VII
DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE
THE one new thing in the world in our day is democracy, the coming forward of the people, and that which has grown out of it, or which goes along with it,—science, free inquiry, the industrial system, the humanitarian spirit. The old and past world from which we inherit our literary tastes and standards was characterized by a condition of things quite different,—the supremacy of the few, the leadership of the hero, the strong man,—the picturesque age that gave us art, theology, philosophy, and the great epic poems. It was the youth of the race. Mankind seems now fast nearing its majority. The bewitching, the delusive, the unreasoning, pathetic time of youth is past. What the man loses and what he gains in passing from youth to manhood the race has lost and has gained in passing from the age of myth to the age of science. A charm, an innocence, a susceptibility, a credulity, and many other things are gone; a seriousness, a reasonableness, a width of outlook, power to deal with real things, sanity, and self-control, have come. Youth is cruel, age is kind and considerate. All forms, ceremonies, titles, all conferred dignities andarbitrary distinctions, all pomp and circumstance, count for less and less in the world. Art is less and less; nature is more and more. The extrinsic, the put on, the ornamental, the factitious, count for less and less; theology, metaphysics, the sacredness of priests, the divinity of kings, count for less and less, while the real, the true, the essential, in all fields, count for more. It is doubtful if art for art’s sake can ever be in the future what it has been in the past. We are too deeply absorbed in the reality; we care less and less for the symbol and more and more for the thing symbolized. The monarchical idea is dwindling; the throne as a symbol has lost its force; the old religious language of supplication and praise begins to have a hollow, archaic sound. The idea of the fatherhood of God is fast taking the place of the idea of the despotism of God. It has taken mankind all these centuries to rise to the conception of a being with whom the language of excessive flattery and adulation seems out of place. The democratic idea will eventually penetrate and modify our religious notions. We shall no longer seek to propitiate an offended deity by groveling in the dust before an imaginary throne. The despot goes out, the Brother comes in. All these things and many more cluster around the word democracy.
What is the import of the word as applied to literature? How far will it carry in this field? Is the democratic movement favorable or unfavorable to the growth of true literature? It has been oftensaid that literature is essentially aristocratic; that is, I suppose, that it implies a degree of excellence, a kind of excellence, quite beyond the appreciation of the masses. This is no doubt in a measure true, and always has been true. While the mass of the people are not good offhand judges of the best literature, it is equally true that great literature—literature that has breadth and power, like the English Bible or like Bunyan, and many other books that transcend the sphere of mere letters—makes its way more or less among the people. The highest ideals in any sphere can never draw the many; yet the few, the elect who are drawn by them, are probably just as sure to appear in a democracy as in an oligarchy.
To some readers democracy in literature seems to suggest only an incursion of the loud, the vulgar, the cheap and meretricious. Apparently it suggests only these things to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whose volume “Questions at Issue” contains an essay upon this subject.
Mr. Gosse congratulates the guild of letters that the summits of literature have not yet been submerged by the flood of democracy. The standards have not been lowered in obedience to the popular taste.
But Mr. Gosse thinks the social revolution or evolution now imminent will require a new species of poetry, that this poetry will be democratic to a degree at present unimaginable, though just what it is to be democratic in poetry is not very clear tohim. He says: “The aristocratic tradition is still paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as we now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales,” and he does not see what will be left if this romantic phraseology is done away with. We shall certainly have left what we had before these types and symbols came into vogue,—nature, life, man, God. If out of these things we cannot supply ourselves with new types and values, then certainly we shall be hard put.
The critic cites the popularity of Tennyson as an illustration of the influence of literature upon democracy rather than of democracy upon literature. It is true that Tennyson was not begotten by the democratic spirit, but by the old feudal spirit; to him the people was but a hundred-headed beast, and his temper toward this beast, if reports are true, was anything but democratic. Tennyson was of the haughty, exclusive, lordly Norman spirit, and his popularity simply showed how widespread the appreciation of literary excellence may become in democratic times.
Of course universal suffrage is of slight import in literature: not by the vote of the many, but by the judgment of the few, are the true standards upheld. The novels that sell by the hundred thousand will not be the best, or even the second or third best, and their great vogue only indicates that the diffusion of education has enormously enlarged the reading public, and that in democratic times, asin all other times, there never has been and probably never will be enough good taste to go around.
Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, literature, no more means a lowering of the standard of excellence than it means a lowering of the standards in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering or ship-building, or in the art of living itself. It means a lifting up of the average, with the great prizes, the high ideals, as attractive and as difficult as ever. Because the people are crude and run for the moment after the cheap and meretricious, we are not therefore to infer that the cheap and meretricious will permanently content them. Democracy in literature, as exemplified by the two great modern democrats in letters, Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new and more deeply religious way of looking at mankind, as well as at all the facts and objects of the visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding of new artistic motives and values in the people, in science and the modern spirit, in liberty, fraternity, equality, in the materialism and industrialism of man’s life as we know it in our day and land,—the carrying into imaginative fields the quality of common humanity, that which it shares with real things and with all open-air nature, with hunters, farmers, sailors, and real workers in all fields.
The typical democratic poet will hold and wield his literary and artistic endowment as a common, everyday man, the brother and equal of all, and never for a moment as the man of exceptional parts and advantages, exclusive and aloof. His poemswill imply a great body of humanity—the masses, the toilers—and will carry into emotional and ideal fields the atmosphere of these.
Behold the artistic motives furnished by feudalism, by royalty, by lords and ladies, by the fears and superstitions of the past, by mythology and ecclesiasticism, by religious and political terrorism in all their manifold forms. Art and literature have lived upon these things for ages. Can democracy, can the worth and picturesqueness of the people, furnish no worthy themes and motives for the poets? Can science, can the present day, can the religion of humanity, the conquest of nature’s forces, inspire no poetic enthusiasm and give rise to great art rivaling that of the past? As between the past and the present, undoubtedly the difficulty is not in the poverty of the material of to-day, but in the inadequacy of the man. It requires a great spirit, a powerful personality, to master and absorb the diverse and complex elements of our time and imbue them with poetic enthusiasm.
The humanitarian enthusiasm as amotifin literature and art,—the inspiration begotten by the contemplation of the wrongs, the sufferings, and the hopes of the people,—undoubtedly came in with democracy. It was quite unknown to the ancient and to the feudal world. To all the more vital voices of our time this enthusiasm gives the tone. How pronounced it is in two of our latest and most promising poets, Mr. Edwin Markham and Mr. William Vaughn Moody!
It is hard to shake off the conviction that the old order of things had the advantage of picturesqueness. Is it because it is so hard to free ourselves from the illusions of time and distance? Charm, enticement, dwell with the remote, the unfamiliar. The now, the here, are vulgar and commonplace. We find it hard to realize that the great deeds were done on just such a day as this, and that the actors in them were just such men as we see about us. Then the days of one’s youth seem strange and incredible; how different their light from this hard, prosy glare! Our distrust of our own day and land as furnishing suitable material for poetry and romance doubtless springs largely from this illusion.
At the same time, a mechanical and industrial age like ours no doubt offers a harder problem to the imaginative producer than the ages of faith and fanaticism of the past. The steam whistle, the type of our civilization, what can the poet make of it? The clank of machinery, it must be confessed, is less inspiring than the clash of arms; the railroad is less pleasing to look upon than the highway, because it is more arbitrary and mechanical. In the same way, the steamship seems unrelated to the great forces and currents of the globe. Yet to put these things in poetry only requires time, only requires a more complete adjustment of our lives to them, and hence the proper vista and association. As is always the case, it is a question of the man and not of the material. Goethe said to Eckermann, “Our German æsthetical people are always talking about poeticaland unpoetical objects, and in one respect they are not quite wrong; yet at bottom no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly,”—if he can throw enough feeling into it. I lately read a poem by one of our younger poets on an entirely modern theme, the building of the railroad,—the gang of men cutting through hills, tunneling mountains, filling valleys, bridging chasms, etc. But, though vividly described, it did not quite reach the poetical; it lacked the personal and the human; it was realistic without the freeing touch of the idealistic. Some story, some interest, some enthusiasm overarching it, would have supplied an atmosphere that was lacking. We cannot be permanently interested in the gigantic or in sheer brute power unless they are in some way related to life and its aspirations. The battle of man with man is more interesting than the battle of man with rocks and chasms, because men can strike back, and victory is not to be had on such easy terms.
The same objection cannot be urged against Mr. William Vaughn Moody’s poem on the steam engine, which he treats under the figure of “The Brute,”—a poem of great imaginative power in which the human interest is constantly paramount. The still small voice of humanity is always heard through the Brute’s roar, as may be seen in the first stanza:—
“Through his might men work their wills;They have boweled out the hillsFor food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought;And they fling him hour by hourLimbs of men to give him power.Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devourChildren’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply bought.He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty thought.”
“Through his might men work their wills;They have boweled out the hillsFor food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought;And they fling him hour by hourLimbs of men to give him power.Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devourChildren’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply bought.He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty thought.”
