Contemporaneousness

EVEN chemistry, I am told, is not so exact a science as to exclude mystery. Does it not teach that certain widely different compounds are products, in the last analysis, of the same elements, combined in the same proportions ? The process of combination, — the electric affinities of atoms, — there is the riddle !

I was reminded of these strange contradictions by reading, in a recent Atlantic, a review of certain books of verse; or, rather, by reading certain generalizations to which the critic’s subject leads him. With all the world’s masterpieces of poetry to work with, that reviewer’s mind evolves a conclusion which satisfies him as logical and just; and here is my humbly anonymous intellect producing, with exactly the same materials, a diametrically opposite result.

He has been dealing with certain “ contrasting experiments in poetic drama.” The theme of one of these dramas, he says, “ has the inestimable advantage of possessing already a hold upon the imagination of the general; an advantage which great dramatic poets from Æschylus to Shakespeare have sedulously pursued, and which the best of their successors down to Mr. Stephen Phillips have continued to pursue; ” whereas the author of the other play “ is actually trying to interpret the present moment in blank verse,” — an effort which compels the bewildered critic “to think there is a real incongruity between their substance and their form.” And at last we find him laying down the law thus : —

“ No great dramatic poetry, no great epical poetry, has ever dealt with contemporary conditions. Only the austere processes of time can precipitate the multitude of immediate facts into the priceless residuum of universal truth.

The great dramatists have turned to the past for their materials, not of choice, but of necessity. Here and there in the dark backward and abysm of time, some human figure, some human episode, is seen to have weathered the years, and to have taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth; and upon this foundation the massive structure of heroic poetry is builded.”

But surely the contemporaneousness of all great art is a truth too important to be at the mercy of any one’s experiments. The masterpieces of every art — I venture to generalize even more broadly than the reviewer — have been the complete, the ultimate expression of the age which produced them, never in any sense an echo of any other. They express the universal truth through the medium of the thought, the feeling of their own time, and they owe nothing to the past except the basic materials, — the stones and mortar, the words and the singing voice, the vast background of nature and human nature, the dreams, the faith, the aspirations, which belong to all the ages, though they take widely varying forms in their progress through the centuries.

Of course, his protest is obvious: “ However expressive of its age the masterpiece may be,” he will say, “it turns to the past for its themes.” I answer that in a restricted and superficial sense it does sometimes, and sometimes not, but that in a larger and deeper sense it never does. He will confront me then with instances : What of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear ? What of Œdipus, the Prometheus Bound, Faust? What of Paradise Lost, yea, of the Iliad itself, whose heroes lived and fought centuries before Homer sang?

But in every one of these instances, I contend, the theme was strictly contemporaneous, and the characters were the imaginative embodiments of the feeling of the poet’s time. Milton’s theme was the Puritan faith, and his God, Satan, Adam and Eve were most wonderfully his neighbors. Homer was the creator of Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, — yes, of the Trojan war itself; he made the whole epic history out of a contest less poetically promising than the present Russo-Japanese campaign, and in doing it he made use of all the religious imagery and significance with which his high-reaching imagination, and that of his compatriots, enriched the bareness of the theme ; in short, he “ dealt with contemporary conditions.” Would the reviewer contend that Shakespeare found in Hamlet or in Lear a human figure which had “ weathered the years and taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth ” ? If he does, let him strip his mind completely of these great tragedies, and look up the childish old wives’ tales which served as the poet’s point of departure. Shakespeare took a hint from some foolish ditty; from that point he changed plot and characters to suit the convenience of his strictly modern purpose, to make his work express his own feeling, his own time.

I might ask him about certain other masterpieces of art in which the materials, as well as the general theme and spirit, are of the most absolute contemporaneousness. What, for example, of the Book of Job and the Hebrew prophecies ? What of the Parthenon, of the Hermes of Praxiteles ? What of the Gothic cathedrals, of Don Quixote, of Molière’s comedies, of Velasquez’ portraits ? What of Dante, whose Beatrice and Francesca he did not find in that “dark backward and abysm of time” where our critic — and so many others, alas ! — would locate the treasury of art ? For us, but not for the mighty Florentine, these ladies, and other people, his contemporaries, have “ weathered the years and taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth.” But it was Dante who gave them to time and men’s hearts, and all that has been said about them since — even to the well-meaning efforts of Mr. Stephen Phillips himself — has been but echoes of echoes.

Never, with any great poet, was his theme “ remote ” and “aloof ” from his own time. Never has he dealt with anything else but “ contemporary conditions.” It is only the minor poet who declares himself “ the idle singer of an empty day,” who finds his age prosaic, and delves forever in the past of old romance, and so necessarily becomes more and more remote, more and more attenuated, in his art. Many a clever and promising poet has gone that way : Mr. Yeats is rapidly taking it; even Mr. Moody is in danger, — may the kind fates turn him back into higher, if rougher, paths ! Mr. Phillips has never given evidence of an original or modern mind, but he does not keep his gait along the flowery, artificial path of his choice, — his strut becomes more and more stilted, and his instrument gets out of tune.

The academic temperament which speaks in this reviewer and in many another critic strikes at the vitality of modern art. True, such strokes cannot quite be fatal, because no great poet will stop for any critic. But the poet may be cruelly hampered, heavily impeded, by such misdirected efforts of his contemporaries ; he may be compelled to spend much of his time and energy in warding off blows. His joyousness may be baffled and whipped into melancholy ; his clear vision may be clouded with bitterness. It is much easier for an artist to pluck flowers along the wayside than to labor in the vineyard, especially when a thousand voices are pleading for the flowers. But the flowers wither in his hands, and only the grapes produce the wine of life. Where should our poets be ?