THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
COLLECTED AND EDITED BY
ALBERT MORDELL
KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y.
THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
1920 by Houghton Mifflin Company
Reissued in 1967 by Kennikat Press
PREFACE
The Centenary Celebration of James Russell Lowell last year showed that
he has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet.
Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work rather
than in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of his
life. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame of his youth did
not continue to glow, but he resigned himself to his fate; nevertheless,
it should be remembered that "The Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Biglow
Papers," and "The Commemoration Ode" are enough to make the reputation
of any poet.
The present volume sustains Lowell's right to be considered one of the
great American critics. The literary merit of some of the essays herein
is in many respects nowise inferior to that in some of the volumes he
collected himself. The articles are all exquisitely and carefully
written, and the style of even the book reviews displays that quality
found in his best writings which Ferris Greenslet has appropriately
described as "savory." That such a quantity of good literature by so
able a writer as Lowell should have been allowed to repose buried in the
files of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact that
Lowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute all
the more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews on
ephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in book
form.
The essays herein represent the matured author as they were written in
the latter part of his life, between his thirty-sixth and fifty-seventh
years. The only early essay is the one on Poe. It appeared in Graham's
Magazine for February, 1845, and was reprinted by Griswold in his
edition of Poe. It has also been reprinted in later editions of Poe, but
has never been included in any of Lowell's works. This was no doubt due
to the slight break in the relations between Poe and Lowell, due to
Poe's usual accusations of plagiarism. The essay still remains one of
the best on Poe ever written.
Though Lowell became in later life quite conservative and academic, it
should not be thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberal
ideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, and
had good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first works
of Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men,
indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers will
enjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, the
raps at spiritualism here and there. Moreover, there is a passage in the
first essay showing that Lowell, before Freud, understood the
psychoanalytic theory of genius in its connection with childhood
memories. The passage follows Lowell's narration of the story of little
Montague.
None of the essays in this volume has appeared in book form except a few
fragments from some of the opening five essays which were reported from
Lowell's lectures in the Boston Advertiser, in 1855, and were
privately printed some years ago. Charles Eliot Norton performed a
service to the world when he published in the Century Magazine in 1893
and 1894 some lectures from Lowell's manuscripts. These lectures are now
collected and form the first five essays in this book. I have also
retained Professor Norton's introductions and notes. Attention is called
to his remark that "The Function of the Poet" is not unworthy to stand
with Sidney's and Shelley's essays on poetry.
The rest of the essays in this volume appeared in Lowell's lifetime in
the Atlantic Monthly, the North American Review, and the Nation.
They were all anonymous, but are assigned to Lowell by George Willis
Cooke in his "Bibliography of James Russell Lowell." Lowell was editor
of the Atlantic from the time of its founding in 1857 to May, 1861. He
was editor of the North American Review from January, 1864, to the
time he left for Europe in 1872. With one exception (that on "Poetry and
Nationalism" which formed the greater part of a review of the poems of
Howells's friend Piatt), all the articles from these two magazines,
reprinted in this volume, appeared during Lowell's editorship. These
articles include reviews of poems by his friends Longfellow and
Whittier. And in his review of "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Lowell
makes effective use of his scholarship to introduce a lengthy and
interesting discourse on the dactylic hexameter.
While we are on the subject of the New England poets a word about the
present misunderstanding and tendency to underrate them may not be out
of place. Because it is growing to be the consensus of opinion that the
two greatest poets America has produced are Whitman and Poe, it does not
follow that the New-Englanders must be relegated to the scrap-heap. Nor
do I see any inconsistency in a man whose taste permits him to enjoy
both the free verse and unpuritanic (if I may coin a word) poems of
Masters and Sandburg, and also Whittier's "Snow-Bound" and Longfellow's
"Courtship of Miles Standish." Though these poems are not profound,
there is something of the universal in them. They have pleasant
school-day memories for all of us and will no doubt have such for our
children.
Lowell's cosmopolitan tastes may be seen in his essays on men so
different as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows that
he even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray to
Dickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree with
him. As a young man he hated Swift, but he gives us a sane study of him.
The review of Plutarch's "Essays" edited by Goodwin, with an
introduction by Emerson, is also of interest.
The last essay in the volume on "A Plea for Freedom from Speech and
Figures of Speech-Makers" shows Lowell's satirical powers at their best.
Ferris Greenslet tells us, in his book on Lowell, that the Philip Vandal
whose eloquence Lowell ridicules is Wendell Phillips. The essay gives
Lowell's humorous comments on various matters, especially on
contemporary types of orators, reformers, and heroes. It represents
Lowell as he is most known to us, the Lowell who is always ready with
fun and who set the world agog with his "Biglow Papers."
Lowell's work as a critic dates from the rare volume "Conversations on
Some of the Old Poets," published in 1844 in his twenty-fifth year,
includes his best-known volumes "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows,"
and most fitly concludes with the "Latest Literary Essays," published in
the year of his death in 1891. My sincere hope is that this book will
not be found to be an unworthy successor to these volumes.
Though some of Lowell's literary opinions are old-fashioned to us (one
author even wrote an entire volume to demolish Lowell's reputation as a
critic), there is much in his work that the world will not let die. He
is highly regarded abroad, and he is one of the few men in our
literature who produced creative criticism.
Thanks and acknowledgments are due the Century Magazine and the
literary representatives of Lowell, for permission to reprint in this
volume the first five essays, which are copyrighted and were published
in the Century Magazine.
ALBERT MORDELL
Philadelphia, January 13, 1920
CONTENTS
ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
Century Magazine, January, 1894
HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
Century Magazine, November, 1893
THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS (HOMER, DANTE,
CERVANTES, GOETHE, SHAKESPEARE)
Century Magazine, December, 1893
THE IMAGINATION
Century Magazine, March, 1894
CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
Century Magazine, May, 1894
I. Life in Literature and Language
II. Style and Manner
III. Kalevala
REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
HENRY JAMES: JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES
The Nation, June 24, 1875
LONGFELLOW: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
Atlantic Monthly, January, 1859
TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
North American Review, January, 1864
WHITTIER: IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
North American Review, January, 1864
HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
Atlantic Monthly, November, 1860
SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
North American Review, April, 1866
POETRY AND NATIONALITY
North American Review, October, 1868
W.D. HOWELLS: VENETIAN LIFE
North American Review, October, 1866
EDGAR A. POE
Graham's Magazine, February, 1845;
R.W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)
THACKERAY: ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
North American Review, April, 1864
TWO GREAT AUTHORS
SWIFT: FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT
The Nation, April 13 and 20, 1876
PLUTARCH'S MORALS
North American Review, April, 1871
A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
Atlantic Monthly, December, 1860
ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before
the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never
printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions
were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in
composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print.
How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the
broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his
essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and
1867—essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew,
though not treated at large.
But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the
enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths
it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression
of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline
alike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand with
Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm
and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less
than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture
Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."
Charles Eliot Norton
* * * * *
Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a
great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in
friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels
out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the
development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up
out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest
pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions
that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what
little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
certain outward respects, but essentially the same.
And however far we go back, we shall find this also—that the poet and
the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer
and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the epea
pteroenta, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored
future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise
and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by,
as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is
Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey,"
"whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"—the gift of conferring
good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as
they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the
desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust,
because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the
future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their
ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries
ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have
poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up
by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some
provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for
a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The
historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as
they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave
them.
The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have
a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves
continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older
epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.
Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances;
for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the
generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for
a purposeless moment, and reënter the dark again after they have
performed the nothing they came for.
Gradually, however, the poet as the "seer" became secondary to the
"maker." His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher. But
always something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has now
come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing
is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep,
too. If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral,
that man is Shakespeare. But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which
does not see through his tragic—yes, and his comic—masks awful eyes
that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic
meaning—a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all
human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself
unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness
that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the
errand that was laid upon him:
Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely;
the application of which is made clear by the next sonnet, in which he
distinctly alludes to his profession.
There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets—that, however
in little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes a
great and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bear
themselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language. There
is not a mature play of Shakespeare's in which great ideas do not jut up
in mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces of
thought, and known afar to many kindreds of men.
And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for any
faculty of observation and description, that we value the poet. It is in
proportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not a
juggler with words. It is by means of this that for every generation of
man he plays the part of "namer." Before him, as before Adam, the
creation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then the
world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever a
great imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging the
outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away
in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth
beneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggests
the invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. His
imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his
characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also
perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract
thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.
Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel
something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of
contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change,
he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and
conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with
their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as
utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which
faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.
History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the
world for a village. This life could only become other than
phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something
that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power
unseen—that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits
stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy. In the "Odyssey"
we find pure allegory.
Now, under all these names—praiser, seer, soothsayer—we find the same
idea lurking. The poet is he who can best see and best say what is
ideal—what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he
celebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as it
appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still
clings to him; he is the revealer of Deity. He may be unconscious of his
mission; he may be false to it; but in proportion as he is a great poet,
he rises to the level of it the more often. He does not always directly
rebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel what
delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil, it is with
such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that
the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great
poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to
a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever
learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean
and bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly
on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that
they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead
of speaking the true universal language of imagination. He who
translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
is the reverse of a poet.
The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same
thing—imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him the
power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks
about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace,
which whoso has on understands the language of all created things. And
as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole
of himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said a
thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as
there are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than an
interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between
man and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, the
possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected
treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under
the dusty path of our daily life.
And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,—a thing which
enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,—but
all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the
dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping
news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately
ships,—"the city on the inconstant billows dancing,"—as there is
between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybody
remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to
the chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful
chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a
fair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw
himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and
fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced
together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the
visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to
him again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are
typified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscences
of the stately home of our childhood,—for we are all of us poets and
geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of
every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,—and we all remember
the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there. But
somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty
taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end—till
suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and
of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to our
true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature
that the poet reintroduces us.
But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power
of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank
materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show
its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was
sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or
no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
you so! The cart did not run over me, for here I am without a bone
broken."
And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.
No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with
which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
the same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do we
depend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but upon
observation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternal
promontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lower
system.
But it seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late,
that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and all that is
left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
railroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in Brother
Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But because he
is a materialist, shall there be no more poets? When we have said that
we live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant more
than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at any
rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespeare
was richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such a
pair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his to
report it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, who
continues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less
than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he
lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not
sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his
little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more
quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have
drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of
affairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground for
the public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere
piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such
ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick
and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink.
It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespeare
received everything that came along,—of what a present man he
was,—that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought into
England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.
It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for that very
reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation
contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. When the
poet comes, he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the
passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not
to have lived in Homer's day, or Dante's, but to be alive now. To be
alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live
in the past, and men yet unborn that live in the future. We are like
Hans in Luck, forever exchanging the burdensome good we have for
something else, till at last we come home empty-handed.
That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton
whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even
now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and
thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus
that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their
triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy,
looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to
behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted
and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when there
was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.
The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its
costume. And that is what makes it prosaic—that we have not faith
enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented
to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is
that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue
of Sir Robert Peel,—a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding
gracefully to the present,—in which the sculptor had done his best to
travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when
England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of
this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord
Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to
the rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, "Thus sat
Francis Bacon"—not "Cneius Pompeius"—"Viscount Verulam." Those men had
faith even in their own shoe-strings.
After all, how is our poor scapegoat of a nineteenth century to blame?
Why, for not being the seventeenth, to be sure! It is always raining
opportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago who
were intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up. We are like
beggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must be
counterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece of
familiar copper. And so, as we stand in our mendicancy by the wayside,
Time tosses carefully the great golden to-day into our hats, and we turn
it over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised at
finding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes. Till Dante's time
the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings
into but Latin,—and indeed a dead tongue was the best for dead
thoughts,—but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men
bargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of the
world around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang.
In our day, it is said despairingly, the understanding reigns
triumphant: it is the age of common sense. If this be so, the wisest way
would be to accept it manfully. But, after all, what is the meaning of
it? Looking at the matter superficially, one would say that a striking
difference between our science and that of the world's gray fathers is
that there is every day less and less of the element of wonder in it.
What they saw written in light upon the great arch of heaven, and, by a
magnificent reach of sympathy, of which we are incapable, associated
with the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only a
professor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn and
unapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanized
among the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in every
calyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The stars
can no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is a
conjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sends
thither its special reporter with his telescope. Over those arcana of
life where once a mysterious presence brooded, we behold scientific
explorers skipping like so many incarnate notes of interrogation. We pry
into the counsels of the great powers of nature, we keep our ears at the
keyhole, and know everything that is going to happen. There is no longer
any sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, and
life turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needs
no more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" We
have found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription upon
it, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted.
Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in our
cradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples the
day with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimation
of demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material for
thought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, as
sapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathy
with man or nature as a town history with its genealogies of Mr.
Nobody's great-grandparents.
We have utilized everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar
system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a
symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass
through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a
museum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum of
supernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has been
going on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern and
historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of
the death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic
imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus.
Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On those
sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.
It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see
farther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom of
a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all this
is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced
itself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are not
arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set
all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In my
opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful
than the discoveries themselves."
But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if it
would, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination. No two
men have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, that
something more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that a
logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as
every man's own logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a
structure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring
together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one.
When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if a
leaf has fallen. I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in the
pulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have not sometimes
found the popular giant as provokingly insensible. The [sqrt of -x] is
nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower
which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day
of childhood. Demonstration may lead to the very gate of heaven, but
there she makes us a civil bow, and leaves us to make our way back again
to Faith, who has the key. That science which is of the intellect alone
steps with indifferent foot upon the dead body of Belief, if only she
may reach higher or see farther.
But we cannot get rid of our wonder—we who have brought down the wild
lightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be our
errand-boy and penny-postman. Wonder is crude imagination; and it is
necessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exact
knowledge is not enough. Do we get nearer the truth or farther from it
that we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit? We
go on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it? The evasive
genius flits into something else, and defies us. The powers of the outer
and inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connection
man is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps
it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was
vainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it
wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man of
science remakes the old spirit. But we seem to have created too many
wonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, when
asked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them. But
nature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best but
scotch it, not kill it. In this day of newspapers and electric
telegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole
continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as
Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!
Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster on
Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblin
is laid at last!"—and while I mused the tables were turning, and the
chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have a
neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed
out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son,
and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with
it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so
brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp.
It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
sort or other. If they cannot get the best they will get some substitute
for it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine's slur that it is wine
of devils. The mind bound down too closely to what is practical either
becomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wilderness
of "isms." The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted some
persons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and found
refreshment in taking a scalp now and then. Nature insists above all
things upon balance. She contrives to maintain a harmony between the
material and spiritual, nor allows the cerebrum an expansion at the cost
of the cerebellum. If the character, for example, run on one side into
religious enthusiasm, it is not unlikely to develop on the other a
counterpoise of worldly prudence. Thus the Shaker and the Moravian are
noted for thrift, and mystics are not always the worst managers. Through
all changes of condition and experience man continues to be a citizen of
the world of idea as well as the world of fact, and the tax-gatherers of
both are punctual.
And these antitheses which we meet with in individual character we
cannot help seeing on the larger stage of the world also, a moral
accompanying a material development. History, the great satirist, brings
together Alexander and the blower of peas to hint to us that the tube of
the one and the sword of the other were equally transitory; but
meanwhile Aristotle was conquering kingdoms out of the unknown, and
establishing a dynasty of thought from whose hand the sceptre has not
yet passed. So there are Charles V, and Luther; the expansion of trade
resulting from the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, and the
Elizabethan literature; the Puritans seeking spiritual El Dorados while
so much valor and thought were spent in finding mineral ones. It seems
to be the purpose of God that a certain amount of genius shall go to
each generation, particular quantities being represented by individuals,
and while no one is complete in himself, all collectively make up a
whole ideal figure of a man. Nature is not like certain varieties of the
apple that cannot bear two years in succession. It is only that her
expansions are uniform in all directions, that in every age she
completes her circle, and like a tree adds a ring to her growth be it
thinner or thicker.
Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, the one trivial and
ordinary, the other sacred and recluse; the one which he carries to the
dinner-table and to his daily work, which grows old with his body and
dies with it, the other that which is made up of the few inspiring
moments of his higher aspiration and attainment, and in which his youth
survives for him, his dreams, his unquenchable longings for something
nobler than success. It is this life which the poets nourish for him,
and sustain with their immortalizing nectar. Through them he feels once
more the white innocence of his youth. His faith in something nobler
than gold and iron and cotton comes back to him, not as an upbraiding
ghost that wrings its pale hands and is gone, but beautiful and
inspiring as a first love that recognizes nothing in him that is not
high and noble. The poets are nature's perpetual pleaders, and protest
with us against what is worldly. Out of their own undying youth they
speak to ours. "Wretched is the man," says Goethe, "who has learned to
despise the dreams of his youth!" It is from this misery that the
imagination and the poets, who are its spokesmen, rescue us. The world
goes to church, kneels to the eternal Purity, and then contrives to
sneer at innocence and ignorance of evil by calling it green. Let every
man thank God for what little there may be left in him of his vernal
sweetness. Let him thank God if he have still the capacity for feeling
an unmarketable enthusiasm, for that will make him worthy of the society
of the noble dead, of the companionship of the poets. And let him love
the poets for keeping youth young, woman womanly, and beauty beautiful.
There is as much poetry as ever in the world if we only knew how to find
it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more
prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped
of material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying
mountain-farm of imagination, which did not appear in the schedule of
his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though he
never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great
poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.
There is no reason why our continent should not sing as well as the
rest. We have had the practical forced upon us by our position. We have
had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we are
descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright
wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the
Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or
they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are
States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.
But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poetical
people. Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men in
visible types. He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap of
invisibility and the purse of Fortunatus. These were once stories for
grown men, and not for the nursery as now. We are apt ignorantly to
wonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction the
absurdity of which any of our primary-school children could demonstrate.
But we forget that the world's gray fathers were children themselves,
and that in their little world, with its circle of the black unknown all
about it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in the
dark. Look at a child's toys, and we shall understand the matter well
enough. Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still),
at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which she
has been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, and
a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.
But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet. In her
railroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness. Fine-Ear herself
could not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listen
in Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans. And what need of
Aladdin's lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill? The
office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these
miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there
is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there
is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed
that fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the
lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul
of poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does not
seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the
"Merchant of Venice" in it. Themes of song are waiting everywhere for
the right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one can
pull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more trouble
than in plucking a violet.
John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford, many years ago,
reckoned the number of whale-ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as
a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that
those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever must
be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity,
but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that a
race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty
Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces.
Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every port
of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies
dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert
only flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot
Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space
occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!
They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible
as the soul.
Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not as the
mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is comme il
faut for a great nation, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy,
for its power of making men better by arousing in them a perception of
their own instincts for what is beautiful, and therefore sacred and
religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not
have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a
people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our
little mother-island sunk beneath the sea, or, worse, were she conquered
by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakespeare would be an immortal England,
and would conquer countries, when the bones of her last sailor had kept
their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched
thunders of her navy.
Old Purchas in his "Pilgrims" tells of a sacred caste in India who, when
they go out into the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world
out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And
it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to
pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever
of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in
the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its
activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty,
if it be bewildered or thwarted by an outward profession of faith
covering up a practical unbelief in anything higher and holier than the
world of sense, it will find vent in such wretched holes and corners as
table-tippings and mediums who sell news from heaven at a quarter of a
dollar the item. Imagination cannot be banished out of the world. She
may be made a kitchen-drudge, a Cinderella, but there are powers that
watch over her. When her two proud sisters, the intellect and
understanding, think her crouching over her ashes, she startles and
charms by her splendid apparition, and Prince Soul will put up with no
other bride.
The practical is a very good thing in its way—if it only be not another
name for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root
which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from
Parthia—which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they
were some great matter till he died.
One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes him
feel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankind
were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism
which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy old
world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany,
talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till
bedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and
beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. But
divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and
messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as
having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of
Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the
sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit
second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of
Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity,
"trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of
sunsets.
No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with every
child. It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon. Every age
says to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I am
like"; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, has
need of seers and will have them. Our time is not an unpoetical one. We
are in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces of
unsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though they
may be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone. It is nothing against us
that we are a commercial people. Athens was a trading community; Dante
and Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was already
commercial when she produced Shakespeare.
This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
the noble, and the true, will never cease out of the world till the God
from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselves
in an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as new
duties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of the
poet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soul
endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while
there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will
still send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hang
their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God with us is
forever the mystical name of the hour that is passing. The lives of the
great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt
most deeply the meaning of the present.
HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
PREFATORY NOTE
In the winter of 1855, when Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a
course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His
subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive
lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the
imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first
characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the
advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads,"
especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of
real life—the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative
of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8,
Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On
Poetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotistic
imaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Function
and Prospects of Poetry."
These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period of
delivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, but
they came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues of
familiar studies and long reflection. No such criticism, at once
abundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished by
breadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, had
been heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiastic
audiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as the
ablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as the
foremost of American men of letters.
In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard
University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in
special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of
the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed
Minister of the United States to Spain.
During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses of
lectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they were
given more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject of
these courses was in general the "Study of Literature," treating in
different years of different special topics, from the literature of
Northern to that of Southern Europe, from the Kalevala and the
Niebelungen Lied to the Provençal poets; from Wolfram von Eschenbach to
Rousseau; from the cycle of romances of Charlemagne and his peers to
Dante and Shakespeare. Some of these lectures, or parts of them, were
afterward prepared for publication, with such changes as were required
to give them proper literary form; and the readers of Lowell's prose
works know what gifts of native power, what large and solid acquisitions
of learning, what wide and delightful survey of the field of life and of
letters, are to be found in his essays on Shakespeare, on Dante, on
Dryden, and on many another poet or prose writer. The abundance of his
resources as critic in the highest sense have never been surpassed, at
least in English literature.
But considerable portions of the earlier as well as of the later
lectures remain unprinted, partly, no doubt, because his points of view
changed with the growth of his learning, and the increasing depth as
well as breadth of his vision. There is but little in manuscript which
he would himself, I believe, have been inclined to print without
substantial change. Yet these unprinted remains contain so much that
seems to me to possess permanent value that, after some question and
hesitation, I have come to the conclusion that selections from them
should be published. The fragments must be read with the fact constantly
held in mind that they do not always represent Lowell's mature opinions;
that, in some instances, they give but the first form of thoughts
developed in other connections in one or other of his later essays; that
they have not received his last revision; that they have the form of
discourse addressed to the ear, rather than that of literary work
finished for the eye.
If so read, I trust that the reader, while he may find little in them to
increase Lowell's well-established reputation, may find much in them to
confirm a high estimate of his position as one of the rare masters of
English prose as well as one of the most capable of critics; much to
interest him alike in their intrinsic character, and in their
illustration of the life and thought of the writer; and much to make him
feel a keen regret that they are the final contributions of their author
to the treasures of English literature.
Charles Eliot Norton
* * * * *
Hippel, the German satirist, divides the life of man into five periods,
according to the ruling desires which successively displace each other
in the human soul. Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, the
second for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourth
for money, and the fifth for a "place" in the country. I think he has
overlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point of
time—the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master of
a chamber to one's self.
How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that
independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!
How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small
chamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor pores
over the "Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks," his longing heightened
as the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney.
There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties his
pockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of the
housemaid. There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment of
Schwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel the
cool shadow of the discoverer's laurel. There the antiquary begins his
collections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistles
of Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late the
property of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate,
who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to make
his children the ornaments of society. There the potential Dibdin or
Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf—more fair to him
than the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe," and
"Gulliver," perhaps "Gil Blas," Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and
Rome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds," the "Parent's Assistant," and
(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," with other narratives
of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.
With these are admitted also "Viri Romae," Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and
even the Latin grammar, because they count, playing here upon these
mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators,
a rôle in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated
volumes—the "books without which no gentleman's library can be
complete."
I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery
of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was
first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of
that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my
unmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adorn
it. The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints
which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather's study,
but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story
till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther. These
were heads of ancient worthies[1]—Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca,
and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortly
banished again with a quousque tandem! Besides those I have mentioned,
there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the
slave of tradition, I called Heraclĭtus—an error which my excellent
schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by
the judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded the
birth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree of
knowledge, whose advantages could Adam have enjoyed during early life,
he had known better than to have yielded to the temptation of any other.
[Footnote 1: Some readers may recall the reference to these "heads of
ancient wise men" in "An Interview with Miles Standish."—C.E.N.]
