English
Essays: Sidney to Macaulay. The Harvard
Classics. 1909–14.
A Defence of
Poetry
Percy Bysshe
Shelley
ACCORDING to one mode of regarding those
two classes of mental action, which are called reason and
imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the
relations borne by one thought to another, however produced, and the
latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with
its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other
thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own
integrity. The one is the [Greek], or the principle of synthesis,
and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal
nature and existence itself; the other is the [Greek], or principle
of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply
as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but
as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general
results. Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known;
imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both
separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and
imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as
the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the
shadow to the substance.
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be
“the expression of the imagination”: and poetry is connate with the
origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external
and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an
ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their
motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the
human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts
otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but
harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus
excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre
could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes
them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can
accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by
itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every
inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation to a
corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened
it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the
lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child
seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the
effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to
the objects which delight a child these expressions are what poetry
is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the
child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by
surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture,
together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of
the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension of
them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next
becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an
additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of
expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become
at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the
picture, the chisel and the statute, the chord and the harmony. The
social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements,
society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that
two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the
present, as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity,
unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone
capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a
social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and
constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in
art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence
men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in
their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the
impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the
laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more
general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the
principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in
which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and
imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all
others, a certain rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a
similar, they observe not the same order, in the motions of the
dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language,
in the series of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a
certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of
mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator
receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the
sense of an approximation to this order has been called taste
by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order
which approximates more or less closely to that from which this
highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently
marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those
instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to
the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation
between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in
whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of
the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they
express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds,
communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication
from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that
is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and
perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent
them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of
thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no
new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have
been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler
purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are
finely said by Lord Bacon to be “the same footsteps of nature
impressed upon the various subjects of the world”1—and he
considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of
axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every
author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and
to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word,
the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between
existence and perception, and secondly between perception and
expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself
the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the
distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely
the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.
But poets, or those who imagine and express this
indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of
music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting:
they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society,
and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw
into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that
partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is
called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or
susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of
false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and
nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of
the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises
and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely
the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the
present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit
of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross
sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as
they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of
superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy,
rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in
the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his
conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical
forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of
persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect
to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the
choruses of Æschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s “Paradise”
would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact,
if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations
of sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more
decisive.
Language, color, form, and religious and civil
habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry;
they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers
the effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more
restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and
especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial
faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of
man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a
more direct representation of the actions and passions of our
internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate
combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more plastic and
obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation.
For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has
relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments,
and conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit
and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a
mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the
light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of
sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of
the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of
those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their
thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense
of the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal
effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and
founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone
seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can
scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which
their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually
conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their
higher character of poets, any excess will remain.
We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within
the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most
perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary, however,
to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction
between measured and unmeasured language; for the popular division
into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both
between each other and towards that which they represent, and a
perception of the order of those relations has always been found
connected with a perception of the order of the relations of
thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain
uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were
not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the
communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without
reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation;
it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might
discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to
transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.
The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence
of harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its
relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of
traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means
essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this
traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be
observed. The practice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be
preferred, especially in such composition as includes much action:
but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of
his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar
versification. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a
vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has
been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and
splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the
most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the
measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought
to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he
forebore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include,
under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero
sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little
success. Lord Bacon was a poet.2 His
language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense,
no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy
satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then
bursts the circumference of the reader’s mind, and pours itself
forth together with it into the universal element with which it has
perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are
not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their
words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which
participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are
harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the elements of
verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme
poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of
the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving
and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted that
form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern
writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its
eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem,
that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other
connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the
other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms
of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is
itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies
only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of
events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and
contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or
actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time,
which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular
facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments
that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applications
of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been
called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A
story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts
that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes
beautiful that which is distorted.
