The Distinction of Our Poetry

FOR many years the susceptible American has alternately chafed and laughed at the cheerful ignorance of his Continental, and particularly his British cousins, in regard to the dimensions and civilization of his native land. From their distant point of view, Buffalo and New Orleans are one, Boston and San Francisco the matter of a few hours’ ride. Only within a few years has it dawned on the British mind that the United States contains many inhabitants who are neither tight-lipped Puritans, nor cutthroat miners, nor Southern planters; that thousands of our citizens have never tracked the buffalo to his native lair, nor escaped the relentless tomahawk of the red man ; that most of us rely upon fiction and the drama for our impressions of the cowboy.

But though the older countries have at length relinquished in great measure their deep-seated faith in what they consider the “ characteristic features ” of our civilization, they yet retain one unfortunate and a priori conception of our literature. Their persistent search for the characteristic, their determination to extract a local flavor from a more or less colonial product, have resulted in their overlooking much that to the critical American represents the literary hope of the country.

In their eagerness for original, highly colored, boldly treated “local ” material, they are perfectly willing to dispense with style, and with it its thousand implications of delicacy, reserve, precision, — all, in a word, that has marked the classics of every nation. Bret Harte’s vicious, gaudy miners, Mary Wilkins’s starved, colorless spinsters, Fenimore Cooper’s grandiloquent, bloodthirsty chiefs, represent most satisfactorily to them the West, that Jack Hamlin would hardly know to - day ; the East, which indignantly repudiates Miss Wilkins’s angular types; the region of the Great Lakes, where the unfortunate and filthy descendant of Uncas and Chingachgook has long since slunk away.

Now it is perfectly certain that Bret Harte’s enduring literary work has been determined, not by the fact that he was fortunate enough to encounter a picturesque condition of society, and clever enough to photograph it, but by his consistent and very respectably effective English style, and the distinctly original addition that he has made to our gallery of lovable villains. Jack Hamlin is a type of the universal rascal; his setting is for all essentially literary purposes incidental. If Miss Wilkins’s studies are to retain a permanent and desirable place in the history of American literature, it will not be because of the heartrending accuracy of a narrow, unlovely, and, fortunately, unenduring sectional type; but she will earn her position among her country’s classics by the success with which she interprets to us the terrible possibilities of anguish, tragedy, and soul hunger in the humblest, most provincial life. These possibilities have never been confined to New England ; and it was the growing conviction that the eloquent and melodramatic red man of Cooper’s romances was the exclusive and highly idealized product of the Great Lake region that went far toward checking that author’s popularity in this country.

The fact that our critics have classed together, with an apparent lack of discrimination, those of our authors who grasp, beneath their local mediums of expression, the elemental types, and those who merely amuse the foreign reader with thumb-nail portraits of an unfamiliar society, seems to indicate that it is the latter sort from which they derive the greatest pleasure. This unfortunate point of view has always rendered by far the greater part of their criticisms worse than useless to us : as one who remorselessly disciplines his own boys and girls often finds a piquant amusement in the fresh naïveté, the crude good sense, the clever impertinence, of a less cultivated neighbor’s children, so the keepers of the English tongue in its greatest purity have deprived us of our kindest because our sternest and ablest critics.

And this attitude has affected our poetry quite as much as our prose. Joaquin Miller in earlier times, Walt Whitman at a later day, Stephen Crane latest of all, have pleased our mother country in greater or less degree, — have seemed to her to represent us most ably ; it is the purpose of this essay to decide how justly.

Great stress has been laid on the English point of view, because the standard of American poetry is necessarily set by the English. Even the most blatantly independent American would not refuse the tutelage of the race that produced Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats. Our poets of to-day, like those of the older school, are formed, for the most part, on the classics of their own inheritance ; and when this education is wanting, either through misfortune or a willful indifference, the result has invariably been a lack of symmetry, a force out of proportion to its means of expression, or else a scope so limited as to preclude utterly any title to greatness.

What are the fundamental characteristics of this English poetry in which, however effectively differentiated, our own is necessarily rooted ? In the first place, it is an eminently cultured poetry : the great poets of England have been, with a few notable exceptions, highly educated gentlemen, many of them great scholars. A carefully graded social system, abundant and long-established material prosperity, have given the leisure class that freedom from harassing strain, that opportunity for calm and symmetrical development, which have been abundantly proved indispensable to any successful flowering of the arts.