Well, over my chimney hung those two antithetical philosophers—the one
showing his teeth in an eternal laugh, while the tears on the cheek of
the other forever ran, and yet, like the leaves on Keats's Grecian urn,
could never be shed. I used to wonder at them sometimes, believing, as I
did firmly, that to weep and laugh had been respectively the sole
business of their lives. I was puzzled to think which had the harder
time of it, and whether it were more painful to be under contract for
the delivery of so many tears per diem, or to compel that [Greek:
anêrithmon gelasma][1] I confess, I pitied them both; for if it be
difficult to produce on demand what Laura Matilda would call the "tender
dew of sympathy," he is also deserving of compassion who is expected to
be funny whether he will or no. As I grew older, and learned to look on
the two heads as types, they gave rise to many reflections, raising a
question perhaps impossible to solve: whether the vices and follies of
men were to be washed away, or exploded by a broadside of honest
laughter. I believe it is Southwell who says that Mary Magdalene went to
Heaven by water, and it is certain that the tears that people shed for
themselves are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved
by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers
should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber
enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while
on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves
of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits
they can upon their fat.
[Footnote 1: Countless—i.e., perpetual—smile.]
On the other hand, man has a wholesome dread of laughter, as he is the
only animal capable of that phenomenon—for the laugh of the hyena is
pronounced by those who have heard it to be no joke, and to be classed
with those [Greek: gelasmata agelasta] which are said to come from the
other side of the mouth. Whether, as Shaftesbury will have it, ridicule
be absolutely the test of truth or no, we may admit it to be relatively
so, inasmuch as by the reductio ad absurdum it often shows that
abstract truth may become falsehood, if applied to the practical affairs
of life, because its relation to other truths equally important, or to
human nature, has been overlooked. For men approach truth from the
circumference, and, acquiring a knowledge at most of one or two points
of that circle of which God is the centre, are apt to assume that the
fixed point from which it is described is that where they stand.
Moreover, "Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat?"
I side rather with your merry fellow than with Dr. Young when he says:
Laughter, though never censured yet as sin,
* * * * *
Is half immoral, be it much indulged;
By venting spleen, or dissipating thought,
It shows a scorner, or it makes a fool;
And sins, as hurting others or ourselves.
* * * * *
Yet would'st thou laugh (but at thine own expense),
This counsel strange should I presume to give—
"Retire, and read thy Bible, to be gay."
With shame I confess it, Dr. Young's "Night Thoughts" have given me as
many hearty laughs as any humorous book I ever read.
Men of one idea,—that is, who have one idea at a time,—men who
accomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, are
inevitably destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be
great and noble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversity
of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a
single idea, and that a small and rickety one—some seven months' child
of thought—that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to
the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no
satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if
Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For
example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy
to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two
hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick
Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great
antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in
Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person
who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm,
the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine
to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm
likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would
have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the
spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an
epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"
exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's
axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable
satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I
have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks,
Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never
succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the
collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus
unconsciously by our passive enthusiast?
I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see
certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of
the comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without
laughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the haruspex haruspicem)
and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secret
I will keep yours." In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be
implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body
and soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm
would lead us an endless dance.
The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of one
idea—for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two. He is the
universal disenchanter. He makes himself quite as much the subject of
ironical study as his neighbor. Is he inclined to fancy himself a great
poet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sit
down because a certain part of him was made of glass, and muses
smilingly, "There are many forms of hypochondria." This duality in his
mind which constitutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of his
character. He is futile in action because in every path he is confronted
by the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusion
that nothing is very much worth the while. If he be independent of
exertion, his life commonly runs to waste. If he turn author, it is
commonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and "Don Quixote" was
the fruit of a debtors' prison.
It seems to be an instinct of human nature to analyze, to define, and to
classify. We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away in
the mind, and feel as if we knew them better when we have named them.
And so to a certain extent we do. The mere naming of things by their
appearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom;
and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combines
appearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the senses
by impression, is poetry. A great part of criticism is scientific, but
as the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possible
in this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far as
that, at some kind of classification that may help us toward that
excellent property—compactness of mind.
Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodness
produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say that
this was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is there
in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne,
Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic of
all of them. Ben Jonson says that
When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
In their constructions all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humor.
But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,—of a good
subject for the humorist,—such as Don Quixote, for example.
Humor—taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous,
and to give it expression—seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.
Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused
through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great
comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their
faces, or before they have spoken a word.
The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the
understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the
English, and next to them the Spanish—both inclined to gravity. Let us
not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take
the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.
Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which
arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the
impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great
humorist, defines it thus:
Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to
set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it
beside the great—that it may annihilate both, because in the
presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal,
only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality,
the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance
of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of
little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the
Scoffer.
We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor,
while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of
lightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without our
being able to put our finger on any passage, and say, "It is here." Wit
must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wise
deacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of human
natur' in man," he might have added that there was a good deal more in
some men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may be
humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence
of mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase,
this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be
instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and its
impression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. As Galiani said of
Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes
every time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime
oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art of
saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where
it is forbidden to say anything." Wit must also have the quality of
unexpectedness. "Sometimes," says Barrow, "an affected simplicity,
sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it rises
only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty
wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one
knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are
unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless
rovings of fancy and windings of language."
That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected
likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at
what is called a conceit, which has all the qualities of wit—except
wit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long
poem called "Albion's England," which had an immense contemporary
popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of
language. In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.
Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled.[1]
[Footnote 1: This, and one or two of the following illustrations, were
used again by Mr. Lowell in his "Shakespeare Once More": Works
(Riverside edition), III, 53.]
This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good
as a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a
pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have
been,—to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,—it
should read:
Hard was the hand that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled,
for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word "hard" as
applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper
logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which
belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:
Her heart and morning broke together
In tears,
which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might
almost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionally
violated in the word broke, and the sentence becomes absurd, though
not funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of
the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it,
though here, again, there would be no true wit:
His heart and Biddle broke together
On 'change.
Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of
"Hudibras," certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose
wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost
rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a
contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject. Butler says of loyalty
that it is
True as the dial to the sun
Although it be not shined upon.
Now what is the difference between this and the examples from Warner and
Morris which I have just quoted? Simply that the comparison turning upon
the word true, the mind is satisfied, because the analogy between the
word as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave no
gap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over. But it is precisely this
jolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discompose
our thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the object
of a pun to give us. Wit of this kind treats logic with every possible
outward demonstration of respect—"keeps the word of promise to the ear,
and breaks it to the sense." Dean Swift's famous question to the man
carrying the hare, "Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?" is
perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an
equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood
abounds in examples of this sort of fun—only that his analogies are of
a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old sailor he
says,
His head was turned, and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died.
This is inimitable, like all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is
perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind
is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical non sequiturs. And
yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in
the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of his
ear-trumpet:
I don't pretend with horns of mine,
Like some in the advertising line,
To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales
That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale's.
There was Mrs. F. so very deaf
That she might have worn a percussion cap
And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.
Again, his definition of deafness:
Deaf as the dog's ears in Enfield's "Speaker."
So, in his description of the hardships of the wild beasts in the
menagerie,
Who could not even prey
In their own way,
and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning
with the lion; but
Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
When Nero bolted him.
In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit
always suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostling
together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.
Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down in
a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but
once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn,
they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. In
the droll complaint of the lover,
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But why did you kick me down-stairs?
the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the
word "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking
downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.
Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole
sentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment of
Huon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that
makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.
Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as
distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so
full is it of quaint fancy:
Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but the offscouring of the British sand,
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
Or what by ocean's slow alluvium fell
Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
This indigestful vomit of the sea
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore
They, with mad labor, fished their land to shore,
And dived as desperately for each piece
Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less than what building swallows bear away,
Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll.
Transfusing into them their sordid soul.
How did they rivet with gigantic piles
Thorough the centre their new-catchèd miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forcèd ground!
Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid.
And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played,
As if on purpose it on land had come
To show them what's their mare liberum;
The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest;
And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs tan
Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban,
And, as they over the new level ranged,
For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.
Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings;
And as among the blind the blinkard reigns
So rules among the drowned he that drains;
Who best could know to pump on earth a leak,
Him they their lord and Country's Father speak.
To make a bank was a great plot of state,
Invent a shovel and be a magistrate;
Hence some small dykegrave, unperceived, invades
The power, and grows, as 't were, a king of spades.
I have cited this long passage not only because Marvell (both in his
serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is
as good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off
into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that
constitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny,
hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an
epigram of two lines:
Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
May man undam you and God damn you all.
Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the
most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus," and
wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a
place "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat," and this
hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is
certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the
Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and
disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But
commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him
rather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an example
from the "Day of Judgment":
With a whirl of thought oppressed
I sank from reverie to rest,
A horrid vision seized my head,
I saw the graves give up their dead!
Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
And thunder roars, and lightning flies!
Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
The world stands trembling at his throne!
While each pale sinner hung his head,
Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said:
"Offending race of human kind;
By nature, reason, learning, blind,
You who through frailty stepped aside.
And you who never fell through pride,
You who in different sects were shammed,
And come to see each other damned
(So some folks told you—but they knew
No more of Jove's designs than you)—
The world's mad business now is o'er,
And I resent these pranks no more—
I to such blockheads set my wit!
I damn such fools! Go, go! you're bit!"
The unexpectedness of the conclusion here, after the somewhat solemn
preface, is entirely of the essence of wit. So, too, is the sudden flirt
of the scorpion's tail to sting you. It is almost the opposite of humor
in one respect—namely, that it would make us think the solemnest things
in life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humor
delights in exposing. This further difference is also true: that wit
makes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none of
its point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and droller
the oftener we read it. If we cannot safely deny that Swift was a
humorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gone
through the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid. We should
never forget that he died mad. Satirists of this kind, while they have
this quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower,
differ from their nobler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is always
to the disadvantage of the higher. They purposely disenchant us—while
the others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted at
all.
Ben Jonson, who had in respect of sturdy good sense very much the same
sort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose "Discoveries," as he
calls them, are well worth reading for the sound criticism they contain,
says:
The parts of a comedy are the same with [those of] a tragedy, and
the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach: the
comics are called didaskaloi[1] of the Greeks, no less than the
tragics. Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy;
that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling.
For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in
comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's
nature without a disease. As a wry face moves laughter, or a
deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using
her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made
the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise
man. So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in
the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly
stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And
therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests
upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and
sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did
move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and
scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands
the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.
[Footnote 1: Teachers.]
He then goes on to say of Aristophanes that
he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous,
oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be
corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter
with that beast the multitude. They love nothing that is right and
proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them
the better it is.
In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a
little bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructed
according to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault
in comedy. I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniably
true, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon the
stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the
writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than
as movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the
greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in
limbo, qualifies him with the title of satiro.
But if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?
Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor? Yes; but, as it
appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree,
from any other ancient. I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies
not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends,
but for the fun of the thing. I am so poor a Grecian that I have no
doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. But
even through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out
more or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was a
master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands—puts forth
buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it
feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.
Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps
we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts
as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent
being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems
too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the
definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true
flavor of Falstaff in him—"a million a minute and your expenses paid."
As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file." Now
they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come
tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the
circus, with a "Here we are!" I can think of nothing like it but
Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the go
out of words. They do not merely play with words; they romp with them,
tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.
I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in "The Clouds" or "The
Birds," but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs," nor does
the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of
humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he
has nothing like the scene in "The Frogs," where Bacchus is terrified
with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries,
and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor
tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess,
the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the
ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been
degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within
the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those
hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet
saw in Tartary?
Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on
the same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, the
greatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not,—and I am inclined
to believe he did,—he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his
esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human
character—the imagination and understanding. There is a great deal more
than this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book is
often little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested. The
plot is of the meagrest. A country gentleman of La Mancha, living very
much by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances of
chivalry, becomes at last the victim of a monomania on this one subject,
and resolves to revive the order of chivalry in his own proper person.
He persuades a somewhat prosaic neighbor of his to accompany him as
squire. They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which
they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting.
Now if this were all of "Don Quixote," it would be simply broad farce,
as it becomes in Butler's parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far
as mere external characteristics are concerned. The latter knight and
his squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficient
reason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that they
furnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom. They
represent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing.
I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfect
character ever drawn. As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense,
always a gentleman,—that is, as he is guilty of no crime that is
technically held to operate in defeasance of his title to that name as a
man of the world,—so is Don Quixote, in everything that does not
concern his monomania, a perfect gentleman and a good Christian besides.
He is not the merely technical gentleman of three descents—but the
true gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness,
generosity, and fear of God can make. And with what consummate skill are
the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just
so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill
event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from
his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's
treatment of him in the second part—which followed the other after an
interval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they delude
themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides
shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castle
are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.
Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooner
or later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal good
by material means. Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is the
type of the man with common sense. He always sees things in the daylight
of reason. He is never taken in by his master's theory of
enchanters,—although superstitious enough to believe such things
possible,—but he does believe, despite all reverses, in his promises
of material prosperity and advancement. The island that has been
promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before
Macbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And,
fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island
of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate—because statesmanship
depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on
precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.
THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS
(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)
The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result
in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of
ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such
men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light
upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as
the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an
accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the
scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth
only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to
know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were
contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting
with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from
the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the
New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise
and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy
and cumbrous—the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men;
generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space,
mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of
something better than provincial scholarship.
But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier
moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can
say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long
steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the
carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts.
What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vast
combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up
to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with all
large mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the first
solid result of thought, however small—the nucleus of speculation. The
true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and
sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of
science.
It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it
democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy
of thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it has
taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it
has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of
reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had few
books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it
over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.
Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and
precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would
hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of
Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books;
for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift.
When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three
hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently
survived until our day.
In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we
admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those
better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon
that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is
deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is
forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual
progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his
dethroned gods.
There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very
few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I
should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so
universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally
true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European
branch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and there
needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than
this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the "Iliad" and the
"Odyssey." The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work
of one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so
nobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I should
place the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, in which the history of the
spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of
outline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same
universal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural man
set before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squire
Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature—the
imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. This
is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly
independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural
history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the
projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable
result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only
ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally
represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral
significance there may be in certain episodes of the "Odyssey," the man
of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the
understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive.
There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is
nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry,
than that passage in the eleventh book of the "Odyssey," where the shade
of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest
shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades
of Hades. Dante's poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man
from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral
conversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the great
camp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so
representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all
men. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction
between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the
transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect;
and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual
culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness,
and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, but
human, and record certain phases of man's nature, certain stages of his
moral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It will
remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it
remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and
harmonious development.
I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a
different category. Though they mark the very highest level of human
genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the
individual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life
as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain
definite conditions. We all of us may be in the position of Macbeth or
Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds
potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of
our common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books I
have mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us grow
up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time,
sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape
our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with
Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and
with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the
intellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do not
mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them,
in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and
perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts
for their permanence, and insures their immortality.
THE IMAGINATION[1]
[Footnote 1: A small portion of this lecture appeared at the time of its
delivery, in January, 1855, in a report printed in the Boston Daily
Advertiser.]
Imagination is the wings of the mind; the understanding, its feet. With
these it may climb high, but can never soar into that ampler ether and
diviner air whence the eye dominates so uncontrolled a prospect on every
hand. Through imagination alone is something like a creative power
possible to man. It is the same in Aeschylus as in Shakespeare, though
the form of its manifestation varies in some outward respects from age
to age. Being the faculty of vision, it is the essential part of
expression also, which is the office of all art.
But in comparing ancient with modern imaginative literature, certain
changes especially strike us, and chief among them a stronger infusion
of sentiment and what we call the picturesque. I shall endeavor to
illustrate this by a few examples. But first let us discuss imagination
itself, and give some instances of its working.
"Art," says Lord Verulam, "is man added to Nature" (homo additus
naturae); and we may modernize his statement, and adapt it to the
demands of aesthetics, if we define art to be Nature infused with and
shaped by the imaginative faculty of man; thus, as Bacon says elsewhere,
"conforming the shows of things to the desires of the mind." Art always
platonizes: it results from a certain finer instinct for form, order,
proportion, a certain keener sense of the rhythm there is in the eternal
flow of the world about us, and its products take shape around some idea
preëxistent in the mind, are quickened into life by it, and strive
always (cramped and hampered as they are by the limitations and
conditions of human nature, of individual temperament, and outward
circumstances) toward ideal perfection—toward what Michelangelo called
Ideal form, the universal mould.
Shakespeare, whose careless generalizations have often the exactness of
scientific definitions, tells us that
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact;
that
as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
And a little before he had told us that
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
Plato had said before him (in his "Ion") that the poet is possessed by a
spirit not his own, and that he cannot poetize while he has a particle
of understanding left. Again he says that the bacchantes, possessed by
the god, drink milk and honey from the rivers, and cannot believe, till
they recover their senses, that they have been drinking mere water.
Empedocles said that "the mind could only conceive of fire by being
fire."
All these definitions imply in the imaginative faculty the capabilities
of ecstasy and possession, that is, of projecting itself into the very
consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by
the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the
tone, the color, and the temperature thereof. Shakespeare is the highest
example of this—for example, the parting of Romeo and Juliet. There the
poet is so possessed by the situation, has so mingled his own
consciousness with that of the lovers, that all nature is infected too,
and is full of partings:
Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
In Shelley's "Cenci," on the other hand, we have an instance of the
poet's imagination giving away its own consciousness to the object
contemplated, in this case an inanimate one.
Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
Crosses a deep ravine; 't is rough and narrow,
And winds with short turns down the precipice;
And in its depth there is a mighty rock
Which has, from unimaginable years,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and with the agony
With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour
Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag,
Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
The melancholy mountain yawns.
The hint of this Shelley took from a passage in the second act of
Calderon's "Purgatorio de San Patricio."
No ves ese peñasco que parece
Que se esta sustentando con trabajo,
Y con el ansia misma que padece
Ha tantos siglos que se viene abajo?
which, retaining the measure of the original, may be thus paraphrased:
Do you not see that rock there which appeareth
To hold itself up with a throe appalling,
And, through the very pang of what it feareth,
So many ages hath been falling, falling?
You will observe that in the last instance quoted the poet substitutes
his own impression of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his
own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all
sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose
excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the
main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its
excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and
healthy expression. Thus Shakespeare in his ninety-seventh sonnet:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time.
It is only when it becomes a habit, instead of a mood of the mind, that
it is a token of disease. Then it is properly dyspepsia,
liver-complaint—what you will, but certainly not imagination as the
handmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: one
as the plastic or shaping faculty, which gives form and proportion,
and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unity
foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as
the realizing energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts,
not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and
coherence.
We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, in
the one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intense
sympathy—a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as a
Cordelia, a Caliban as a Prospero. There is a passage in Chaucer's
"House of Fame" which very prettily illustrates this latter function:
Whan any speche yeomen ys
Up to the paleys, anon ryght
Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
Which that the worde in erthe spak,
Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
And so were hys lykenesse,
And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
That it the same body be,
Man or woman, he or she.
We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind
of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive,
sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of
body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "the
dull substance of his flesh were thought." It is not in mere intensity
of phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, or
the situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witness
of itself in expression. I know nothing more profoundly imaginative
therefore in its bald simplicity than a line in Webster's "Duchess of
Malfy." Ferdinand has procured the murder of his sister the duchess.
When her dead body is shown to him he stammers out:
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.
The difference between subjective and objective in poetry would seem to
be that the aim of the former is to express a mood of the mind, often
something in itself accidental and transitory, while that of the latter
is to convey the impression made upon the mind by something outside of
it, but taken up into the mind and idealized (that is, stripped of all
unessential particulars) by it. The one would fain set forth your view
of the thing (modified, perhaps, by your breakfast), the other would set
forth the very thing itself in its most concise individuality.
Subjective poetry may be profound and imaginative if it deal with the
primary emotions of our nature, with the soul's inquiries into its own
being and doing, as was true of Wordsworth; but in the very proportion
that it is profound, its range is limited. Great poetry should have
breadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere on
the open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on their
occasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploring
expeditions among the crypts of metaphysics.
But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengage
what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse
the vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things are
gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. It
is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that
can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to
itself. That the power of abstraction has something to do with the
imagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is a
dramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep.
His acquaintances walk and talk before him on the stage of dream
precisely as in life. When he wakes, his genius has flown away with his
sleep. It was indeed nothing more than that his mind was not distracted
by the multiplicity of details which the senses force upon it by day. He
thinks of Smith, and it is no longer a mere name on a doorplate or in a
directory; but Smith himself is there, with those marvellous
commonplaces of his which, could you only hit them off when you were
awake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too,
that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforced
his remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the corner
of the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a week
of newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination
bodies forth? It is indeed the verbum caro factum—the word made
flesh and blood.
I said that the imagination always idealizes, that in its highest
exercise, for example, as in the representation of character, it goes
behind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types of
human nature, as in Don Quixote and Hamlet, Antigone and Cordelia,
Alcestis and Amelia. By this I mean that those features are most
constantly insisted upon, not in which they differ from other men but
from other kinds of men. For example, Don Quixote is never set before us
as a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when you
analyze it, of a very noble kind—nothing less, indeed, than devotion to
an unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginative
men for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats and
disillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice at
intervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one of
Beethoven's symphonies, a kind of clue to guide us through those
intricacies of harmony. So in Lear, one of Shakespeare's profoundest
psychological studies, the weakness of the man is emphasized, as it
were, and forced upon our attention by his outbreaks of impotent
violence; so in Macbeth, that imaginative bias which lays him open to
the temptation of the weird sisters is suggested from time to time
through the whole tragedy, and at last unmans him, and brings about his
catastrophe in his combat with Macduff. This is what I call ideal and
imaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries of
character, not by arbitrary lines drawn at this angle or that, according
to the whim of the tracer, but by those mountain-ranges of human nature
which divide man from man and temperament from temperament. And as the
imagination of the reader must reinforce that of the poet, reducing the
generic again to the specific, and defining it into sharper
individuality by a comparison with the experiences of actual life, so,
on the other hand, the popular imagination is always poetic, investing
each new figure that comes before it with all the qualities that belong
to the genus; Thus Hamlet, in some one or other of his characteristics
has been the familiar of us all, and so from an ideal and remote figure
is reduced to the standard of real and contemporary existence; while
Bismarck, who, if we knew him, would probably turn out to be a
comparatively simple character, is invested with all the qualities which
have ever been attributed to the typical statesman, and is clearly as
imaginative a personage as the Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's "Don
Carlos." We are ready to accept any coup de théâtre of him. Now, this
prepossession is precisely that for which the imagination of the poet
makes us ready by working on our own.
But there are also lower levels on which this idealization plays its
tricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may be
called the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to
delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from the
associations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroic
stature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar face
in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the
countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful
reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most
penetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ of
expression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor were
wrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at any
rate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual and
trivial. Their stage showed nothing that could be met in the streets. We
barbarians, on the other hand, take delight precisely in that. We admire
the novels of Trollope and the groups of Rogers because, as we say, they
are so real, while it is only because they are so matter-of-fact, so
exactly on the level with our own trivial and prosaic apprehensions.
When Dante lingers to hear the dispute between Sinon and Master Adam,
Virgil, type of the higher reason and the ideal poet, rebukes him, and
even angrily.
E fa ragion ch'io ti sia sempre allato
Si più avvien che fortuna t' accoglia
Ove sien genti in simigliante piato;
Chè voler ciò udire è bassa voglia.
Remember, I am always at thy side,
If ever fortune bring thee once again
Where there are people in dispute like this,
For wishing to hear that is vulgar wish.
Verse is another of these expedients for producing that frame of mind,
that prepossession, on the part of hearer or reader which is essential
to the purpose of the poet, who has lost much of his advantage by the
invention of printing, which obliges him to appeal to the eye rather
than the ear. The rhythm is no arbitrary and artificial contrivance. It
was suggested by an instinct natural to man. It is taught him by the
beating of his heart, by his breathing, hastened or retarded by the
emotion of the moment. Nay, it may be detected by what seems the most
monotonous of motions, the flow of water, in which, if you listen
intently, you will discover a beat as regular as that of the metronome.
With the natural presumption of all self-taught men, I thought I had
made a discovery in this secret confided to me by Beaver Brook, till
Professor Peirce told me it was always allowed for in the building of
dams. Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not only
metre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outward
nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray
out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to
spray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands
an embodied ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of proportion, number,
and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen the
blue river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been ravished by the
visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and
downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
vault below? At least there can be no doubt that metre, by its
systematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes the
senses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself in
sympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predisposition
to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose
of the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right
way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own
sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The right
reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary
condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mind
both in poet and hearer. The imagination must be sensitized ere it will
take the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced and
fixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun. Then
that becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of the
brain. Your own passion must penetrate and mingle with that of the
artist that you may interpret him aright. You must, I say, be
prepossessed, for it is the mind which shapes and colors the reports of
the senses. Suppose you were expecting the bell to toll for the burial
of some beloved person and the church-clock should begin to strike. The
first lingering blow of the hammer would beat upon your very heart, and
thence the shock would run to all the senses at once; but after a few
strokes you would be undeceived, and the sound would become commonplace
again. On the other hand, suppose that at a certain hour you knew that a
criminal was to be executed; then the ordinary striking of the clock
would have the sullen clang of a funeral bell. So in Shakespeare's
instance of the lover, does he not suddenly find himself sensible of a
beauty in the world about him before undreamed of, because his passion
has somehow got into whatever he sees and hears? Will not the rustle of
silk across a counter stop his pulse because it brings back to his sense
the odorous whisper of Parthenissa's robe? Is not the beat of the
horse's hoofs as rapid to Angelica pursued as the throbs of her own
heart huddling upon one another in terror, while it is slow to Sister
Anne, as the pulse that pauses between hope and fear, as she listens on
the tower for rescue, and would have the rider "spur, though mounted on
the wind"?