The parts of a composition may be poetical, without
the composition as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be
considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a
series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark
of inextinguishable thought. And thus all the great historians,
Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were poets; and although the plan of
these writers, especially that of Livy, restrained them from
developing this faculty in its highest degree, they made copious and
ample amends for their subjection, by filling all the interstices of
their subjects with living images.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all
spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom
which is mingled with its delight. In the infancy of the world,
neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the
excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended
manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for
future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and
effect in all the strength and splendor of their union. Even in
modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his
fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he
does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be
impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many
generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings
to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men
entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they
are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. The poems of
Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they
were the elements of that social system which is the column upon
which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the
ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt
that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of
becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty
of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object,
were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the
sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a
sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until from
admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified
themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be
objected that these characters are remote from moral perfection, and
that they can by no means be considered as edifying patterns for
general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less specious,
has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol of the
worship of a semi-barbarous age: and Self-deceit is the veiled image
of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But
a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary
dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover
without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic
or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as
he may the ancient armor or the modern uniform around his body;
whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The
beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its
accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall
communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it
hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and
graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous
and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest class have chosen to
exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and
splendor; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit,
etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal
ears.
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of
poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts
to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges
the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and
proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of
admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and
deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and
diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering
it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of
thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,
and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it
reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in
its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have
once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted
content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with
which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going
out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the
beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A
man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the
pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers
to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the
circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of
ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and
assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form
new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food.
Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral
nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A
poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right
and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his
poetical creations, which participate in neither. By this assumption
of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps
after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a
glory in a participation in the cause. There was little danger that
Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood
themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest
dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less
intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently
affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished
in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert
to this purpose.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a
certain interval by the dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who
flourished contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the
kindred expressions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting,
music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we may add, the forms
of civil life. For although the scheme of Athenian society was
deformed by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry
and Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of
modern Europe; yet never at any other period has so much energy,
beauty, and virtue been developed; never was blind strength and
stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of
man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful
and the true, as during the century which preceded the death of
Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we
records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the
divinity in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in
language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others,
and the store-house of examples to everlasting time. For written
poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and
it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the
light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the
darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause and
effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found
to coexist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and
perfection of man. I appeal to what has already been established to
distinguish between the cause and the effect.
It was at the period here adverted to that the drama
had its birth; and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or
surpassed those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have
been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never
was understood or practised according to the true philosophy of it,
as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, action, music,
painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to produce a common
effect in the representation of the highest idealism of passion and
of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind of
artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a
beautiful proportion and unity one towards the other. On the modern
stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the image of
the poet’s conception are employed at once. We have tragedy without
music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highest
impersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and both
without religion and solemnity. Religious institution has indeed
been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting the
actor’s face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriated
to his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent and
unchanging expression, is favorable only to a partial and
inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where
all the attention may be directed to some great master of ideal
mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though
liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an
extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in
“King Lear,” universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favor
of “King Lear” against the “Oedipus Tyrannus” or the
“Agamemnon,” or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are
connected; unless the intense power of the choral poetry, especially
that of the latter, should be considered as restoring the
equilibrium. “King Lear,” if it can sustain this comparison, may be
judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing
in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet
was subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which
has prevailed in modern Europe. Calderon, in his religious autos,
has attempted to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic
representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a
relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating them
to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions
still more important, and more is lost than gained by the
substitution of the rigidly defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a
distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of
human passion.
But I digress. The connection of scenic exhibitions
with the improvement or corruption of the manners of men has been
universally recognized; in other words, the presence or absence of
poetry in its most perfect and universal form has been found to be
connected with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption
which has been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the
poetry employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of
manners whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline
of the other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any
example of moral cause and effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have
approached to its perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and
intellectual greatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian
poets are as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a
thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but that ideal
perfection and energy which everyone feels to be the internal type
of all that he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is
enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they
distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are
conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity,
indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged
from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of
familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its
contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the
unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for
censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and
self-respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless
reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it
continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided
mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and
divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary
forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all
that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propagating its
like wherever it may fall.
But in periods of the decay of social life, the
drama sympathizes with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation
of the form of the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all
harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very
form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines,
which the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no
more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness, with
which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. Hence
what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison’s
“Cato” is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous
to cite examples of the other! To such purposes poetry cannot be
made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed,
which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. And thus we
observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative
in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which,
divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite.
The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the
drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in which poetry had
been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of
kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone
illuminating an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating
principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry
ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal
universality: wit succeeds to humor; we laugh from self-complacency
and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt
succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile.
Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in
life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if
less disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption of society
forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater
number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being
combined than any other, the connection of poetry and social good is
more observable in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is
indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever
corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the
corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has
once flourished is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an
extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life.
But, as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be
preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back
the drama to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry
in its most extended sense: all language, institution, and form
require not only to be produced but to be sustained: the office and
character of a poet participate in the divine nature as regards
providence, no less than as regards creation.
Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal
predominance first of the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms,
were so many symbols of the extinction or suspension of the creative
faculty in Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage under
the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest
representatives of its most glorious reign. Their poetry is
intensely melodious; like the odor of the tuberose, it overcomes and
sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of
the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the
fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and
harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense with a power of
sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in
written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music,
and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions, which
distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical
faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of
harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of
the senses and the affections is to be found in the writings of
Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed sensual and
pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their superiority
over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of those
thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in
the absence of those which are connected with the external; their
incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all.
It is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in
which their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were
poets, but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be
considered with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of
their age. Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them
the sensibility to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is
imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would
have been achieved. For the end of social corruption is to destroy
all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It
begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and
distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the
affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass
in which hardly sense survives. At the approach of such a period,
poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the last
to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps of
Astræa, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates all the
pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the
light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or
true can have place in an evil time. It will readily be confessed
that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria,
who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold,
cruel, and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption
must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before
poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have never
been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many
men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the
invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates,
and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty which contains
within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation.
And let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic
poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was
addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal
compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who
are more finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize
them as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the
co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the
beginning of the world.
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had
place in ancient Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life
never seem to have been perfectly saturated with the poetical
element. The Romans appear to have considered the Greeks as the
selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of
nature, and to have abstained from creating in measured language,
sculpture, music, or architecture, anything which might bear a
particular relation to their own condition, whilst it should bear a
general one to the universal constitution of the world. But we judge
from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. Ennius,
Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost.
Lucretius is in the highest, and Vergil in a very high sense, a
creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are as a
mist of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth
of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet
Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the
Vergilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The
institutions also, and the religion of Rome, were less poetical than
those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance.
Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the
perfection of political and domestic society. The true poetry of
Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and
majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty
which creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus,
the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their
godlike state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic
to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannæ, were not the
consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal
advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of
life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these
immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order,
created it out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence
was empire, and the reward ever-living fame. These things are not
the less poetry, quia carent vate sacro3. They are
the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories
of men. The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of
everlasting generations with their harmony.
At length the ancient system of religion and manners
had fulfilled the circle of its revolutions. And the world would
have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were
found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems
of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action
never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men,
became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is
foreign to the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by
these systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the
principles already established, that no portion of it can be
attributed to the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David,
Solomon, and Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of
Jesus and his disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by
the biographers of this extraordinary person are all instinct with
the most vivid poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly
distorted. At a certain period after the prevalence of a system of
opinions founded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into
which Plato had distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort
of apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilized
world. Here it is to be confessed that “Light seems to thicken,” and
“The crow makes wing to the rocky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night’s black agents to their preys do
rouse.”
But mark how beautiful an order has
sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! how the world,
as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the golden wings of
Knowledge and of Hope, has reassumed its yet unwearied flight into
the heaven of time. Listen to the music, unheard by outward ears,
which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind, nourishing its
everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the
mythology and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman
Empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with
their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of
manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the
dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the
Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained
sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with
the progress of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too
intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish:
their own will had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and
thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice,
cruelty, and fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to
be found capable of creating in form, language, or
institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not
justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected
with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation
which could dissolve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for
those who cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these
anomalies have been incorporated into our popular religion.
It was not until the eleventh century that the
effects of the poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began
to manifest themselves. The principle of equality had been
discovered and applied by Plato in his “Republic” as the theoretical
rule of the mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power
produced by the common skill and labor of human beings ought to be
distributed among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted
by him to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the
utility to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timæus
and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of
doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the
future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and
eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and
Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression
of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The
incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of
the south impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in
their mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action
and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed
as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other
without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it
supersedes. The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the
emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading restraints
of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events.
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of
the highest political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to
conceive. The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love.
Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever
present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been
endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their
worshippers; so that earth became peopled with the inhabitants of a
diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life
became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of
the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its
creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art:
“Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse.”4 The
Provençal trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses
are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the
delight which is in the grief of love. It is impossible to feel them
without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it
were superfluous to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of
mind connected with these sacred emotions can render men more
amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull
vapors of the little world of self. Dante understood the secret
things of love even more than Petrarch. His “Vita Nuova” is an
inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is
the idealized history of that period, and those intervals of his
life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in
Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by
which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne
of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern
poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgment of the
vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the “Divine Drama,” in
the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell,
Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of
everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of
all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest
writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the
caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of
arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso,
Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of
our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it
were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over
sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other by the
sexes into which humankind is distributed has become less
misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity with
inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially
recognised in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe
this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was the law, and
poets the prophets.
