whites, and yet the number of Negroes
who show a decent prose style is still
very small, and there is no sign of it
increasing. Similarly, the white au-
thors of America, during the past ten
or fifteen years, have produced a great
mass of very creditable poetry, and yet
the quality of the national prose re-
mains very low, and the Americans
with prose styles of any distinction 10
could be counted on the fingers of the
two hands.

IV

30

was not until less than two centuries ago that it reached a high development. In Shakespeare's day music was just getting upon its legs in England; in Goethe's day it was just coming to full flower in Germany; in France and America it is still in the savage state. It is thus the youngest of the arts, and the most difficult, and hence, the noblest. Any sane young man of twenty-two can write an acceptable sonnet, or design a habitable house, or draw a horse that will not be mistaken for an automobile, but before he may write even a bad string quartette he must go through a long and arduous training, just as he must sweat and strive for years before he may write prose that is instantly recognizable as prose, and not as a string of mere words.

So far I have spoken chiefly of the content of poetry. In its character as a sort of music it is plainly a good deal more respectable, and makes an appeal to a far higher variety of reader, or, at all events, to a reader in a state 20 of greater mental clarity. A capacity for music-by which I mean melody, harmony and clang-tint-comes late in the history of every race. The savage can apprehend rhythm, but he is quite incapable of carrying a tune in any intelligible scale. The Negro navvies of the American South, who are commonly regarded as very musical, are actually only rhythmical; they never invent melodies, but only rhythms. And the whites to whom their barbarous dance-tunes chiefly appeal are in their own stage of culture. When one observes a room full of well-dressed men and women swaying and wriggling to the tune of some villainous dance from the Mississippi levees, one may assume very soundly that they are the sort of folk who play golf and bridge, and prefer The Rosary to Heart of Darkness, and believe in the League of Nations. A great deal of superficial culture is compatible with that pathetic barbarism, and even a high degree of æsthetic sophistication in other directions. The Greeks who built the Parthenon knew no more about music than a hog knows of predestination; they were almost as ignorant in that de- 50 spearean plays whose meaning is un

partment as the modern Iowans or New Yorkers. It was not, indeed, until the Renaissance that music as we know it appeared in the world, and it

The virtue of such great poets as Shakespeare does not lie in the content of their poetry, but in its music. The content of the Shakespearean plays, in fact, is often puerile, and sometimes quite incomprehensible. No scornful essays by George Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris were needed to demonstrate the fact; it lies plainly in the text. One moans sourly over the spectacle of generations of pedants debating the question of Hamlet's mental processes; the simple fact is that Shakespeare gave him no more mental processes than a bishop has, but merely employed him as a convenient spout for some of the finest music ever got into words. Assume that he has all the 40 hellish sagacity of a Nietzche, and that music remains unchanged; assume that he is as idiotic as an ambassador, and it still remains unchanged. As it is intoned on the stage by actors, the poetry of Shakespeare commonly loses content altogether. One cannot make out what the cabotin is saying; one can only observe that it is beautiful. There are whole speeches in the Shake

known even to scholars-and yet they remain favorites, and well deserve to. Who knows, again, what the sonnets are about? Is the bard talking about

to distinguish. Prose is simply a form of writing in which the author intends that his statements shall be accepted as conceivably true, even when they about imaginary persons and events. Its appeal is to the fully conscious and alertly reasoning man. Poetry is a form of writing in which the author attempts to disarm reason

are

the inn-keeper's wife at Oxford, or about a love affair of a pathological character? Some say one thing, and some the other. But all who have ears must agree that the sonnets are extremely beautiful stuff-that the English language reaches in them the topmost heights of conceivable beauty. Shakespeare thus ought to be ranked among the musicians, along with 10 and evoke emotion, partly by presentBeethoven. As a philosopher he was a ninth-rater-but so was old Ludwig. I wonder what he would have done with prose? I can't make up my mind about it. One day I believe that he would have written prose as good as Dryden's, and the next I begin to fear that he would have produced something as bad as Swinburne's. He had the ear, but he lacked the logical sense. 20 Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

ing images that awaken a powerful response in the subconscious and partly by the mere sough and blubber of words. Poetry is not distinguished from prose, as Dr. Lowes says in his Convention and Revolt in Poetry, by an exclusive phraseology, but by a peculiar attitude of mind-an attitude of self-delusion, of fact-denying, of saying what isn't true. It is essentially an effort to elude the bitter facts of life, whereas prose is essentially a means of unearthing and exhibiting them. Immediately the thing acquires a literal meaning it ceases to be poetry; immediately it becomes capable of convincing an adult and perfectly sober man during the hours between breakfast and luncheon it is indisputably