Dr. Johnson tells us that that only is good poetry which may be
translated into sensible prose. I greatly doubt whether any very
profound emotion can be so rendered. Man is a metrical animal, and it is
not in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joy
over the new centre of hope and terror that is sucking life from her
breast. Translate passion into sensible prose and it becomes absurd,
because subdued to workaday associations, to that level of common sense
and convention where to betray intense feeling is ridiculous and
unmannerly. Shall I ask Shakespeare to translate me his love "still
climbing trees in the Hesperides"? Shall I ask Marlowe how Helen could
"make him immortal with a kiss," or how, in the name of all the Monsieur
Jourdains, at once her face could "launch a thousand ships and burn the
topless towers of Ilion"? Could Aeschylus, if put upon the stand, defend
his making Prometheus cry out,
O divine ether and swift-winged winds,
Ye springs of rivers, and of ocean waves
The innumerable smile, all mother Earth,
And Helios' all-beholding round, I call:
Behold what I, a god, from gods endure!
Or could Lear justify his
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you children!
No; precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain
any more than we can describe a perfume. There is a little quatrain of
Gongora's quoted by Calderon in his "Alcalde of Zalamea" which has an
inexplicable charm for me:
Las flores del romero,
Niña Isabel,
Hoy son flores azules,
Y mañana serán miel.
If I translate it, 't is nonsense, yet I understand it perfectly, and it
will, I dare say, outlive much wiser things in my memory. It is the very
function of poetry to free us from that witch's circle of common sense
which holds us fast in its narrow enchantment. In this disenthralment,
language and verse have their share, and we may say that language also
is capable of a certain idealization. Here is a passage from the XXXth
song of Drayton's "Poly-Olbion":
Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every Hill
Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring valleys fill;
Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
From whose stone-trophied head, it on to Wendrosse went,
Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent,
That Broadwater therewith within her banks astound,
In sailing to the sea, told it in Egremound.
This gave a hint to Wordsworth, who, in one of his "Poems on the Naming
of Places," thus prolongs the echo of it:
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again;
The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
Carried the Lady's voice,—old Skiddaw blew
His speaking-trumpet;—back out of the clouds
Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.
Now, this passage of Wordsworth I should call the
idealization of that of Drayton, who becomes poetical
only in the "stone-trophied head of Dunbalrase";
and yet the thought of both poets is the same.
Even what is essentially vulgar may be idealized by seizing and dwelling
on the generic characteristics. In "Antony and Cleopatra" Shakespeare
makes Lepidus tipsy, and nothing can be droller than the drunken gravity
with which he persists in proving himself capable of bearing his part in
the conversation. We seem to feel the whirl in his head when we find his
mind revolving round a certain fixed point to which he clings as to a
post. Antony is telling stories of Egypt to Octavius, and Lepidus, drawn
into an eddy of the talk, interrupts him:
Lepidus: You gave strange serpents there.
Antony [trying to shake him off]: Ay, Lepidus.
Lepidus: Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud
by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.
Antony [thinking to get rid of him]: They are so.
Presently Lepidus has revolved again, and continues, as if he had been
contradicted:
Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies' pyramises
are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard
that.
And then, after another pause, still intent on proving himself sober, he
asks, coming round to the crocodile again:
What manner o' thing is your crocodile?
Antony answers gravely:
It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath
breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own
organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements
once out of it, it transmigrates.
Lepidus: What color is it of?
Antony: Of its own color, too.
Lepidus [meditatively]: 'T is a strange serpent.
The ideal in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades
embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the
dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic
sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though
these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this
that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was
supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and
something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg
encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas
the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the
mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this
was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and
personification with that typical expression which is the true function
of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.
Revenge impatient rose;
He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
And, with a withering look,
The war-denouncing trumpet took,
And blew a blast so loud and dread,
Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of woe!
And ever and anon he beat
The doubling drum with furious heat.
"Words, words, Horatio!" Now let us hear Chaucer with his single
stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the
murderous tread behind us:
The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.
Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it—Collins's noise
or Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you will
perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness
which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention.
Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as
the two points most apt to impress the imagination.
The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on the
other hand, adorns, illustrates, and commonly amplifies. The one is
suggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander," I
read—
Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,
And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine,
For her love's sake, that with immortal wine
Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease
Than there was water in the Sestian seas.
In the epithet "star," Hero's thought implies the beauty and brightness
of her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune's
skies" we have not only the simple fact that the waters are the
atmosphere of the sea-god's realm, but are reminded of that reflected
heaven which Hero must have so often watched as it deepened below her
tower in the smooth Hellespont. I call this as high an example of fancy
as could well be found; it is picture and sentiment combined—the very
essence of the picturesque.
But when Keats calls Mercury "the star of Lethe," the word "star" makes
us see him as the poor ghosts do who are awaiting his convoy, while the
word "Lethe" intensifies our sympathy by making us feel his coming as
they do who are longing to drink of forgetfulness. And this again reacts
upon the word "star," which, as it before expressed only the shining of
the god, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitual
association of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothing
can be more fanciful than this bit of Henry More the Platonist:
What doth move
The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?
The thrush or lark that, mounting high above,
Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn
Heavily hanging in the dewy morn?
But compare this with Keats again:
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown;
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
The imagination has touched that word "alien," and we see the field
through Ruth's eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, not
merely through those of the poet.
CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
I. LIFE IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
It is the office and function of the imagination to renew life in lights
and sounds and emotions that are outworn and familiar. It calls the soul
back once more under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest bush
burn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible presence of God. And it
works the same miracle for language. The word it has touched retains the
warmth of life forever. We talk about the age of superstition and fable
as if they were passed away, as if no ghost could walk in the pure white
light of science, yet the microscope that can distinguish between the
disks that float in the blood of man and ox is helpless, a mere dead
eyeball, before this mystery of Being, this wonder of Life, the sympathy
which puts us in relation with all nature, before that mighty
circulation of Deity in which stars and systems are but as the
blood-disks in our own veins. And so long as wonder lasts, so long will
imagination find thread for her loom, and sit like the Lady of Shalott
weaving that magical web in which "the shows of things are accommodated
to the desires of the mind."
It is precisely before this phenomenon of life in literature and
language that criticism is forced to stop short. That it is there we
know, but what it is we cannot precisely tell. It flits before us like
the bird in the old story. When we think to grasp it, we already hear it
singing just beyond us. It is the imagination which enables the poet to
give away his own consciousness in dramatic poetry to his characters, in
narrative to his language, so that they react upon us with the same
original force as if they had life in themselves.
II. STYLE AND MANNER
Where Milton's style is fine it is very fine, but it is always liable
to the danger of degenerating into mannerism. Nay, where the imagination
is absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theological
discussions in "Paradise Lost," it becomes mannerism of the most
wearisome kind. Accordingly, he is easily parodied and easily imitated.
Philips, in his "Splendid Shilling," has caught the trick exactly:
Not blacker tube nor of a shorter size
Smokes Cambrobriton (versed in pedigree,
Sprung from Cadwallader and Arthur, kings
Full famous in romantic tale) when he,
O'er many a craggy hill and barren cliff,
Upon a cargo of famed Cestrian cheese
High overshadowing rides, with a design
To vend his wares or at the Arvonian mart.
Or Maridunum, or the ancient town
Yclept Brechinia, or where Vaga's stream
Encircles Ariconium, fruitful soil.
Philips has caught, I say, Milton's trick; his real secret he could
never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable. But all
authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies
less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become
mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily
imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his
time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence
has in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined by
him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is
circumlocution in the crow of a cock. Cowper was only saved by mixing
equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind of
cross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we should
not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that
no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the
majesty and compass of the organ. He was as much composer as poet.
How is it with Shakespeare? did he have no style? I think I find the
proof that he had it, and that of the very highest and subtlest kind, in
the fact that I can nowhere put my finger on it, and say it is here or
there.[1]
[Footnote 1: In his essay, "Shakespeare Once More" (Works, in, pp.
36-42), published in 1868, Mr. Lowell has treated of Shakespeare's style
in a passage of extraordinary felicity and depth of critical judgment.]
I do not mean that things in themselves artificial may not be highly
agreeable. We learn by degrees to take a pleasure in the mannerism of
Gibbon and Johnson. It is something like reading Latin as a living
language. But in both these cases the man is only present by his
thought. It is the force of that, and only that, which distinguishes
them from their imitators, who easily possess themselves of everything
else. But with Burke, who has true style, we have a very different
experience. If we go along with Johnson or Gibbon, we are carried
along by Burke. Take the finest specimen of him, for example, "The
Letter to a Noble Lord." The sentences throb with the very pulse of the
writer. As he kindles, the phrase glows and dilates, and we feel
ourselves sharing in that warmth and expansion. At last we no longer
read, we seem to hear him, so livingly is the whole man in what he
writes; and when the spell is over, we can scarce believe that those
dull types could have held such ravishing discourse. And yet we are told
that when Burke spoke in Parliament he always emptied the house.
I know very well what the charm of mere words is. I know very well that
our nerves of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the violin is
said to do, to certain modulations, so that we receive them with a
readier sympathy at every repetition. This is a part of the sweet charm
of the classics. We are pleased with things in Horace which we should
not find especially enlivening in Mr. Tupper. Cowper, in one of his
letters, after turning a clever sentence, says, "There! if that had been
written in Latin seventeen centuries ago by Mr. Flaccus, you would have
thought it rather neat." How fully any particular rhythm gets possession
of us we can convince ourselves by our dissatisfaction with any
emendation made by a contemporary poet in his verses. Posterity may
think he has improved them, but we are jarred by any change in the old
tune. Even without any habitual association, we cannot help recognizing
a certain power over our fancy in mere words. In verse almost every ear
is caught with the sweetness of alliteration. I remember a line in
Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" which owes much of its fascination to
three m's, where he speaks of the Hebrid Isles
Far placed amid the melancholy main.
I remember a passage in Prichard's "Races of Man" which had for me all
the moving quality of a poem. It was something about the Arctic regions,
and I could never read it without the same thrill. Dr. Prichard was
certainly far from being an inspired or inspiring author, yet there was
something in those words, or in their collocation, that affected me as
only genius can. It was probably some dimly felt association, something
like that strange power there is in certain odors, which, in themselves
the most evanescent and impalpable of all impressions on the senses,
have yet a wondrous magic in recalling, and making present to us, some
forgotten experience.
Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems are
full of those little pitfalls for the fancy. Whatever you have read,
whether in the classics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stir
you with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable. Gray
makes use of the same artifice, and with the same success.
There is a charm in the arrangement of words also, and that not only in
verse, but in prose. The finest prose is subject to the laws of metrical
proportion. For example, in the song of Deborah and Barak: "Awake,
awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, utter a song! Arise, Barak, and lead thy
captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam!" Or again, "At her feet he
bowed; he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he
bowed, there he fell down dead."
Setting aside, then, all charm of association, all the influence to
which we are unconsciously subjected by melody, by harmony, or even by
the mere sound of words, we may say that style is distinguished from
manner by the author's power of projecting his own emotion into what he
writes. The stylist is occupied with the impression which certain things
have made upon him; the mannerist is wholly concerned with the
impression he shall make on others.
III. KALEVALA
But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which
imagination may display itself—as an active power or as a passive
quality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receives
from nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latter
reproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration by
conventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by the
conscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself with
expression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we call
art, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in a
vivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet was
conscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have not
communicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have come
down to us to which every generation adds some new significance out of
its own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for the
understanding, and, passing into the common currency of speech, become
the property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, which
is the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is the
property of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always here
a certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrases
and images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditions
remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy
combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and
natural relation with the world about him, however little or however
much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious
and incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomes
with the advance of every generation in literary culture and social
refinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never produced
among cultivated people. Like the mayflower, they love the woods, and
will not be naturalized in the garden. Now, the advantage of that
primitive kind of poetry of which I was just speaking is that it finds
its imaginative components ready made to its hand. But an illustration
is worth more than any amount of discourse. Let me read you a few
passages from a poem which grew up under the true conditions of natural
and primitive literature—remoteness, primitiveness of manners, and
dependence on native traditions. I mean the epic of Finland—Kalevala.[1]
[Footnote 1: This translation is Mr. Lowell's, and, so far as I know,
has not been printed.—C.E. NORTON.]