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge
thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient
world. The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his
rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in
which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and
disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they were
conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their
minds between their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at
least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing
Rhipæus, whom Vergil calls justissimus unus,5 in
Paradise, and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution
of rewards and punishments. And Milton’s poem contains within itself
a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange
and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing
can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as
expressed in “Paradise Lost.” It is a mistake to suppose that he
could ever have been intended for the popular personification of
evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement
of device to inflict the extremist anguish on an enemy, these things
are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in
a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one
subdued, are marked by all that dishonors his conquest in the
victor. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his
God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to
be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the
cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible
revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him
to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design
of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far
violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a
violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his
God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose
is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius. He
mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colors upon a
single pallet, and arranged them in the composition of his great
picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is, according to
the laws of that principle by which a series of actions of the
external universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is
calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations of
mankind. The “Divina Commedia” and “Paradise Lost” have conferred
upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time
shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which
have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be
learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe,
only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with
the eternity of genius.
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet:
that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a
defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and
religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which
followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their
development. For Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit
in the dregs of the sensible world; and Vergil, with a modesty that
ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even
whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock
of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius,
Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought
even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the
third epic poet. For if the title of epic in its highest sense be
refused to the “Æneid,” still less can it be conceded to the
“Orlando Furioso,” the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” the “Lusiad,” or the
“Faerie Queene.”
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with
the ancient religion of the civilized world; and its spirit exists
in their poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms
survived in the unreformed worship of modern Europe. The one
preceded and the other followed the Reformation at almost equal
intervals. Dante was the first religious reformer, and Luther
surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony than in the
boldness of his censures of papal usurpation. Dante was the first
awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, in itself music
and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarians. He was
the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the
resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in
the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a
heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are
instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of
inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of
their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no
conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn,
which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be
undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A
great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of
wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted
all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them
to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are
ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived
delight.
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio was characterized by a revival of painting,
sculpture, and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration,
and the superstructure of English literature is based upon the
materials of Italian invention.
But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a
critical history of poetry and its influence on society. Be it
enough to have pointed out the effects of poets, in the large and
true sense of the word, upon their own and all succeeding times.
But poets have been challenged to resign the civic
crown to reasoners and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted
that the exercise of the imagination is most delightful, but it is
alleged that that of reason is more useful. Let us examine as the
grounds of this distinction what is here meant by utility. Pleasure
or good, in a general sense, is that which the consciousness of a
sensitive and intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it
acquiesces. There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal,
and permanent; the other transitory and particular. Utility may
either express the means of producing the former or the latter. In
the former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the affections,
enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a
narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it
to express that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our
animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the
dispersing the grosser delusions of superstitions, and the
conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may
consist with the motives of personal advantage.
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this
limited sense, have their appointed office in society. They follow
the footsteps of poets, and copy the sketches of their creations
into the book of common life. They make space, and give time. Their
exertions are of the highest value, so long as they confine their
administration of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature
within the limits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic
destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of
the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon
the imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the
political economist combines labor, let them beware that their
speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles
which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern
England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. They
have exemplified the saying, “To him that hath, more shall be given;
and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken
away.” The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer;
and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and
Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must
ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating
faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest
sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For,
from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human
nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the
pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror,
anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an
approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction
depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of
the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the
melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The
pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure
itself. And hence the saying, “It is better to go to the house of
mourning than to the house of mirth.” Not that this highest species
of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and
friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the
perception and still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly
unalloyed.
The production and assurance of pleasure in this
highest sense is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this
pleasure are poets or poetical philosophers.
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire,
Rousseau,6 and their
disciples, in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled
to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree
of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have
exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have
been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women,
and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have
been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition
in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have
been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton,
had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born;
if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the
study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of
ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of
the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together
with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the
intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the
invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of
analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now
attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and
creative faculty itself.