“Through his might men work their wills;They have boweled out the hillsFor food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought;And they fling him hour by hourLimbs of men to give him power.Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devourChildren’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply bought.He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty thought.”
“Through his might men work their wills;
They have boweled out the hills
For food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought;
And they fling him hour by hour
Limbs of men to give him power.
Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devour
Children’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply bought.
He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty thought.”
Quite different is the treatment of “The Lightning Express” by a western poet, Mr. J. P. Irvine, yet the poetic note is clearly and surely struck in his stanzas too:—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .“In storm and darkness, night and day,Through mountain gorge or level way,With lightening rein and might unspent,And head erect in scorn of space,Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race,Flame-girt across a continent.Think not of danger; every wheelOf all that clank and roll belowRings singing answers, steel for steel,Beneath the hammer’s testing blow;And what though fields go swirling round,And backward swims the mazy ground,So swift the herds seem standing still,As scared they dash from hill to hill;And though the brakes may grind to fireThe gravel as they grip the tireAnd holding, strike a startling veinOf tremor through the surging train,The hand of him who guides the reinIs all-controlling and intent;Fear not, although the race you rideIs on the whirlwind, side by side,With time across a continent.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .“In storm and darkness, night and day,Through mountain gorge or level way,With lightening rein and might unspent,And head erect in scorn of space,Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race,Flame-girt across a continent.Think not of danger; every wheelOf all that clank and roll belowRings singing answers, steel for steel,Beneath the hammer’s testing blow;And what though fields go swirling round,And backward swims the mazy ground,So swift the herds seem standing still,As scared they dash from hill to hill;And though the brakes may grind to fireThe gravel as they grip the tireAnd holding, strike a startling veinOf tremor through the surging train,The hand of him who guides the reinIs all-controlling and intent;Fear not, although the race you rideIs on the whirlwind, side by side,With time across a continent.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .“In storm and darkness, night and day,Through mountain gorge or level way,With lightening rein and might unspent,And head erect in scorn of space,Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race,Flame-girt across a continent.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“In storm and darkness, night and day,
Through mountain gorge or level way,
With lightening rein and might unspent,
And head erect in scorn of space,
Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race,
Flame-girt across a continent.
Think not of danger; every wheelOf all that clank and roll belowRings singing answers, steel for steel,Beneath the hammer’s testing blow;And what though fields go swirling round,And backward swims the mazy ground,So swift the herds seem standing still,As scared they dash from hill to hill;And though the brakes may grind to fireThe gravel as they grip the tireAnd holding, strike a startling veinOf tremor through the surging train,The hand of him who guides the reinIs all-controlling and intent;Fear not, although the race you rideIs on the whirlwind, side by side,With time across a continent.”
Think not of danger; every wheel
Of all that clank and roll below
Rings singing answers, steel for steel,
Beneath the hammer’s testing blow;
And what though fields go swirling round,
And backward swims the mazy ground,
So swift the herds seem standing still,
As scared they dash from hill to hill;
And though the brakes may grind to fire
The gravel as they grip the tire
And holding, strike a startling vein
Of tremor through the surging train,
The hand of him who guides the rein
Is all-controlling and intent;
Fear not, although the race you ride
Is on the whirlwind, side by side,
With time across a continent.”
What are the sources of the interesting in life? Novelty is one, but it is short-lived; beauty and sublimity are others, and are more lasting. But the main source of the interesting is human association.The landscape that is written over with human history, how it holds us and draws us! All phases of modern industrial life—the miner, the lumberman, the road-builder, the engineer, the factory-hand, are available for poetic treatment to him who can bring the proper fund of human association, who can make the human element in these things paramount over the mechanical element. The more of nature you get in, the more the picture has a background of earth and sky, or of great human passions and heroisms, the more the imagination is warmed and moved. The railroad is itself a blotch upon the earth, but it has a mighty background. In itself it is at war with every feature of the landscape it passes through; it stains the snows, it befouls the water, it poisons the air, it smuts the grass and the foliage, it expels the peace and the quiet, it puts to rout every rural divinity. It adapts itself to nothing; it is as arbitrary as a cyclone and as killing as a pestilence. Yet a train of cars thundering through storm and darkness, racing with winds and clouds, is a sublime object to contemplate; it is sublime because of its triumph over time and space, and because of the danger and dread that compass it about. It has a tremendous human background. The body-killing and soul-blighting occupations peculiar to our civilization are not of themselves suggestive of poetic thoughts; but if Dante made poetry out of hell, would not a nature copious and powerful enough make poetry out of the vast and varied elements of our materialistic civilization?