I am driven by my longing,
Of my thought I hear the summons
That to singing I betake me,
That I give myself to speaking,
That our race's lay I utter,
Song for ages handed downward.
Words upon my lips are melting,
And the eager tones escaping
Will my very tongue outhasten,
Will my teeth, despite me, open.
Golden friend, beloved brother,
Dear one that grew up beside me,
Join thee with me now in singing,
Join thee with me now in speaking,
Since we here have come together,
Journeying by divers pathways;
Seldom do we come together,
One comes seldom to the other,
In the barren fields far-lying,
On the hard breast of the Northland.
Hand in hand together clasping,
Finger fast with finger clasping,
Gladly we our song will utter,
Of our lays will give the choicest—
So that friends may understand it.
And the kindly ones may hear it.
In their youth which now is waxing,
Climbing upward into manhood:
These our words of old tradition,
These our lays that we have borrowed
From the belt of Wainamoinen,
From the forge of Ilmarinen,
From the sword of Kaukomeli,
From the bow of Jonkahainen,
From the borders of the ice-fields,
From the plains of Kalevala.
These my father sang before me,
As the axe's helve he fashioned;
These were taught me by my mother,
As she sat and twirled her spindle,
While I on the floor was lying,
At her feet, a child was rolling;
Never songs of Sampo failed her.
Magic songs of Lonhi never;
Sampo in her song grew aged,
Lonhi with her magic vanished,
In her singing died Wipunen,
As I played, died Lunminkainen.
Other words there are a many,
Magic words that I have taught me,
Which I picked up from the pathway,
Which I gathered from the forest,
Which I snapped from wayside bushes,
Which I gleaned from slender grass-blades,
Which I found upon the foot-bridge.
When I wandered as a herd-boy.
As a child into the pastures,
To the meadows rich in honey,
To the sun-begoldened hilltops,
Following the black Maurikki
By the side of brindled Kimmo.
Lays the winter gave me also,
Song was given me by the rain-storm,
Other lays the wind-gusts blew me,
And the waves of ocean brought them;
Words I borrowed of the song-birds,
And wise sayings from the tree-tops.
Then into a skein I wound them,
Bound them fast into a bundle,
Laid upon my ledge the burthen,
Bore them with me to my dwelling,
On the garret beams I stored them,
In the great chest bound with copper.
Long time in the cold they lay there,
Under lock and key a long time;
From the cold shall I forth bring them?
Bring my lays from out the frost there
'Neath this roof so wide-renownèd?
Here my song-chest shall I open,
Chest with runic lays o'errunning?
Shall I here untie my bundle,
And begin my skein unwinding?
* * * * *
Now my lips at last must close them
And my tongue at last be fettered;
I must leave my lay unfinished,
And must cease from cheerful singing;
Even the horses must repose them
When all day they have been running;
Even the iron's self grows weary
Mowing down the summer grasses;
Even the water sinks to quiet
From its rushing in the river;
Even the fire seeks rest in ashes
That all night hath roared and crackled;
Wherefore should not music also,
Song itself, at last grow weary
After the long eve's contentment
And the fading of the twilight?
I have also heard say often,
Heard it many times repeated,
That the cataract swift-rushing
Not in one gush spends its waters,
And in like sort cunning singers
Do not spend their utmost secret,
Yea, to end betimes is better
Than to break the thread abruptly.
Ending, then, as I began them,
Closing thus and thus completing,
I fold up my pack of ballads,
Roll them closely in a bundle,
Lay them safely in the storeroom,
In the strong bone-castle's chamber,
That they never thence be stolen,
Never in all time be lost thence,
Though the castle's wall be broken,
Though the bones be rent asunder,
Though the teeth may be pried open,
And the tongue be set in motion.
How, then, were it sang I always
Till my songs grew poor and poorer,
Till the dells alone would hear me,
Only the deaf fir-trees listen?
Not in life is she, my mother,
She no longer is aboveground;
She, the golden, cannot hear me,
'T is the fir-trees now that hear me,
'T is the pine-tops understand me,
And the birch-crowns full of goodness,
And the ash-trees now that love me!
Small and weak my mother left me,
Like a lark upon the cliff-top,
Like a young thrush 'mid the flintstones
In the guardianship of strangers,
In the keeping of the stepdame.
She would drive the little orphan.
Drive the child with none to love him,
To the cold side of the chimney,
To the north side of the cottage.
Where the wind that felt no pity,
Bit the boy with none to shield him.
Larklike, then, I forth betook me,
Like a little bird to wander.
Silent, o'er the country straying
Yon and hither, full of sadness.
With the winds I made acquaintance
Felt the will of every tempest.
Learned of bitter frost to shiver,
Learned too well to weep of winter.
Yet there be full many people
Who with evil voice assail me,
And with tongue of poison sting me,
Saying that my lips are skilless,
That the ways of song I know not,
Nor the ballad's pleasant turnings.
Ah, you should not, kindly people,
Therein seek a cause to blame me,
That, a child, I sang too often,
That, unfledged, I twittered only.
I have never had a teacher,
Never heard the speech of great men,
Never learned a word unhomely,
Nor fine phrases of the stranger.
Others to the school were going,
I alone at home must keep me,
Could not leave my mother's elbow,
In the wide world had her only;
In the house had I my schooling,
From the rafters of the chamber.
From the spindle of my mother,
From the axehelve of my father,
In the early days of childhood;
But for this it does not matter,
I have shown the way to singers,
Shown the way, and blazed the tree-bark,
Snapped the twigs, and marked the footpath;
Here shall be the way in future,
Here the track at last be opened
For the singers better-gifted,
For the songs more rich than mine are,
Of the youth that now are waxing,
In the good time that is coming!
Like Virgil's husbandman, our minstrel did not know how well off he was
to have been without schooling. This, I think, every one feels at once
to be poetry that sings itself. It makes its own tune, and the heart
beats in time to its measure. By and by poets will begin to say, like
Goethe, "I sing as the bird sings"; but this poet sings in that fashion
without thinking of it or knowing it. And it is the very music of his
race and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos.
Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners to
the old national lays grow fewer every day. Before long the Fins will be
writing songs in the manner of Heine, and dramas in imitation of
"Faust." Doubtless the material of original poetry lies in all of us,
but in proportion as the mind is conventionalized by literature, it is
apt to look about it for models, instead of looking inward for that
native force which makes models, but does not follow them. This rose of
originality which we long for, this bloom of imagination whose perfume
enchants us—we can seldom find it when it is near us, when it is part
of our daily lives.
REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
HENRY JAMES
JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES[1]
[Footnote 1: A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales. By Henry James, Jr.
Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co.
Transatlantic Sketches. By the same author.]
Whoever takes an interest, whether of mere curiosity or of critical
foreboding, in the product and tendency of our younger literature, must
have had his attention awakened and detained by the writings of Mr.
James. Whatever else they may be, they are not common, and have that air
of good breeding which is the token of whatever is properly called
literature. They are not the overflow of a shallow talent for
improvisation too full of self to be contained, but show everywhere the
marks of intelligent purpose and of the graceful ease that comes only of
conscientious training. Undoubtedly there was a large capital of native
endowment to start from—a mind of singular subtlety and refinement; a
faculty of rapid observation, yet patient of rectifying afterthought;
senses daintily alive to every aesthetic suggestion; and a frank
enthusiasm, kept within due bounds by the double-consciousness of humor.
But it is plain that Mr. James is fortunate enough to possess, or to be
possessed by, that finer sixth sense which we call the artistic, and
which controls, corrects, and discontents. His felicities, therefore,
are not due to a lucky turn of the dice, but to forethought and
afterthought. Accordingly, he is capable of progress, and gives renewed
evidence of it from time to time, while too many of our authors show
premature marks of arrested development. They strike a happy vein of
starting, perhaps, and keep on grubbing at it, with the rude helps of
primitive mining, seemingly unaware that it is daily growing more and
more slender. Even should it wholly vanish, they persist in the vain
hope of recovering it further on, as if in literature two successes of
precisely the same kind were possible Nay, most of them have hit upon no
vein at all, but picked up a nugget rather, and persevere in raking the
surface of things, if haply they may chance upon another. The moral of
one of Hawthorne's stories is that there is no element of treasure-trove
in success, but that true luck lies in the deep and assiduous
cultivation of our own plot of ground, be it larger or smaller. For
indeed the only estate of man that savors of the realty is in his mind.
Mr. James seems to have arrived early at an understanding of this, and
to have profited by the best modern appliances of self-culture. In
conception and expression is he essentially an artist and not an
irresponsible trouvère. If he allow himself an occasional
carelessness, it is not from incaution, but because he knows perfectly
well what he is about. He is quite at home in the usages of the best
literary society. In his writing there is none of that hit-or-miss
playing at snapdragon with language, of that clownish bearing-on in what
should be the light strokes, as if mere emphasis were meaning, and
naturally none of the slovenliness that offends a trained judgment in
the work of so many of our writers later, unmistakably clever as they
are. In short, he has tone, the last result and surest evidence of an
intellect reclaimed from the rudeness of nature, for it means
self-restraint. The story of Handel's composing always in full dress
conveys at least the useful lesson of a gentlemanlike deference for the
art a man professes and for the public whose attention he claims. Mr.
James, as we see in his sketches of travel, is not averse to the
lounging ease of a shooting-jacket, but he respects the usages of
convention, and at the canonical hours is sure to be found in the
required toilet. He does not expect the company to pardon his own
indolence as one of the necessary appendages of originality. Always
considerate himself, his readers soon find reason to treat him with
consideration. For they soon come to see that literature may be light
and at the same time thoughtful; that lightness, indeed, results much
more surely from serious study than from the neglect of it.
We have said that Mr. James was emphatically a man of culture, and we
are old-fashioned enough to look upon him with the more interest as a
specimen of exclusively modern culture. Of any classical training we
have failed to detect the traces in him. His allusions, his citations,
are in the strictest sense contemporary, and indicate, if we may trust
our divination, a preference for French models, Balzac, De Musset,
Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, especially the three
latter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, their
clever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by direct
bluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is an
admirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable by
example. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to be
called our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the French
small-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows the
graceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a man
distinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of letting
us feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusively
aware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of his
character by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be made
always in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes and
prejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proof
of indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any fault
with Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, it
would be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like
bouder, se reconnaît, banal, and the like), where our English, without
being driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite as
good and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow as
near surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who so
generally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us a
disagreeable alien like abandon (used as a noun), as if it could show
an honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster.
Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance that
escapes our obtuser sense, a sweetness, it may be, of early association,
for he tells us somewhere that in his boyhood he was put to school in
Geneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into the
rusticism that "remembers of" a thing.
But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligent
study of French models, it is plain that a much larger share of Mr.
James's education has been acquired by travel and through the eyes of a
thoughtful observer of men and things. He has seen more cities and
manners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and if
with less gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of his
artistic apprehensiveness and scope that is of far greater value to him.
We do not mean to imply that Mr. James lacks what is called knowledge of
the world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in
him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination
ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity.
He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in
a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening
the ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line he
has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character
and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of
society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and
art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr.
James does not see things with his eyes alone. His vision is always
modified by his imaginative temperament. He is the last man we should
consult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow of
sensitive impression, and are positively better than the actual
pilgrimage. We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, but
hardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. Et ego in
Arcadia, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not the
name we found in our guide-book. It is always Dichtung und Wahrheit
(Goethe knew very well what he was about when he gave precedence to the
giddier sister)—it is always fact seen through imagination and
transfigured by it. A single example will best show what we mean. "It is
partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened
that the aqueducts are so impressive. They seem the very source of the
solitude in which they stand; they look like architectural spectres,
and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede
along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out
of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's
pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance
crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice,"
or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it
stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose.
But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased. Mr. James tempts us
into many byways of serious and fruitful thought. Especially valuable
and helpful have we found his obiter dicta on the arts of painting,
sculpture, and architecture; for example, when he says of the Tuscan
palaces that "in their large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty of
effect, [they] reproduce more than other modern styles the simple
nobleness of Greek architecture." And we would note also what he says of
the Albani Antinoüs. It must be a nimble wit that can keep pace with Mr.
James's logic in his aesthetic criticism. It is apt to spring airily
over the middle term to the conclusion, leaving something in the
likeness of a ditch across the path of our slower intelligences, which
look about them and think twice before taking the leap. Courage! there
are always fresh woods and pastures new on the other side. A curious
reflection has more than once flashed upon our minds as we lingered with
Mr. James over his complex and refined sensations: we mean the very
striking contrast between the ancient and modern traveller. The former
saw with his bodily eyes, and reported accordingly, catering for the
curiosity of homely wits as to the outsides and appearances of things.