We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom
than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific
and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just
distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these
systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and
calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what
is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or
at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and
endure. But we let “I dare not wait upon I would, like
the poor cat in the adage.” We want the creative faculty to imagine
that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which
we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun
conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation
of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of
man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty,
proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man,
having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a
cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to
the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all
knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for
abridging and combining labor, to the exasperation of the inequality
of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries
which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse
imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money
is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold:
by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and
pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to
reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order
which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of
poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an
excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of
the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of
assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has
then become too unwidely for that which animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the
centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends
all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is
at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of
thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns
all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and
withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession
of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate
surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of
the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the
form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and
corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship—what were
the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were
our consolations on this side of the grave—and what were our
aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and
fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of
calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a
power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A
man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even
cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which
some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color
of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its
approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its
original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness
of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already
on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been
communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the
original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of
the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the
finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study. The toil
and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to
mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and
an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by
the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only
imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for
Milton conceived the “Paradise Lost” as a whole before he executed
it in portions. We have his own authority also for the Muse having
“dictated” to him the “unpremeditated song.” And let this be an
answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of
the first line of the “Orlando Furioso.” Compositions so produced
are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and
intuition of the poetical faculty are still more observable in the
plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under
the power of the artist as a child in a mother’s womb; and the very
mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting
to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the
process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest
moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent
visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place
or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always
arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and
delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the
regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it
does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the
interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its
footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming
calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand
which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility
and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by
them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue,
love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such
emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom
to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as
spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all
that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a
word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will
touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever
experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image
of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most
beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which
haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language
or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of
kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide—abide, because
there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit
which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from
decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the
beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that
which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and
pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light
yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches,
and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed
by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it
breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous
waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of
familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping
beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
All things exist as they are perceived: at least in
relation to the percipient. “The mind is its own place, and of
itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” But poetry
defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of
surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured
curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of
things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes
us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a
chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions
and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of
familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It
compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which
we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated
in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by
reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso—“Non
merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.”7
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest
wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be
the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.
As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame
of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a
poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as
he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have
been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate
prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives,
the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those
who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will
be found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule.
Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and
usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible characters
of accuser, witness, judge, and executioner, let us decide without
trial, testimony, or form, that certain motives of those who are
“there sitting where we dare not soar,” are reprehensible. Let us
assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Vergil was a flatterer, that
Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a
peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet
laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to
cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great
names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to
have been dust in the balance; if their sins “were as scarlet, they
are now white as snow”; they have been washed in the blood of the
mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the
imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the
contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how little
is as it appears —or appears as it is; look to your own motives, and
judge not, lest ye be judged.
Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect
from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active
powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no
necessary connection with the consciousness or will. It is
presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of
all mental causation, when mental effects are experienced
unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent recurrence of
the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the
mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature
and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of
inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet
becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the
influences under which others habitually live. But as he is more
delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain and
pleasure, both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to
them, he will avoid the one and pursue the other with an ardor
proportioned to this difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to
calumny, when he neglects to observe the circumstances under which
these objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised
themselves in one another’s garments.
But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error,
and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely
evil have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the
lives of poets.
I have thought it most favorable to the cause of
truth to set down these remarks according to the order in which they
were suggested to my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself,
instead of observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the
view which they contain be just, they will be found to involve a
refutation of the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards
the first division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what
should have moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers
who quarrel with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them,
unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the
day. Bavius and Mævius undoubtedly are, as they ever were,
insufferable persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to
distinguish rather than confound.
The first part of these remarks has related to
poetry in its elements and principles; and it has been shown, as
well as the narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what is
called poetry, in a restricted sense, has a common source with all
other forms of order and of beauty, according to which the materials
of human life are susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry
in an universal sense.
The second part will have for its object an
application of these principles to the present state of the
cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the
modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a
subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the
literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever
preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national
will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the
low-thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our
own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we
live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison
any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and
religious liberty. The most unfailing herald, companion, and
follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial
change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there
is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving
intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The
person in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many
portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with
that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst
they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power
which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to
read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present
day without being startled with the electric life which burns within
their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of
human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and
they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its
manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the
age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the
mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the
present; the words which express what they understand not; the
trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the
influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Note 1. “De Augment. Scient.,”
cap. 1, lib. iii. [back]
Note 2. See the “Filum
Labyrinthi,” and the “Essay on Death” particularly.—S. [back]
Note 3. “Because they lack the
sacred bard.” [back]
Note 4. “The book, and he who
wrote it, was a Galeotto” [i. e., a pander], from the episode
of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s “Inferno,” v. 137. [back]
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