I do not forget, of course, that there is a borderland in which it is hard to say, of this or that composition, whether it is prose or poetry. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is commonly reckoned as prose, and yet I am convinced that it is quite as much poetry as the Queen Mab speech, or Marlowe's mighty 30 prose. elegy of Helen of Troy. More, it is so read and admired by the great masses of the American people. It is an almost perfect specimen of a comforting but unsound asseveration put into rippling and hypnotizing words; done into plain English, the statements of fact in it would make even a writer of school history-books laugh. In the main, the test is to be found in the 40 audience rather than in the poet. If that audience is naturally intelligent and in a sober and critical mood, demanding sense and proofs, then nearly all poetry becomes prose; if, on the contrary, it is congenitally maudlin, or has a few drinks aboard, or is in love, or is otherwise in a soft and believing mood, then even the worst of prose, if it has a touch of soothing sing-song in it, becomes moving poetry.

But at the extremes, of course, there are indubitable poetry and incurable prose, and the difference is not hard

This quality of untruthfulness pervades all poetry, good and bad. You will find it in the very best poetry that the world has so far produced, to wit, in the sonorous poems of the Jewish Scriptures. The ancient Jews were stupendous poets. Moreover, they were shrewd psychologists, and so knew the capacity of poetry, given the believing mind, to convince and enchant-in other words, its capacity to drug the auditor in such a manner that he accepts it literally, as he might accept the baldest prose. the baldest prose. This danger in poetry, given auditors impressionable enough, is too little estimated and understood. It is largely responsible for the persistence of sentimentality in a world apparently designed for the one 50 purpose of manufacturing cynics. It is probably chiefly responsible for the survival of Christianity, despite the hard competition that it has met with from other religions. The theology of

I admire most in the world. Brahms enchants me because he knew his trade perfectly. I like Richard Strauss because he is full of technical ingenuities, because he is a master-workman. Well, who ever heard of a finer craftsman than William Shakespeare? His music was magnificent, he played superbly upon all the common emo

Christianity-i.e., its prose-is certainly no more convincing than that of half a dozen other religions that might be named; it is, in fact, a great deal less convincing than the theology of, say, Buddhism. But the poetry of Christianity is infinitely more lush and beautiful than that of any other religion ever heard of. There is more lovely poetry in one of the Psalms than 10 tions-and he did it with an air. No, in all the non-Christian scriptures of I am no poetry hater. But even the world taken together. More, this Shakespeare I most enjoy, not on brisk poetry is in both Testaments, the New mornings when I feel fit for any devilas well as the Old. Who could imag- try, but on dreary evenings when my ine a more charming poem than that old wounds are troubling me, and some of the Child in the Manger? It has fickle fair one has just sent back the enchanted the world for nearly two autographed set of my first editions, thousand years. It is simple, exquiIt is simple, exqui- and bills are piled up on my desk, and site, and overwhelming. Its power to I am too sad to work. Then I mix a arouse emotion is so great that even 20 stiff dram-and read poetry. in our age, it is at the bottom of fully a half of the kindliness, romanticism, and humane sentimentality that survive in Christendom. It is worth a million syllogisms.

STUART P. SHERMAN (1881-1926)

THE POINT OF VIEW IN AMERI-
CAN CRITICISM 1

1

According to all the critics, domestic and foreign, who have prophesied against America during the last hundred years, the great and ever-present danger of a democratic society lies in its tendency to destroy high standards of excellence and to accept the average man as a satisfactory measure of all things. Instead of saying, like Antigone in the drama of Sophocles, "I know I please the souls I ought to please," democracy, we are told, is prone to dismiss the question whether 40 she has any high religious obligation, and to murmur complacently, "I know I please the souls of average men." I propose to examine a little the origins of this belief, and then to inquire whether it is justified by the present condition of our civilization, as reflected in our current literature. the course of the inquiry I shall at least raise the question whether the average man is as easy to please as he is ordinarily supposed to be.