This culture has been based for generations on the study of the classics ; and however great the claims of a modern utilitarian education, which would replace these by a smattering of many sciences and a traveling acquaintance with half a dozen modern tongues, there can be no doubt that a fairly thorough knowledge of what is left to us of the Greek and Latin literatures is a peculiarly formative discipline, a deep-seated and controlling influence. There goes with such a culture a serenity, a spiritual poise, a certain happy mental balance, that even if it allow of narrowness, occasionally of dogmatism, has resulted in stamping the finest of English literature, like the finest of English gentlemen, with a mark never quite equaled elsewhere.

When we add to these influences that of the English scenery and climate, we have, passing by the deep religious feeling which is so obviously a factor in English poetry, the final explanation of its form and temperament. That minutely cultivated land, the gracious parks, the clean-clipped hedges, the old abbeys, the solid, green-lawned houses, where domesticity and hospitality have risen through the generations to an art, the evidences everywhere of Nature enriched, controlled, enjoyed to the full, the short and lovely distances, — hill and level field, tower and pasture, cliff and beach, and, never too far away, the sea, — these, with the soft, moist air, the ever veiling clouds that protect the eye from the strain of too distant reaches, and frame most perfectly the green and growing England of all her poets since Chaucer, have penetrated and moulded the English verse.

Perhaps the most perfect exponent of a thoughtful a priori conception of the logical characteristics of English poetry is that eminent type, Matthew Arnold. His grave and finished style, — that combination of masculine force with exquisite delicacy, — his thoroughly AngloSaxon temperament informed and irradiated by the very essence and spirit of the Greek, together with that haunting strain of Celtic pathos that no great English poet has ever lacked, rank him with Milton, and above even Tennyson, in the essentially national quality of his art.

Now, in the theoretical derivation of American from English poetry, what development could one confidently anticipate ?

In the first place, the enormous and vital change in conditions, the exigences of mere physical struggle in a new land, the peculiarly unstable and tentative social character of an experimental democracy, above all the immense output of vitality required for establishing the requisite political, commercial, and agricultural basis, at once deprive the very material from which the characteristic personality would first evolve itself of all that continuous, hereditary culture, that beneficial protection of leisure and the preceding generations, in which the English poetry is grounded.

And when the American culture begins to take definite shape, and dispense with the temporary adjustment of the English system under which our older school of poets were trained, we see at once that, like that of all republics, the new country’s educational ideal is scientific, utilitarian, inventional ; sacrificing depth to breadth, preferring definite information to intellectual atmosphere. In a word, the classic ideal, in anything like the English sense, disappears.

Finally, under this clear and brilliant sky, in this dry, keen, relentless air, with an endless coast line, the open frontage of the two great oceans of the world, with mighty miles of forest, sudden descents of cliff and gorge, wide, rolling prairie, tremendous lakes and giant waterfalls, the inspiration everywhere of immense, untamed, almost indomitable natural forces, the last great restraining influence is gone. The young nation, intoxicated with the power of independent, constructive authority, already shaping new ideals, confronts a new nature, of an enormous and almost recklessly prodigal beauty. The result of these influences, so instantly differentiated from those of the mother country, may be anticipated immediately: their concrete sum, unmodified from within or without, closely approximates that very class of work which the English have persistently considered our ultimate height, — passionate original force, a scorn of technique, wonderful flashes of spiritual illumination, grand and amazing frankness, democracy apotheosized.

But, fortunately for the future of American poetry, this sum of influences has not been unmodified. An entirely original factor, a new and indigenous element working from within, gave the developing art its one spiritual restraint, — an odd and apparently inartistic factor, but one with which the essential fibre of American literary expression is indissolubly bound up, — the national sense of humor. By this cathartic element, the flowering of our unique national quality of hard, keen common sense, our literary, and particularly our poetic sense of form has been continually purged and renewed. For the classic ideals, on the whole the most perfect corrective for the art of any nation, we have substituted our innate and final standard, our peculiar national touchstone. Whether or not this substitution can ever result in an art product of the greatest absolute value is another question; that it is and always must be reckoned with, in any consideration of our poetic make-up is certain.

