Chapter 7 MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY

Our views of poetry, or the literature of ecstasy, illuminate many dark crannies in one of the most unfathomable caverns of aesthetic speculation; speculation of the connection between poetry and morals, form and matter, art for art's sake and didacticism. It has been often asked whether poetry should deal with moral subjects, sociological questions, and philosophical ideas. The question disappears when we regard literature of ecstasy in prose as poetry, for all ideas are dealt with in prose and some may be ecstatically treated.

If poetry is an atmosphere that suffuses literature, it may bathe most various ideas. Emotional treatment of the ideas gives us literature of ecstasy or poetry. If the natural language of ecstasy is prose, we certainly do not wish to see a train of philosophical, moral or sociological views treated in verse. To this extent the old critic was right who did not want poetry (a long composition in verse, as he understood it) to deal with ethics or science.

The question is then not really whether poetry should be concerned with moral, sociological or psychological themes, for these themes always have poetry in them, and an emotional treatment of them brings the poetry into prominence. Ideas are the substance of poetry and nearly all ideas are moral, sociological or psychological. Even scientific facts and metaphysical utterances may be so stated by a writer as to show the latent poetry. The two famous passages in Leaves of Grass beginning "I open my scuttle at night" and "I am an acme of things accomplished and an encloser of things to be" are emotional statements of the facts of the infinity of the universe and of the evolution of man, respectively; Whitman brought out the poetry in a philosophical and in a scientific idea.

Moral views may be imaginatively treated and be poetry. The theme of Great Expectations is a sermon against pride and snobbery, and the emotional treatment, especially by force of example, makes part of the book poetry. Portrayals of hypocrites, for instance, so truthfully and movingly artistic as to arouse an ecstatic state in the reader, become poetry. Hence Tartuffe and Pecksniff are poetical portraits, even when drawn in prose.

Poetry was supposed to appeal to the imagination, prose to the intellect; poetry was presumed to be dictated by the heart, prose by the mind; fancy was thought to hold sway in poetry, logic in prose. But nevertheless, the great English poets like Shakespeare, Browning, Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, gave us much poetry that was produced by the intellect, weighed by the mind, and governed by logic. Any intellectual and even moral performance may be elevated into poetry, when emotionally and ecstatically presented. And philosophers like Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have demonstrated this.

Our definition of poetry throws much light on the subject of the relations of politics and morals, of social and philosophical problems to poetry. Poets should instruct, while delighting, is the contention of one group. They ought merely to express beauty and emotions, is the emphatic demand of another class. I doubt if there has ever been a great poet who hasn't done both of these things. If a poet is to teach he must teach something; he must express ideas, and ideas mean thoughts about life, and these in turn refer to the relations of man to himself, to one another, to the opposite sex, to society, to the universe, to nature. But it is while doing this that he must give us beauty and emotion.

When a prose writer is purely didactic without any emotional or aesthetic appeal he is no poet. It is manifestly absurd also for an author to give in metre didactic works which could be better written in prose. To this extent the disciples of art for art's sake are right, that the poet should not give us unecstatic political, philosophical or moral lessons in metre. If, as I believe, our emotions may be expressed in prose or free verse probably more poetically than even in metre, it is surely inadvisable to drive home a prosaic idea in verse, and especially at great length. Yet this has often been done. Browning gave us an effective harangue against spiritualism in Mr. Sludge, "The Medium," in blank verse, Byron proved a good critic of society in Don Juan, in Ottava Rima metre, Shelley preached moral reforms in the Revolt of Islam, in the Spenserian stanza. Two of the best poems of the nineteenth century, among the masterpieces of their authors, are Swinburne's Hertha, and Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, and they are both ecstatically didactic.

But the future poets will not spin out their ideas in metre at great length. The short verse poem embodying an idea will always be with us, but I doubt if we will have, or at least ought to have, philosophical or moral works, extending into hundreds or thousands of lines of regular verse.