Even Montaigne, habitually introspective as he was, sticks to the old
method in his travels. The modern traveller, on the other hand,
superseded by the guide-book, travels in himself, and records for us the
scenery of his own mind as it is affected by change of sky and the
various weather of temperament.
Mr. James, in his sketches, frankly acknowledges his preference of the
Old World. Life—which here seems all drab to him, without due lights
and shades of social contrast, without that indefinable suggestion of
immemorial antiquity which has so large a share in picturesque
impression—is there a dome of many-colored glass irradiating both
senses and imagination. We shall not blame him too gravely for this, as
if an American had not as good a right as any ancient of them all to
say, Ubi libertas, ibi patria. It is no real paradox to affirm that a
man's love of his country may often be gauged by his disgust at it. But
we think it might fairly be argued against him that the very absence of
that distracting complexity of associations might help to produce that
solitude which is the main feeder of imagination. Certainly, Hawthorne,
with whom no modern European can be matched for the subtlety and power
of this marvellous quality, is a strong case on the American side of the
question.
Mr. James's tales, if without any obvious moral, are sure to have a
clearly defined artistic purpose. They are careful studies of character
thrown into dramatic action, and the undercurrent of motive is, as it
should be, not in the circumstances but in the characters themselves. It
is by delicate touches and hints that his effects are produced. The
reader is called upon to do his share, and will find his reward in it,
for Mr. James, as we cannot too often insist, is first and always an
artist. Nowhere does he show his fine instinct more to the purpose than
in leaving the tragic element of tales (dealing as they do with
contemporary life, and that mainly in the drawing-room) to take care of
itself, and in confining the outward expression of passion within the
limits of a decorous amenity. Those who must have their intellectual
gullets tingled with the fiery draught of coarse sensation must go
elsewhere for their dram; but whoever is capable of the aroma of the
more delicate vintages will find it here. In the volume before us
"Madame de Mauves" will illustrate what we mean. There is no space for
detailed analysis, even if that were ever adequate to give the true
impression of stories so carefully worked out and depending so much for
their effect on a gradual cumulation of particulars each in itself
unemphatic. We have said that Mr. James shows promise as well as
accomplishment, gaining always in mastery of his material. It is but a
natural inference from this that his "Roderick Hudson" is the fullest
and most finished proof of his power as a story-teller. Indeed, we may
say frankly that it pleases us the more because the characters are drawn
with a bolder hand and in more determined outline, for if Mr. James need
any friendly caution, it is against over-delicacy of handling.
LONGFELLOW
THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
The introduction and acclimatization of the hexameter upon English
soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was
first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre
remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel
Harvey,—a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,—whose chief claim to
remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was
the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure
Letters" (1592) he says, "If I never deserve anye better remembraunce,
let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English Hexameter,
whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and excellent Sir
Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and elsewhere."
This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an afterthought
with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him and Spenser in
1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a collaborator with
Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of Surrey is said to have
been the first who wrote thus in English. The most successful person,
however, was William Webb, who translated two of Virgil's Eclogues with
a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in his "Schoolmaster" (1570),
had already suggested the adoption of the ancient hexameter by English
poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham in his "Art of Poesie")
thought the number of monosyllabic words in English an insuperable
objection to verses in which there was a large proportion of dactyls,
and recommended, therefore, that a trial should be made with iambics.
Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have tried his hand at the new
kind of verse. He says:
I like your late Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I
also enure my penne sometimes in that kinde…. For the onely or
chiefest hardnesse, whych seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime
gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that
it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, as in
Carpenter; the middle sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when
it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that
draweth one legge after hir and Heaven, being used shorte as one
sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a Diastole, is
like a lame dogge that holdes up one legge. But it is to be wonne
with Custome, and rough words must be subdued with Vse. For why a
God's name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of our
owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the Sounde, reserving the
Quantitie to the Verse?
The amiable Edmonde seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this
sentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue
English to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for
example, make the vowel in "debt" long, in the teeth of use and wont.
We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the ear
of Master Gabriel Harvey,—an ear that must have been long by position,
in virtue of its place on his head.
Not the like Discourser, for Tongue and head to be fóund out;
Not the like resolute Man, for great and serious áffayres;
Not the like Lynx, to spie out secretes and priuities óf States;
Eyed like to Argus, Earde like to Midas, Nosd like to Naso,
Winged like to Mercury, fittst of a Thousand for to be émployed.
And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the
"Aeneid."
Laocoon storming from Princelie Castel is hastning,
And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine
Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie?
Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,
Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlisses
So soone forgotten? My life for an haulfpennie (Trojans), etc.
Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:—
Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,
And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed.
Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff, "that
drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill,
like the waye betwixt Stamford and Beechfeeld, and goes like a horse
plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to the
saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It will be noticed that his
prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England at
that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so far
useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's "Defence of Ryme" (1603),
one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also, in his
"Satires," condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for their
grave beauty and strength.
The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich
Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to
the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His
"Odyssey" (1783), his "Iliad" (1791), and his "Luise" (1795), were
confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann and
Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modern
hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other classic metres
into England, and we should be grateful to him, at least, for having
given the model for Canning's "Knife-grinder." The exotic, however,
again refused to take root, and for many years after we have no example
of English hexameters. It was universally conceded that the temper of
our language was unfriendly to them.
It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only
tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of the
Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but "Evangeline"
(1847), though encumbered with too many descriptive irrelevancies, was
so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made converts by
thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than this, it made
Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary English poets.
Clough's "Bothie"—poem whose singular merit has hitherto failed of the
wide appreciation it deserves—followed not long after; and Kingsley's
"Andromeda" is yet damp from the press.
While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by "Evangeline" is a
striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have
never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a
dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform
for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow
into prose,—as in the verse
Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,
and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his style
in other metres, as where he says
Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses,
using a word as essentially unpoetic as "surtout or pea-jacket." We
think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms
the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented
sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of
phrase.
But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as
frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles
Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the
narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with a
firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness, and
simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest
artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the
picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is with
a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and characters
of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of Priscilla
spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We feel charmed
to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the little old
familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are astonished,
like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius could be
contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot associate
sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins may be
consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot
Desmoulins—as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.
Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary
popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait
for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any
general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to
receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in
itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and
always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly
popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the
great poets—the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and
naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which
brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed
expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that is
a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one who
is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr.
Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics
are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done,
because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault is
a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his readers,
which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be drawn from
any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two stanzas could
be cut off from "The Two Angels," a poem which, without them, is as
perfect as anything in the language.
Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain jewels
in Maga's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should, perhaps,
have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of our most
precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some very
unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it seemed to
us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original poet. The
writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more complex or
more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite with the
few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and not
personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the development
of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the gratitude and
love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace
and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr.
Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets,
deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic
narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In
our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red
pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to
overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if,
since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative
than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Apart from its intrinsic
beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful
consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict
of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no
fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that
which charms now and charms always,—true power and originality, without
grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic type
of strength.
TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular of
American, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of his
nature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of his
images, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justify
the public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation will
settle into fame. That he has not this of Tennyson, nor that of
Browning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other things
that are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in his
verse that make day for a moment in this dim cavern of consciousness
where we grope; but there is an equable sunshine that touches the
landscape of life with a new charm, and lures us out into healthier air.
If he fall short of the highest reaches of imagination, he is none the
less a master within his own sphere—all the more so, indeed, that he is
conscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving to
be other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as in
these latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poets
like that of Irving among our prose-writers. Make whatever deductions
and qualifications, and they still keep their place in the hearts and
minds of men. In point of time he is our Chaucer—the first who imported
a finer foreign culture into our poetry.
His present volume shows a greater ripeness than any of its
predecessors. We find a mellowness of early autumn in it. There is the
old sweetness native to the man, with greater variety of character and
experience. The personages are all drawn from the life, and sketched
with the light firmness of a practised art. They have no more
individuality than is necessary to the purpose of the poem, which
consists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellers
gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its
sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a
natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of
his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the
same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities
of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes,
and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease of
style which is, of all things, the hardest to attain. The verse flows
clear and sweet as honey, and with a faint fragrance that tells, but not
too plainly, of flowers that grew in many fields. We are made to feel
that, however tedious the processes of culture may be, the ripe result
in facile power and scope of fancy is purely delightful. We confess that
we are so heartily weary of those cataclysms of passion and sentiment
with which literature has been convulsed of late,—as if the main object
were, not to move the reader, but to shake the house about his
ears,—that the homelike quiet and beauty of such poems as these is like
an escape from noise to nature.
As regards the structure of the work looked at as a whole, it strikes us
as a decided fault, that the Saga of King Olaf is so disproportionately
long, especially as many of the pieces which compose it are by no means
so well done as the more strictly original ones. We have no quarrel with
the foreign nature of the subject as such,—for any good matter is
American enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking
that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for
freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself
felt. Put into English, the Saga seems too Norse; and there is often a
hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for
literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but
hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the
ethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent"
is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," which
he learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland,
where he played as a boy. We are willing, however, to pardon the parts
which we find somewhat ineffectual, in favor of the "Nun of Nidaros,"
which concludes, and in its gracious piety more than redeems, them all.
WHITTIER
IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
It is a curious illustration of the attraction of opposites, that, among
our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in
the Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a
drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to
the tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of
our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burns
all the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is not
as a singular antithesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity of
his is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as illustrating
how deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon the
commonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sect
they chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of the
Puritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englander
is too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens to
reverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of a
sincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poetic
sentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitiful
snobbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of the
Puritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest men
brought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of the
democracy which was to develop itself from their institutions. They
brought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly nature
of the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate and
disperse itself. The same conditions have produced the same results also
at the South, and nothing but slavery blocks the way to a perfect
sympathy between the two sections.
Mr. Whittier is essentially a lyric poet, and the fervor of his
temperament gives his pieces of that kind a remarkable force and
effectiveness. Twenty years ago many of his poems were in the nature of
conciones ad populum, vigorous stump-speeches in verse, appealing as
much to the blood as the brain, and none the less convincing for that.
By regular gradations ever since his tone has been softening and his
range widening. As a poet he stands somewhere between Burns and Cowper,
akin to the former in patriotic glow, and to the latter in intensity of
religious anxiety verging sometimes on morbidness. His humanity, if it
lack the humorous breadth of the one, has all the tenderness of the
other. In love of outward nature he yields to neither. His delight in it
is not a new sentiment or a literary tradition, but the genuine passion
of a man born and bred in the country, who has not merely a visiting
acquaintance with the landscape, but stands on terms of lifelong
friendship with hill, stream, rock, and tree. In his descriptions he
often catches the expression of rural scenery, a very different thing
from the mere looks, with the trained eye of familiar intimacy. A
somewhat shy and hermitical being we take him to be, and more a student
of his own heart than of men. His characters, where he introduces such,
are commonly abstractions, with little of the flesh and blood of real
life in them, and this from want of experience rather than of sympathy;
for many of his poems show him capable of friendship almost womanly in
its purity and warmth. One quality which we especially value in him is
the intense home-feeling which, without any conscious aim at being
American, gives his poetry a flavor of the soil surprisingly refreshing.
Without being narrowly provincial, he is the most indigenous of our
poets. In these times, especially, his uncalculating love of country has
a profound pathos in it. He does not flare the flag in our faces, but
one feels the heart of a lover throbbing in his anxious verse.
Mr. Whittier, if the most fervid of our poets, is sometimes hurried away
by this very quality, in itself an excellence, into being the most
careless. He draws off his verse while the fermentation is yet going on,
and before it has had time to compose itself and clarify into the ripe
wine of expression. His rhymes are often faulty beyond the most
provincial license even of Burns himself. Vigor without elegance will
never achieve permanent success in poetry. We think, also, that he has
too often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path to
which his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, into
metaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real life
of his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a smudge, and gives
evidence of itself in smoke instead of flame. Where he follows his truer
instincts, he is often admirable in the highest sense, and never without
the interest of natural thought and feeling naturally expressed.
HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
The natural product of a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man
and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard
Barton. His verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the
sect; for from title-page to colophon there was no sin either in the way
of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse,
that brewed a cup, neither cheering unduly nor inebriating, out of the
emptyings of Wordsworth's teapot. How that little busy B. improved each
shining hour, how neatly he laid his wax, it gives us a cold shiver to
think of—ancora ci raccappriccia! Against a copy of verses signed
"B.B.," as we remember them in the hardy Annuals that went to seed so
many years ago, we should warn our incautious offspring as an
experienced duck might her brood against a charge of B.B. shot. It
behooves men to be careful; for one may chance to suffer lifelong from
these intrusions of cold lead in early life, as duellists sometimes
carry about all their days a bullet from which no surgery can relieve
them. Memory avenges our abuses of her, and, as an awful example, we
mention the fact that we have never been able to forget certain stanzas
of another B.B., who, under the title of "Boston Bard," whilom obtained
from newspaper columns that concession which gods and men would
unanimously have denied him.