To this modification from within must be added the great and long-continued influence of our older school of poets. Those to whom Evangeline and Barbara Frietchie are yet the classics of their country resent bitterly the statement that, judged by modern poetic standards, compared absolutely with the notable poetry of the world, the really suggestive, original, and enduring work of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Holmes, together, would fill but a small volume. But modern criticism, at once more tolerant and more exacting, sees in this realization no reason for lessening one whit our love and admiration for these gentle preceptors of an unformed art; recognizes perfectly the incalculable debt we shall always owe to that offshoot of the English school whose members, our types of scholarship and culture, transmitted to us the forms, the conventions, the allusions, the graces, the literary good breeding, of the English tongue. If a wider literary experience and a growing artistic perception have taught us that our popular singers have not reached the poetic heights that a more provincial attitude had allowed us to believe ; if, considered merely as English literature, the great mass of their work seems less assured of immortality than we had once thought, we see, on the other hand, to-day as never before, the immense educative influence, the humanizing, cultivating, steady progress toward sweetness and light, that they will represent to the future critics of a distinct national school of poetry, which is to-day only in its infancy, and for which these men, always in this sense American classics, prepared the way.

In what specific regards do they fail, first of the modern, and secondly of the national standard with which this paper is henceforth to concern itself ? For I suppose it unnecessary to analyze their failure to take rank with the elder and unquestionable classics of the AngloSaxons.

The first is best explained by analogy. The great revolution in modern painting since when Nature herself has never seemed the same to us; the simple but illuminating conviction that it is the artist’s duty and privilege to paint what he sees, not what previous analysis has convinced him that he ought to see, has slowly but surely tinctured and modified even the work of those who condemn the method so dubiously interpreted as “ impressionistic.” Its direct concord of poignant impression with adequate expression ; its method apparently so formless and vague, which yet strikes in the soul of the observer just that chord that quivered in the artist when first he felt the spell of the vision ; its utter lack of preamble, of definition, of appeal to the logical faculties, all find their counterparts in the temperament, aims, and methods of modern poetry. The great geniuses of any period whatever in the world’s history are utterly unaffected by such classification, because this atmosphere, this inevitable and direct touch, are equally modern in the phrase of Homer, the songs of Shakespeare, the odes of Milton. To bring this quality of what, for a better word, we may call “ atmosphere ” to concrete illustration: it is what Keats possessed in perhaps the greatest proportionate quantity; it is what the minor English poets — to choose such modern and widely differing examples as Dobson and Henley — have always to such a striking degree exhibited ; it is what Longfellow attained, not in Hiawatha, nor Miles Standish, nor the Psalm of Life, but in a few sonnets, a verse and a refrain from poems like My Lost Youth, a handful of verses from the Saga of King Olaf; it is what, very recently, and in this country, Bliss Carman and Louise Imogen Guiney have displayed in such gratifying measure.

But why do these poets of the older school fail to fulfill the a priori conception of our nationally characteristic poetry ? Because, as has been before indicated, they are, so far as temper and style are concerned, distinctly an offshoot of English or even of British colonial literature. They stood somewhere between the great American personality and the great English traditions : they disseminated culture ; they did not embody, in their poetry at least, the distinctively American temper and potentiality. For we look for something more than American material : narratives of colonial settlers and Indians; poetic embodiment of national issues, even from the national point of view; American wild flowers, even American rivers and mountains, may, though treated with eminent grace of form and genuine patriotic feeling, yet fail of that intangible quality, that subtle distinctive note, which must, at some stage in the artistic growth of any nation, definitely mark it off, in temper, essence, and treatment, from its forbears, however closely connected by blood. What should this distinction be in the case under consideration ? Along what lines should we progress ? In what regards should we gain sufficiently in personality to make up for what we have lost in our inevitable differentiation from the English stock ?

We shall expect a new and vigorous motive power, an independent habit of mind, an art which with few but telling strokes should express the soul that finds itself alone with its God in a great and virgin Nature, unsoiled by the wars and shames of old cities and civilizations, unweighted by leaden traditions, unvowed to ancient ruts of indirection and patchedup failure.