John Addington Symonds has in his Essays Speculative and Suggestive taken two of the most famous dicta in English literature regarding the function of poetry in relation to form and matter, and given us a sane viewpoint. He analyzes Arnold's statement that poetry is a criticism of life, and Pater's assumption that all art, including poetry, aspires towards the condition of music which thus in his opinion becomes the true type or measure of consummate art. Symonds shuns both the didacticism which Arnold's view encourages, and the worship of form implied in Pater's statement; though it should be said that Pater in his essay on "Style" urges that, after all, subject matter is the deciding factor in determining great art. As Symonds says, the poet gives us rather a revelation than a criticism of life, a presentment according to his faculty for observing and displaying it; he is more a reporter and a seer than a judge. Poets take their final rank by matter and not by form. Though Symonds mentions slurringly a great poet like Baudelaire, still the following lines should be carefully pondered by many of our versifiers: "The carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of triolets and rondeaux, the seeking after sound and color without heed for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure." Poetry appeals to the imaginative reason, and must embody thought and emotion. As Symonds remarks, Pater's discrimination between these two is fanciful.

Poetry then must not be timid about dealing with ideas in an emotional or imaginative manner. It may even take up moral problems provided it does not sink into the commonplace ethical purposes that we have in the Psalm of Life and Excelsior, two of Longfellow's most inferior and popular poems. An idea that is the result of reason may be uttered with ecstasy, and hence there may be logic in poetry.

In his Oxford Lectures on Poetry in the essay on "Poetry for Poetry's Sake," Professor A. C. Bradley takes issue with those who claim that it is no consequence what a poet says but how he says it, and he rightly regards as of small aesthetic value that formalist heresy which encourages men to taste poetry as though it were wine. Poetry inheres in ideas. To insist, as the poetry for poetry's sake school does, that a poem has no more lesson for us than a tree is to institute a false comparison, for the tree has a lesson for any one who finds it.

When one finishes a volume of poetry by some of the purely aesthetic poets, one is amazed at the kind of life they embody in art. It is often such a petty life, a talk to a cat, or an imitation of an image of an old poet, or a superabundant reference to flowers. It is not of the substance of which noble lives are made. We are pained to find that trite utterances or references are tricked out in gaudy images and given forth to the world in large quantities.

Verses of trivial facts and ideas set forth with artifice are not poetry. Indeed, it is a petty employment for poets to be giving vent to labored conceits about gold fish, and vases, about dandelions and kittens and lollypops, investing none of these themes with imagination or intellect. Man is stirred by thousands of emotions arising from his inability to adjust himself to surroundings, by his thwarted will and suppressed desires. He is often wrapped in gloom for want of real truthful consoling poetry. He experiences tragedies due to conflicts with relatives, friends, to lack of harmony in matrimonial or amorous affairs. His life is often being gradually snuffed out by the prevailing of stupid and deplorable customs; he is often starving or being insufficiently fed, and frequently sees his children in unhappy circumstances. He is the victim of tyrants and unjust social systems, and is engaged in soul-killing occupations. He faces the great mysteries of existence, the riddle of the Sphinx. He witnesses cruelties of all kinds, persecution of races and individuals, mismanagement of affairs, lynchings, massacres, wars and imprisonments. Hypocrisy and vindictiveness are rife and man suffers thereby. He thirsts for beauty, he pants for happiness.

Yet poets who may find numerous and important subjects for the literature of ecstasy, are busy writing sugared verses about mosaics, candles, and puppies, and arranging vowel sounds and rhythms. Men's souls are starving to be fed with poetry and the versifiers polish and file and chisel verses on themes that interest no one. As Horace says, the mountains are in labor and the issue is but a ridiculous mouse.

Indeed it is not the subject the poet chooses that one objects to, but to the absence of ideas, or the shallowness or triviality of the idea. Burns took a daisy and made it the symbol of the racked poet, and could write about a mouse or a louse and deduce some universal idea. Shelley and Keats could endure emotions and thoughts by singing of a skylark or a nightingale. But the petty poet cannot deduce anything but a trifling idea, no matter what theme he selects.

