THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF THE POETRY OF ART
Nobody will deny that the modern man does more thinking and less singing than the man, say, of Shakspere’s time; and nobody will deny that thinking needs solitude, while singing—real, hearty singing—asks the throng and a refrain. Thought, M. Anatole France[296] declares in his vivacious way, “thought is the acid which dissolves the universe, and if all men fell to thinking at once, the world would cease to be.” “Lonely thinking,” says Nietzsche, “that is wise; lonely singing,—stupid.” In the same fashion, a solitary habit of thinking has made itself master of poetry, particularly of the lyric; while the singing of a poem is going fast out of date. Poetry begins with the impersonal, with communal emotion, and passes to a personal note of thought so acutely individual that it has to disguise itself, wear masks, and prate about being objective. For objective and even simple poetry may be highly subjective at heart; and to define subjective as talking about one’s self, what Bagehot, in his essay on Hartley Coleridge, calls self-delineation, is by no means a sufficient account of the trait. When the folksong runs:—
A Nant’s, à Nant’s est arrivé, _Saute, blonde, et lève le pied_, Trois beaux navir’s chargés de blé; _Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde_....
Une plainte touchante De ma bouche sortit; Le bon Dieu me dit, Chante, Chante, pauvre petit!
it is not only wrong to take simplicity as the differencing factor of the communal song, for Béranger is quite as simple, but it will not do to fall back on mere self-delineation as end of the matter in art. Half of the folksongs of Europe are self-delineations of the singing and dancing crowd, in mass or by deputed “I.” The real difference lies in the shifting of the point of view; song, once the consolation and expression of the festal crowd, comes to be the consolation and expression of the solitary poet. “I do not inquire,” Ribot remarks,[297] “whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain or a loss for poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as civilization advances, the complete antithesis to its collective character in the earliest ages.” To study such a change in the long reaches of poetic progress would be an almost impossible task even if the material were at hand; it is best to take a comparatively short range of time and a definite place,—say the literature of modern Europe from its beginning in the Middle Ages down to the present time. The extremes are fairly sundered. Europe had lapsed from civilization to a half barbarous state, from the height of the Roman empire to the depth of the dark ages, with a corresponding decline of intellectual power and a great inrush of communal force. Out of these communal conditions, individual and intellectual vigour made its difficult way; how difficult, how tortuous that way, every one knows; and it is along this route, and about the time of the renaissance, that one may best watch the differencing elements of artistic and individual poetry as they come slowly into view.