And does this spirit seek out for itself new mediums of expression ? Does it reject the artistic results of the generations, and plunge off at a tangent in a chaotic formlessness commensurate with its vitality ? Emphatically not. The moral, political, and governmental attitude of those earliest New England settlers was from the first an attitude of restraint, of law and order, of definite and desired standards of control ; an insistent shaping of the new spirit by inherited forms already tried and approved. There was no struggle from savagery and barbarism for this people ; theirs was no slowly and unconsciously acquired national spirit. A perfectly understood and intentional ideal, the product of a race already well advanced in the sense of form, inspired them. These early builders of a spiritual republic were far from seeking to tear down and uproot from its foundations the structure of their civilization, in order that they might demonstrate their ability to invent new and striking architectural laws, or, worse yet, dispense with architecture as an art. It was their more grateful and creditable labor to infuse into the old forms a new spirit, to turn the old tools to new uses, to subject their new and precious vitality to what is at once the test and the tuition of the old, tried canons of experience.

And this temper should emphatically characterize their art products. We are to seek rather a subtle than any obvious and exterior change; we are to expect a grave, an almost studied, though intensely simple formality. We must remember that the simplicity of early American life was not wholly involuntary and of necessity. It was not stupidity or inability to appreciate a less austere and frugal life that made their own what seems to modern luxury so barren. Any one who fails to recognize in those deliberate deprivations, that rigorously moderated existence, a definitely artistic and conscious element is blind to one of the strongest factors of the true American temperament. With the pure - blooded American, luxury is acquired only, prodigality essentially exotic. That simplicity which is not penury, but a keenly passionate preference ; that accurate and delicate adjustment of means to end ; that relentless insistence upon the essential, the elemental, most fittingly and stupendously conveyed through a medium absolutely shorn of external solicitation, when adequately applied to art production gives us a result in its own line beyond the criticism of our own or any other time.

To reduce this somewhat abstract and general anticipation to more technical terms : we shall expect to find American verse, as soon as it has sufficiently realized its original native system of culture, grave and controlled in style, extremely delicate, almost reserved, in treatment; presenting great and deeply felt experiences in simple words ; employing preferably short and almost primitive metres; undistracted by the million complicated precedents, issues, and allusions of a more fatigued and socially complex civilization ; calm, alike from the immense and resourceful stretches of its physical natural vision, and the moral confidence that admits no middleman to disturb its elected communion with what it has unwaveringly believed a justifying God. Such a temperament has no need to fortify its distinct personality by the selection of historic themes ; it does not turn to narrative most naturally, nor, in the nature of the rapidly changing elements and temper of the civilization around it, to the technical epic : it is essentially lyric and philosophic in tendency. Delicate, with the moral sensitiveness alike of youth and the consciousness of an intentionally ethical foundation, it is yet strong with the vigorous, unsapped strength of a new organism, — the delicacy and strength of its native arbutus. If its austerity, the intellectual vigor born of its keen gales, its clear, inspiring sky, its swift, pure air, has seemed bloodless and ascetic to more sensuously blunted organizations, such misapprehension is impossible to those who know that this is a very passion of purity; an intoxication as vivid, as æsthetic, as intense, as the more tropical ardor of nations otherwise founded and developed. It is not a starved, unwholesome asceticism ; it is healthy, wind - swept, rain - washed, — a vital delight.

Has this peculiar temperament waited until a very recent date, then, for its notable illustration? We shall expect, and very reasonably, some striking example of it early in the artistic life of the nation ; a type perhaps too strong for perfect symmetry, susceptible to the mellowing and broadening influence of the later culture, but, from the very fact that in the hands of its descendants it would be subjected to modification and dilution, clearer and more definitely national than perhaps any later and more complex type can ever be. And can we show by some anticipation of perfection, an instinctively beautiful form, a technical ease, a maturity of grace, with which artists all through the world’s history have continually surprised a later generation, which profits by this happy foreglimpse of its own latter-day skill ? It seems that we can, and that in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich America has seen all her potential force of national spirit and charm of national grace. If, in the one, philosophy slipped into mysticism, inspired brevity into curtness, intensity of conviction into dogmatism ; if his exquisite facility has sometimes led the other into work more remarkable for that quality than for inspiration, they yet remain the most perfect types, the most valuable examples, and the safest criterions of the American genius; and it is their influence on our most notable recent verse, direct or implied, that subsequent illustration, unaided by much analysis or comment, may be trusted to bring out.