Another feature which distinguishes the minor poet in prose or verse is his investing a trite idea with an emotion out of all proportion. He hales with enthusiasm a commonplace, he gets into ecstasy about that toward which an intelligent man displays little or no emotion. It is the distinction of the unknown author of the ancient Greek fragment On the Sublime that he deprecates the tendency to wax emotional about the unemotional. The silly ideas and emotions about which versifiers get excited are often an index to their own moral and intellectual failing, as well as their aesthetic deficiency. From Sainte-Beuve Matthew Arnold appropriately quotes a saying to the effect that, in judging a work, the French question not only whether they are moved by it, but whether also they have the right to be moved by it.

So when we look through much of the so-called popular poetry, we see why we cannot often admit it to the high realm of the literature of ecstasy. It contains the childish sentimental excitement about facts that every thinking man takes for granted. When we read the eloquent sermon on the advantage of practicing justice, we wonder at the folly of making a comment about so obvious a truism. It is for this reason that moral axioms lack the elements of poetry, because they do not admit of exposition with appreciable ecstasy. Verse is full of stale themes sung over so often that we almost rebel when the new poet comes along and sings over the same old story.

It requires a great intellect to know when to judge rightly about the propriety of one's emotions for the subject of literature. We do not think that it is the subject matter of emotion to go into ecstatic praises, for example, over a man who supports his child. We find that animals provide food for their young; hence it is not fit to grow eloquent because a man does what even the lowest animal has the instinct to do.

Conventional morality only becomes poetry when colored by the imagination or illustrated by an unusually pleasing ecstatic presentment. When Fuller, for instance, says that we should not mock at the defects of people who are physically or mentally disabled, he utters a stale truism that is not poetry but ethics. When he adds that it is pitiable to beat a cripple with his own crutches, the little prose passage is lifted up into poetry, for we are brought into a state of ecstasy by the imaginative illustration. Similarly take some of the instances of self-sacrifice by the common people which Bret Harte and O. Henry delighted in depicting. Some of their stories become poetry by emotional presentation of a trite idea.

There must also be more or less sympathy with the poet's viewpoint. "All right human song," says Ruskin in his Lectures on Art, "is the finished expression by art, of the joy or grief of noble persons, for right causes. And accurately in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money."

Ruskin may have corrupted our artistic outlook somewhat by insisting on an ethical aim. Yet we should remember that our aesthetic feelings are influenced by our moral outlook. While we should not seek an ethical aim in literature as an end in itself, while we should shun the preacher of commonplaces who poses as a poet, we cannot respond to the sympathetic depicting of an emotion which we ourselves could never feel because of repugnance to it.

To appreciate a poem truly, we must feel as the poet does and sympathize with the motives that inspired his feelings. The reasons that urge him to express his emotions must appear to us just ones. If our intellect is far greater than that of the poet, we shall find that many of the causes that inspire him to sing as he does would not at all arouse in us the emotions experienced by him; his poem is not the greatest art to us. If his intellect is superior to ours, we shall not like his work; but then it will be because he is more advanced than we are.

If a poet were to sing of an incestuous love; or decry sympathy for the distressed; or to laud a cruel action; or to gloat over the schemes of the fraudulent; or sing favorably of any action which we think a base one, his poem would not be art for it does not evoke emotional response from anybody.

Poe laid down the principle of art for art's sake that poetry deals with beauty alone and that the only faculty for appreciating it is that of taste. He held that poetry had nothing to do with truth or duty; that the intellect and the moral sense were concerned with these and hence had no field for exercising themselves either in writing or judging poetry.

As a matter of fact all three faculties, taste, intellect and moral sense, are called into use in creating and appreciating the highest kind of poetry or any other form of literature. There is no reason why a poet should not make use of all three faculties if he has them all developed. Goethe and Ibsen possessed them. The highest form of taste can scarcely be attained unless the poet's intellect and moral sense are fine. For falsehood and sin are repugnant to our taste for beauty. A book that is absolutely tainted with moral perversities or shows a foolish and inconceivable conception of intellectual values will be certainly deficient in some phases of beauty. Our consciences and our minds are unconsciously consulted in our conception of the beautiful. Not only truth, but duty is beauty. Even Poe maintained that Taste held intimate relations with Intellect and Truth and he therefore placed it between them.

