorest, paltriest dime novel, detective story, daily newspaper report, baseball game account, and splash advertisement.

Oh, what a charming picture of ourselves we see therein! And a faithful one, mind you! Think what a speaking likeness of ourselves was the report of national, international, racial importance—the Jeffries-Johnson fight! Nay, I am not laughing. The people of the future are going to look back at the record a thousand years from now; and say, "This is what interested men in the year 1910." I wonder which will appear most ludicrous then, Bishop Wilfred in juxtaposition with the comet star, or the destiny of the white race put in jeopardy by a pugilistic contest between one white and one black man! O the bated breath, the expectant eyes, the inbitten lip, the taut muscles, the riveted attention, of hundreds of thousands of people watching the great "scientific" combat. I wonder whether the year 3000 will admire it more or less than the Song of Beowulf and the Battle of Brunanburh.

Consider the soul reflected on the sporting page. Oh, how mercilessly correct it is! Consider the soul reflected on the advertising page. Oh, the consummate liar that strides across it! Oh, the gull, the simpleton, the would-be getter of something for nothing whose existence it argues! Yea, commercial man has set his image therein; let him regard himself when he gets time.

And the body of our reform literature, which really reflects the very best social aspirations of men, how prodigal in words it is,—how indefinite in ideas! How generous of brotherhood—and sisterhood—in the large; how chary in the practice! Do we not appear therein as curious little dwarfs who have somehow gotten "big heads"? Mites gesticulating at the stars and imagining they are afraid because they twinkle. I would not discourage any comrade of mine in the social struggle, but sometimes it is a wholesome thing to reconsider our size.

A word in defense of the silly story. Let us not forget that lowly minds have lowly needs; and the mass of minds are lowly, and have a right to such gratification as is not beyond their comprehension. So long as I do not have to read those stories, I feel quite glad for the sake of those who are not able to want better that such gratification is not denied them. I would not wish to frown the silly story out of existence so long as it is a veritable expression of many people's need. There are those who have only learned the art of reading at all because of the foolish story. And quite in a side way I learned the other day through the grave assertion of a physician that the ability to read even these, whereby some little refinement of conception is introduced into the idea of love, is one of the restraining influences upon sexual degradation common among poor and ignorant young women. The face of man revealed in them is therefore not altogether without charm, though it may look foolish to us. I said there were some appearances in the Mirror not generally remarked, but which to me are suggestive. One of these is the evident delight of the human soul in smut. In the older literature these things are either badly set down, as law and cursing, as occasionally in the Bible; or they are clothed and mixed with sprightly imaginations as in the tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer; or they are thinly veiled with a possible modest meaning as in the puns of the Shakespearian period; but in our day, they compose a subterranean literature of themselves, like segregated harlots among books. Should I say that I blush for this face of Man? I ought to, perhaps, but I do not: all I say is, the thing is there, a very real, a very persistent image in the glass; no one who looks straight into it can avoid seeing it. Mixed with the humorous, as it often—rather usually—is, it seems to be one of the normal expressions of normal men. We deceive ourselves greatly if we fancy that Man has become purified of such imaginations because they are not used openly in modern dramas and stories, as they were in the older ones.

It may be dangerous to say it, but I believe from the evidence of literature as a whole, that a moderate amount of amusement in smut is a saving balance in the psychology of nearly every man and woman,—a sign of anchorage in a robust sanity, which takes things as they are—and laughs at them. I believe it is a much more wholesome appearance, than that betrayed in our fever-bred stories and sketches which deal with the abnormalities of men, and which are growing more and more in vogue, in spite of our cry about realism.

Personally, I am more interested in the abnormalities, which I find very fascinating. And I am very eager to know whether they will prove to be the result of the abnormal conditions of life which Modern Man has created for himself in his tampering with the forces of nature,—his strenuous industrial existence, his turning of night into day, his whirling himself over the world at a pace not at all in conformity with his native powers of locomotion, and other matters in accordance. Or will they prove to be the revenge of the dammed up, cribbed, cabined, and confined imagination, which can no longer exert itself upon externals,—since the Investigating Man has explained and mastered these or is doing so—and now turns in to wreak frightful wreck upon the mind itself?