But if it is a question of native force and original spirit, why not present that more strikingly vigorous personality, Walt Whitman ?

Simply because that titanic force, that sweeping annihilation of all accepted canons, that unregulated if colossal genius, is manifestly unrelated, and voluntarily so, to any school or characteristic system. It is a law unto itself, and to stretch it further, to allow it to cover the crudities and vulgarities, the vagueness and incoherence, the cheap sentimentality and meaningless cosmopolitanism, into which an unrestrained imitation of it would surely degenerate, would bring a condition of things for which the most unqualified admirer of his work would surely hesitate to be made responsible.

At his best, the poet of “ When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed ” is inimitable ; if not to be claimed as typically American, at least to be cherished as one of the great universal brotherhood who have risen most adequately to the expression of a deep and lofty feeling; at his worst, however, he falls to a level which is precisely the level reserved for the American of genius in his most unfortunate lapses. Walt Whitman is more akin to us in our failures than in our legitimate and characteristic successes. To illustrate this: —

Now, in its repression, its strength, its atmosphere so perfectly adequate to the conception, the telling quality of every word, this is equal to almost the best of Emerson. In its large, sympathetic, bold treatment of an unusual theme Whitman should not have scorned it. And yet the young man who can catch so perfectly the temper and instant impression of a row of shouldering peaks, and in such a brief flash of poetic insight set them before us, in the next breath is capable of this : —

Whatever heights of philosophical achievement this may have represented to Stephen Crane, it certainly is not poetry. Thus far Emerson could never drop; the most sententious of his aphorisms has a certain grave dignity, a pleasing and aristocratic quality of phrase, that, if it does not intoxicate or illumine, at least does not insult the muse. Yet compared with some of the amazing combinations of Walt Whitman, it is classic.

Consider this : —

This might almost be a literal translation from Heine ; and yet there is a subtle note, a clean, abstract, universal pathos in it, that the self-centred German could not have given us.

Compare this with the well-known Daughters of Time, the Hypocritic Days : —

This unwarrantable breaking of Emerson’s metre softens immensely the difference between the classic and romantic atmospheres of the two poems, and brings out more obviously their common temper. It is not merely a question of broken metres in any two chance poems : it is the American spirit; subtle, limited if you like, but more intense and distinct in these three than in a thousand Tales of a Wayside Inn.

But these are not examples of that simple, regular, but exquisite form that has been predicted for the modern American poetry. Let us illustrate by this one of Miss Guiney’s recent poems : —

“ A man said unto his angel:
‘ My spirits are fallen thro’,
And I cannot carry this battle.
O brother! what shall I do ? ’

“ Then said to the man his angel:
‘ Thou wavering, foolish soul,
Back to the ranks ! What matter
To win or to lose the whole,

“' As judged by the little judges
Who hearken not well, nor see ?
Not thus by the outer issue
The Wise shall interpret thee.

“ ‘ Thy will is the very, the only,
The solemn event of things ;
The weakest of hearts defying
Is stronger than all these Kings.

I have quoted this at such length because it is at once so entirely of the latest modern movement, — not so far from Kipling, — and yet of such a form and matter alike that the third and fourth stanzas are quite worthy of Emerson.

It must be steadily borne in mind that this Emersonian standard is by no means offered as the final one for all English poetry, but merely as the characteristic one for the American school; the attempt being to link together constantly both the typical best and worst of this poetry.

It is to be regretted that the thirteen little poems collected under the title Alexandriana — which alone are sufficient to insure Louise Imogen Guiney’s place in any Anglo-Saxon anthology — cannot be inserted here in full. The following two have been selected with a view to the elucidation of that universal quality, that grandeur of conception, expressed by the most exquisite perfection of form, in the simplest of words and metres, that has been offered previously as a matter of theory.

This is worthy of Landor, as is the next, but would Landor have hazarded that daring metaphor ? Yet it would have been perfectly possible to Emerson.

This is a classicism Emerson never achieved : it is one of the modern enrichments. But it is an added grace, not a generic quality.