The greatest classics are those that appeal to all three faculties in us and those works which offend both our intellect and moral sense do not completely satisfy our sense of beauty. The best critics from Hazlitt to Brandes understood that. Fortunately many of the classics have lost only in parts their moral and intellectual value, and hence still hold sway over us. And sometimes the beauty is so intensely striking that we charitably overlook faults of morality and intellect.

As Professor Woodberry says in his A New Defense of Poetry in The Heart of Man: "Can there by any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation."

The connection between art and ethics is closer than some critics imagine. Spingarn was mistaken when he said that we have done with all moral judgment of literature. A book is often artistically great chiefly because its ethical viewpoint is right. The rightness of it is often what creates the ecstasy. Let us take Ibsen's Ghosts. The real greatness of this play is not chiefly in its picture of heredity or of a man becoming an idiot. Its real value lies in its attitude towards the marriage problem and its contrast of the two characters, Mrs. Alving, the representative of the new order, and of Pastor Manders, representing society. The leading question there is, should Mrs. Alving have gone back to her husband, knowing that he was possessed of a loathsome disease which might be inherited by any possible progeny? Was she justified in leaving him? That these are the important questions is evident from the motive which prompted Ibsen to write the play, namely, to answer the critics of the Doll's House. The conclusion reached by Ibsen from the terrible picture is that Mrs. Alving was wrong in going back to her husband, that there are times when it is justifiable to leave one's husband. This is the moral lesson of the play, and is conveyed with great ecstasy; in fact, the moral intensifies the ecstasy. A conventional playwright would have concluded that Mrs. Alving should have remained with her husband in obedience to duty, that the simple-minded Pastor was in the right. The play even if handled as well as by Ibsen could not have been the great work of literature that it is, if written in defense of the conventional moral code. A great author attacks conventional morality to battle for a higher morality.

The moral ideas of an author have much to do with the literary excellence of his work.[133-A] But this does not mean that we must go back to the old Greek idea that poetry be a vehicle for the inculcation of the commonplace ethics. Nor does it imply that we cannot appreciate a poet because we disapprove of the religion or political party with which he is affiliated.

In the conclusion of his essay on "How a Young Man Should Study Poetry," Plutarch shows that the philosopher and the poet are engaged in the same mission. He takes passages from the poets and shows us that they are similar to those he selects from the philosophers. The doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras agree with the ideas by the dramatists spoken on the stage, and with those that lyricists sang to the harp. We may accept Plutarch's views except in so far as he urges that poetry should preach dogmatic and conventional ethics.

We also see that parts of Dante, Pope, and Shelley may be placed parallel respectively to passages from thinkers who influenced them, Aquinas, Bolingbroke, and Godwin, to learn that the poetry resided in the original philosophic prose passage. It was enhanced not by the verse form but by the process of ecstatic re-statement.

Should we say that Cowper and Wordsworth are poets, and that Rousseau, from whom they got many ideas, is not? Is Browning only a poet and no philosopher, and is Carlyle only a philosopher and not a poet? Is the verse of Goethe where pantheism is taught, poetry, and do you find no poetry at all in Spinoza's Ethics?

Among the most famous philosophical passages of Shakespeare is the one in The Tempest describing the transitoriness of this world and ending with the famous line about our life being rounded with sleep. If there is anything in Shakespeare that is poetry of a high order, this famous passage is, and yet it is really philosophy. It is poetry not because it is in blank verse or has rhythm, but because the ideas are stated in an emotional and ecstatic manner. There is poetry in ideas and those critics who shrink from applying the word poetry to intellectual performances are urged to honeycomb their Shakespeare for numerous ideas that are beyond question poetry.

A great idea is poetry; a profound and farseeing idea is poetry, whether written with rhythm or not. If a commonplace thought, rhythmically adorned, may sometimes be poetry, most certainly a profound idea ecstatically but unrhythmically expressed is poetry.

What is the difference between poetry and philosophy? If we examine into the nature of each we will find that there is a line at which they meet and where it is hard to distinguish one from the other. As a rule, the principles of metaphysics, epistemology and logic as written down in the average philosophical work seldom are poetry. Only occasionally have the philosophers waxed ecstatic. Yet many novelists, essayists and verse writers have made many of these philosophical principles poetry by stating them in an ecstatic manner. Any philosophical principle arousing our emotions is poetry.