Once, after ploughing through sixty or seventy volumes of bad verse, I described myself as a poetry-hater. The epithet was and is absurd. The truth is that I enjoy poetry quite as much as 30 the next man-when the mood is on me. But what mood? The mood, in a few words, of intellectual and spiritual fatigue, the mood of revolt against the insoluble riddle of existence, the mood of disgust and despair. Poetry, then, is a capital medicine. First its sweet music lulls, and then its artful presentation of the beautifully improbable soothes and gives surcease. It is an escape from life, like religion, like enthusiasm, like glimpsing a pretty girl. And to the mere sensuous joy in it, to the mere low delight in getting away from the world for a bit, there is added, if the poetry be good, something vastly better, something reaching out into the realm of the intelligent, to wit, appreciation of good workmanship. A sound sonnet is almost as 50 pleasing an object as a well-written fugue. A pretty lyric, deftly done, has all the technical charm of a fine carving. I think it is craftsmanship that

In

1 From The Genius of America; copyright, 1923, by Charles Scribner's Sons. By permission of the publishers.

At the very foundation of the Republic, the menace of the average man was felt by a distinguished group of our own superior men, including Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and many other able and prosperous country gentlemen. To them the voice of the people was not the voice of God, but the clamor of a hydra-headed monster, requiring to be checked and bridled. Thus, at the outset of our eivilization, they established a point of view and they instituted a criticism, which were unfriendly to the average man and his aspirations and to all his misguided friends. They possessed, for example, certain standards of character and manners, which they applied with some austerity to what they regarded as the vulgar Jacobinism of Thomas Paine, to the disintegrating demagoguery of Jefferson, to the cosmopolitan laxity of Franklin, and to all the tendencies of French radicalism towards leveling by law the inequalities created by law and by nature.

the elevation of their public spirit, and, at the same time, their lofty disdain for the vulgar herd and a conviction that the salvation of the people depended upon the perpetuation of their own superiorities.

At its best, near the source, and on its positive side, there is something very august and inspiring in the utter10 ances of this old Roman or aristocratic republicanism. It is not far from its best in the letters of Abigail Adams.

Glory, my son [she writes to John Quincy Adams], in a country which has given birth to characters, both in the civil and military departments, which may vie with the wisdom and valor of antiquity. As an immediate descendant of one of these characters, may you be led to an imitation of that disinterested patriotism and that noble love of 20 country, which will teach you to despise wealth, titles, pomp, and equipage, as mere external advantages, which cannot add to the excellence of your mind, or compensate for the want of integrity or virtue.

It is not difficult to despise "wealth, pomp, and equipage" when one is adequately supplied with them; John Quincy Adams, accordingly, found his occasion for pride in the excellence of his mind and in his integrity and virtue. tue. And, true to his breeding, he maintained, like Coriolanus, a kind of passionate and scornful opposition to the vulgar mob. In 1795, he writes to his mother that France will remain without the means to form a Constitution till she has exploded the doctrine of submission to and veneration for public opinion. A little later, he ad40 mits to his father that "the struggle against a popular clamor is not without its charms in my mind."

Edmund Burke explained England's relative immunity to the equalitarian speculations of the French by this fact: "We continue," he said, "as in the last 30 two ages, to read more generally, than, I believe, is now done on the Continent, the authors of sound antiquity. These occupy our minds. They give us another taste and turn, and will not suffer us to be more than transiently amused with paradoxical morality." Now, it is insufficiently recognized that, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, America, like England, was at the height of her classical period I mean the period when statesmen, poets, and painters most deliberately and successfully imitated the example of the ancients. The public characters of Washington and his friends, like those of Burke and his friends, were in the grand style, were in a style more or less-consciously moulded upon that of the great republicans of England, 50 Rome, and Athens. From Cromwell and Milton, and, above all, from the heroes of Plutarch, the friends of Washington inherited the ardor and

There he sounds the rallying cry of our great conservative tradition. I shall not ask here whether the creative ardor of the aristocratic spirit which we observed in the mother is not already beginning to be transformed in the son to a certain ardor for repression. Nor am I concerned here to trace the evolution of this Roman-American pride from its pure high source, down through the ages, till it reappears in aristocratic republicans of our own

times, who still find a charm in opposing the popular clamor. I am thinking of the railway magnate, author of the celebrated phrase, "The public be damned"; and I am thinking of our most aggressive literary critic, a professed Federalist, who remarked the other day in language savoring a bit, perhaps, of the Roman decadence: "I don't care a damn what happens to 10 the Republic after I am dead."

We must pause here, however, long enough to recall that the classical models of society, which the more conservative of our forefathers kept in their minds' eye, rested upon a slave population, and that the government which they set up actually countenanced, in opposition to the plebeian taste of Paine and the demagoguery 20 of Jefferson, a slave population. It is a question of more than academic interest to-day, whether or not the government which they set up necessarily implies the continued existence of an illiterate peasantry.