More directly derived from the early type, and offering an almost perfect instance of the modern lyric, exquisitely rhythmical, not too long to be comprehended in the space of an emotional breath, utterly simple in form and word, yet profoundly suggestive and atmospheric in treatment and implication, is this, one of the best of Miss Guiney’s and of the new school alike : —

THE VIGIL-AT-ARMS.

That the spirit of this poem is complex rather than simple, moral rather than religious, intellectual rather than emotional, does not prevent it from being the essential modern and national equivalent of Tennyson’s St. Agnes’ Eve and Sir Galahad, though admittedly without their claim to greatness.

Now take these two stanzas : —

This description of Genius might easily be Miss Guiney’s ; it might almost be Emily Dickinson’s, if she could have widened her scope a little — but it is Emerson’s.

Only less notably illustrative than Miss Guiney’s, of the theory of American poetry previously developed in this paper, is the work of Lizette Woodworth Reese, whose Celtic Maying Song, quoted below, evidences not only her own style and wonderfully developed atmosphere, but the American contribution to the recent Celtic revival for which Miss Guiney has done so much : —

This differs from the verse of Fiona McCleod, for example, or Dora Sigerson; it is the Celtic filtered through the American temperament; its note comes to us with even more refinement of pathos for being less localized and less strongly accentuated.

The first stanzas of her poem Growth might well be mistaken by Emily Dickinson for her own : —

And though Emerson would not have written just that verse, it is not too much to state broadly that without Emerson, or better, what Emerson stands for, the verse could not have been written. For neither Longfellow nor Lowell has struck just this note ; it lay in their forefathers’ temperaments, however, and their descendants have begun to interpret it. It has the wonderful correspondence of form and spirit that alone nationalizes any art.

The form we need not consider further ; the spirit, — how and where did we make it ours ?

Long before Chaucer sang, Celt and Saxon were at weave upon the web we have inherited, to embroider in our turn, with here and there a touch we hope may outlast our day. Upon that changeless old-time warp, as much our own as our cousins’ across the sea, we may lay our woof : keen crimsons from our wonderful autumn, the impenetrable blue of our crystal skies, the sweet austerity of our unmatched Quaker gray. But however our diverse and strangely welded nation may blend the dyes, we must remember that the warp is beyond our changing. Our blood has been widely diluted since first we began to add to the art products of the world, but even the elements that may have given us a greater variety and scope have not yet so modified the essential trend of our most representative work as to turn it from its two great natural themes, — the soul musing upon God and Nature. The quantitively slight material of this sort offered for appreciation is none the less distinctly fine and characteristic because it is slight; and where there is, here and anywhere, the gleam, there may one day be found the steady glow.

We look for one on whom, because of greater national maturity, the national spirit shall have descended with a potency yet unknown, because he will be in no sense a pioneer, and his inheritance of characteristic force will be cumulative. And his taste will have become so trained that the crudities, hitherto almost always inseparable from the strongest poetic material of the country, will be as impossible for him in the treatment of the elemental conceptions as they have been for Aldrich in his treatment of those most exquisite cameos of verse.

Nor must it be understood that the Concord philosopher is to be considered for one moment as an example for the painstaking imitation of the American poetry of the future. Its essential kinship with his wonderful combination of temperament and style — displayed, for that matter, fully as clearly in his prose as in his verse — will be indicated through verse forms more varied, an emotional range far wider, than his; the correspondence will be, as it has been in the illustrations offered, more subtle than any imitation could produce. But that poetry will be, like his, the flowering of an intuition, exquisitely exact, of the distinctive national consciousness.

It is entirely possible to conceive of America’s producing a future Swinburne ; it is more than probable that the learning, the psychological temper, the wide and many-sided interests, and the poetic genius of Browning will find their great worthy inheritor in this country, in the progress of our intellectual and artistic development; but it would be absolutely impossible for anything but ten generations of English life and influence to produce a Matthew Arnold, — and this, not that he is greater, necessarily, but that he is more perfectly characteristic. In precisely the same way, no cathedral town, however grave and religious ; no Australian or Canadian scenery, however vast and impressive ; no possible future democracy, however politically perfect, can produce in just such mingled temperament the type that Emerson has, on the whole, most clearly fixed and epitomized for the curious and loving analyst of literary and poetic America.

Josephine Dodge Daskam.