The general truths of sociology, ethics and psychology form the subject matter of the literature of ecstasy, but they are poetry only when ecstatically treated. The psychological novel and the problem play deal with these truths. Go to some original treatises on sociological, moral or psychological subjects and omit the statistics, the laboratory work and the cold hard reasoning and you will often find great ideas emotionally stated that belong to the literature of ecstasy. We have parted with the idea that an author must be tearing a passion to tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in order to produce poetry. When Herbert Spencer analyzes love for a page and a half and tells us how it is composed, we exclaim, this is the literature of ecstasy even though we find it in a treatise on psychology. He describes to us how we feel when we love by enumerating to us the different sensations we experience. (Principles of Psychology Vol. 1, Part IV, Ch. 8, Par. 215.) The passage may not be passionate poetry, but it would not have been out of place in a novel by Stendhal, George Eliot or Meredith.

When Freud reveals our souls to ourselves, when Fabre writes a book on the doings of insects, we often are reading poetry or the literature of ecstasy, when we think we are reading science.

We might select many passages from philosophical works that belong to the literature of ecstasy, passages from Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume, but more especially from Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. There are isolated paragraphs in their works wherein we find the imagination and the intellect fused; we cannot distinguish that which belongs to the realm of logic and that which is the result of pure emotion. Of philosophers of our own time, Bergson and Bertrand Russel have occasional passages where a profound idea is emotionalized. Hence these belong to the literature of ecstasy, or poetry.

We must no longer conclude that only that is poetry which sings a song in verse. It is just because the verse lyric, epic, and tragedy are among the oldest forms of literature that the theories of poetry have been built up by examining chiefly these forms. Aristotle's Poetics, except for a few vital passages, has done more mischief in literary criticism than his Logic has done in philosophy.

What a queer definition of poetry is that which includes a metrical insipid utterance or a versified fact of microscopic importance, and excludes the sublime reflections of philosophers who contemplate the nature of the entire cosmos, who fathom the mysteries of the universe, and who state for us our relation to it and give us profound conceptions of it. If one finds poetry only in the saccharine sonnets of our magazine writers and none at all in the great philosophers, he does not understand what poetry is. If you, however, call a philosophical principle poetry when you find it in verse, you must admit that the poetry was there before it was put in verse, in the prose version. For poetry, not being a branch of literature but an emotional spirit bathing all literature, also holds philosophical ideas, intellectual conceptions in solution, whenever these are in prose and move to ecstasy.

Aristotle and many others were also absorbed as to the difference between poetry and history, as they had been between poetry and philosophy. He stated truly enough that Homer as a poet did not differ from Herodotus as a historian simply because of their difference in metre. He found that the difference between poetry and history lay in this, that poetry dealt with the universal and history with the particular. This definition means very little to us to-day even though commentators try to explain that Aristotle includes under poetry any treatment also of the particular which presents universal situations and depicts universal traits. History, however, also treats of the universal, for it records universal traits in the particular events which it describes. Aristotle's distinction falls, for history and poetry deal with both the particular and universal. We cannot say with Aristotle that history tells what Alcibiades actually did, while poetry would tell what any man would do. An actual emotional account of the deeds and character of Alcibiades is poetry, as you will observe by reading Plutarch.

For all historical writing may be poetical and contain poems, if the ecstasy is there. What distinguishes the poetry in history is the emotion, and all history that is a dry narrative is history and not poetry. Thucydides's Peloponnesian War and Carlyle's French Revolution contain much poetry though they deal with the particular, but they are made poetry by the ecstasy. Some of Herodotus is poetry, and much of Homer is history.

Again Aristotle's distinction is obsolete in these days of prose fiction which deals with the particular, and often with the actual, and merely changes the names. And these novels often contain poems. We recall Fielding's distinction between novels and histories, the former being true in everything but the names, and the latter being false in everything but the names.

There is poetry in Livy, Tacitus, in Gibbon, Froude, and all great historians.

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FOOTNOTES:

[133-A] "Moral nihilism inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism. . . . The values of literature are in the last resort moral. . . . Literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty prevails."-J. Middleton Murry.

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