George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on
established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him
crazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else it
might be, was surely not of that kind "that never was on land or sea."
There has been much that was poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in
the men themselves. Poetry demands a richer and more various culture,
and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias
Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth is
something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of
the same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as
they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate
for the waste of human life as the Journal of an average Quaker.
Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing
springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness.
Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, who
can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she
made a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choice
between Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on the
whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. He
sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery. He has not forgiven the
Puritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admires
them for all that, calls on his countrymen as
Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
Answering Charles's royal mandate with a stern "Thus saith the Lord,"
and at heart, we suspect, has more sympathy with Miles Standish than
with Mary Dyer. Indeed,
Sons of men who sat in meeting with their broadbrims o'er their brow,
Answering Charles's royal mandate with a thee instead of thou,
would hardly do. Whatever Mr. Whittier may lack, he has the prime merit
that he smacks of the soil. It is a New England heart he buttons his
straight-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain now
and then. Even the native idiom crops out here and there in his verses.
He makes abroad rhyme with God, law with war, us with curse,
scorner with honor, been with men, beard with shared. For
the last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest
we can make no terms whatever,—they must march out with no honors of
war. The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give
a flavor of essence-pennyr'y'l to the very Beatitudes. It differs from
Lowland Scotch as a patois from a dialect.
But criticism is not a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has other
and better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in the
heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soil
might have made him a Burns or a Béranger for us. New England is dry and
hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the
magnolia grows after a fashion. It is all very nice to say to our poets,
"You have sky and wood and waterfall and men and women—in short, the
entire outfit of Shakespeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere"; and
when the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir of
approval. But it is all bosh, nevertheless. Nature is not the same
here, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled his
being with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped in
history, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere of
thought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition. Nature without an
ideal background is nothing. We may claim whatever merits we like (and
our orators are not too bashful), we may be as free and enlightened as
we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We may
be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to
the political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has little
of that marvellous bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finer
issues than a gregarious activity in hoarding. The Puritans left us a
fine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but they
disinherited us of the past. Not a single stage-property of poetry did
they bring with them but the good old Devil, with his graminivorous
attributes, and even he could not stand the climate. Neither horn nor
hoof nor tail of him has been seen for a century. He is as dead as the
goat-footed Pan, whom he succeeded, and we tenderly regret him.
Mr. Whittier himself complains somewhere of
The rigor of our frozen sky,
and he seems to have been thinking of our clear, thin, intellectual
atmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artists
complain that it rounds no edges. We have sometimes thought that his
verses suffered from a New England taint in a too great tendency to
metaphysics and morals, which may be the bases on which poetry rests,
but should not be carried too high above-ground. Without this, however,
he would not have been the typical New England poet that he is. In the
present volume there is little of it. It is more purely objective than
any of its forerunners, and is full of the most charming rural pictures
and glimpses, in which every sight and sound, every flower, bird, and
tree, is neighborly and homely. He makes us see
the old swallow-haunted barns,
Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
Through which the moted sunlight streams.
And winds blow freshly in to shake
The red plumes of the roosted cocks
And the loose hay-mow's scented locks,—
the cattle-yard
With the white horns tossing above the wall,
the spring-blossoms that drooped over the river,
Lighting up the swarming shad,—
and
the bulged nets sweeping shoreward
With their silver-sided haul.
Every picture is full of color, and shows that true eye for Nature which
sees only what it ought, and that artistic memory which brings home
compositions and not catalogues. There is hardly a hill, rock, stream,
or sea-fronting headland in the neighborhood of his home that he has not
fondly remembered. Sometimes, we think, there is too much description,
the besetting sin of modern verse, which has substituted what should be
called wordy-painting for the old art of painting in a single word. The
essential character of Mr. Whittier's poetry is lyrical, and the rush of
the lyric, like that of a brook, allows few pictures. Now and then there
may be an eddy where the feeling lingers and reflects a bit of scenery,
but for the most part it can only catch gleams of color that mingle with
the prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it. This volume
contains some of the best of Mr. Whittier's productions in this kind.
"Skipper Ireson's Ride" we hold to be by long odds the best of modern
ballads. There are others nearly as good in their way, and all, with a
single exception, embodying native legends. In "Telling the Bees," Mr.
Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of exquisite
grace and feeling. "The Garrison of Cape Ann" would have been a fine
poem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at the
end of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point of a sword. It is
pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton
Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad
English and worse Latin. With all his faults, that conceited old pedant
contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on
this side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the trouble
to give us a tolerably correct edition of it. Absurdity is common
enough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightful
gift.
This last volume has given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier's
powers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his
earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third
stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said
Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer
and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The
half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and,
we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia." The
years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richer
quality in these verses where the ferment is over and the rile has
quietly settled. We have had no more purely American poet than Mr.
Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous
expression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been
so true to the present.
SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
At the close of his poem Mr. Whittier utters a hope that it may recall
some pleasant country memories to the overworked slaves of our great
cities, and that he may deserve those thanks which are all the more
grateful that they are rather divined by the receiver than directly
expressed by the giver. The reviewer cannot aspire to all the merit of
this confidential privacy and pleasing shyness of gratitude, but he may
fairly lay claim to a part of it, inasmuch as, though obliged to speak
his thanks publicly, he need not do it to the author's face. We are
again indebted to Mr. Whittier, as we have been so often before, for a
very real and a very refined pleasure. The little volume before us has
all his most characteristic merits. It is true to Nature and in local
coloring, pure in sentiment, quietly deep in feeling, and full of those
simple touches which show the poetic eye and the trained hand. Here is a
New England interior glorified with something of that inward light which
is apt to be rather warmer in the poet than the Quaker, but which,
blending the qualities of both in Mr. Whittier, produces that kind of
spiritual picturesqueness which gives so peculiar a charm to his verse.
There is in this poem a warmth of affectionate memory and religious
faith as touching as it is uncommon, and which would be altogether
delightful if it did not remind us that the poet was growing old. Not
that there is any other mark of senescence than the ripened sweetness of
a life both publicly and privately well spent. There is fire enough, but
it glows more equably and shines on sweeter scenes than in the poet's
earlier verse. It is as if a brand from the camp-fire had kindled these
logs on the old homestead's hearth, whose flickering benediction touches
tremulously those dear heads of long ago that are now transfigured with
a holier light. The father, the mother, the uncle, the schoolmaster, the
uncanny guest, are all painted in warm and natural colors, with perfect
truth of detail and yet with all the tenderness of memory. Of the family
group the poet is the last on earth, and there is something deeply
touching in the pathetic sincerity of the affection which has outlived
them all, looking back to before the parting, and forward to the assured
reunion.
But aside from its poetic and personal interest, and the pleasure it
must give to every one who loves pictures from the life, "Snow-Bound"
has something of historical interest. It describes scenes and manners
which the rapid changes of our national habits will soon have made as
remote from us as if they were foreign or ancient. Already, alas! even
in farmhouses, backlog and forestick are obsolescent words, and
close-mouthed stoves chill the spirit while they bake the flesh with
their grim and undemonstrative hospitality. Already are the railroads
displacing the companionable cheer of crackling walnut with the dogged
self-complacency and sullen virtue of anthracite. Even where wood
survives, he is too often shut in the dreary madhouse cell of an
airtight, round which one can no more fancy a social mug of flip
circling than round a coffin. Let us be thankful that we can sit in Mr.
Whittier's chimney-corner and believe that the blaze he has kindled for
us shall still warm and cheer, when a wood fire is as faint a tradition
in New as in Old England.
We have before had occasion to protest against Mr. Whittier's
carelessness in accents and rhymes, as in pronouncing "ly'ceum," and
joining in unhallowed matrimony such sounds as awn and orn, ents
and ence. We would not have the Muse emulate the unidiomatic
preciseness of a normal school-mistress, but we cannot help thinking
that, if Mr. Whittier writes thus on principle, as we begin to suspect,
he errs in forgetting that thought so refined as his can be fitly
matched only with an equal refinement of expression, and loses something
of its charm when cheated of it. We hope he will, at least, never mount
Pega'sus, or water him in Heli'con, and that he will leave Mu'seum to
the more vulgar sphere and obtuser sensibilities of Barnum. Where Nature
has sent genius, she has a right to expect that it shall be treated with
a certain elegance of hospitality.
POETRY AND NATIONALITY[1]
[Footnote 1: This essay, to which I have given the above title, forms
the greater part of a review of poems by John James Piatt. The brief,
concluding portion of the review is of little value and is omitted here.
Piatt died several years ago. He was a great friend of William Dean
Howells, and once published a volume of poems in collaboration with him.
A.M.]
One of the dreams of our earlier horoscope-mongers was, that a poet
should come out of the West, fashioned on a scale somewhat proportioned
to our geographical pretensions. Our rivers, forests, mountains,
cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in him their antitype
and voice. Shaggy he was to be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties,
unhampered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse, half-alligator
breed. By him at last the epos of the New World was to be fitly sung,
the great tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for all time. It
was a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judicious
prophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its
terms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dare
affirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he was
impossible? And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless.
Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturally
levy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images and
illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhere
outside of the life that lay immediately about him. Life in its large
sense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, is
the only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always close
at hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the
difference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota is
almost inappreciable. Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always to
underlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it. The Iliad
and the Odyssey paint manners that are only here and there incidentally
true to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either never
existed or had long since passed away. Had Dante's scope been narrowed
to contemporary Italy, the "Divina Commedia" would have been a
picture-book merely. But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspired
him was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theories
as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shakespeare shows us less of
the England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time.
The struggle of Goethe's whole life was to emancipate himself from
Germany, and fill his lungs for once with a more universal air.
Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in these rare fruits, some
gift of the sun peculiar to the region that ripened them. If we are ever
to have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality will be of
this subtile essence, something that shall make him unspeakably nearer
to us, while it does not provincialize him for the rest of mankind. The
popular recipe for compounding him would give us, perhaps, the most
sublimely furnished bore in human annals. The novel aspects of life
under our novel conditions may give some freshness of color to our
literature; but democracy itself, which many seem to regard as the
necessary Lucina of some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract an
influence to serve for any such purpose. If any American author may be
looked on as in some sort the result of our social and political ideal,
it is Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the traditional, in the
irresponsible freedom of his speculation, and his faith in the absolute
value of his own individuality, is certainly, to some extent, typical;
but if ever author was inspired by the past, it is he, and he is as far
as possible from the shaggy hero of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, who
have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may
safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our
representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the
credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hope
for better things.
[Footnote 1: This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is
mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. The
Howells essay appeared two years before the above. A.M.]
The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; and
if a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and the
gift of the right word,—for it is these, and not sublime spaces, that
make a poet,—he will be original rather in spite of democracy than in
consequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite as much to the
accumulations of the Old World as to the promises of the New. But for a
long while yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not, perhaps, for
the birth of such a man, but for his development and culture. At
present, with the largest reading population in the world, perhaps no
country ever offered less encouragement to the higher forms of art or
the more thorough achievements of scholarship. Even were it not so, it
would be idle to expect us to produce any literature so peculiarly our
own as was the natural growth of ages less communicative, less open to
every breath of foreign influence. Literature tends more and more to
become a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality. Any
more Cids, or Songs of Roland, or Nibelungens, or Kalewalas are out of
the question,—nay, anything at all like them; for the necessary
insulation of race, of country, of religion, is impossible, even were it
desirable. Journalism, translation, criticism, and facility of
intercourse tend continually more and more to make the thought and turn
of expression in cultivated men identical all over the world. Whether we
like it or not, the costume of mind and body is gradually becoming of
one cut.
W.D. HOWELLS
VENETIAN LIFE
Those of our readers who watch with any interest the favorable omens of
our literature from time to time, must have had their eyes drawn to
short poems, remarkable for subtilty of sentiment and delicacy of
expression, and bearing the hitherto unfamiliar name of Mr. Howells.
Such verses are not common anywhere; as the work of a young man they are
very uncommon. Youthful poets commonly begin by trying on various
manners before they settle upon any single one that is prominently their
own. But what especially interested us in Mr. Howells was, that his
writings were from the very first not merely tentative and preliminary,
but had somewhat of the conscious security of matured style. This is
something which most poets arrive at through much tribulation. It is
something which has nothing to do with the measure of their intellectual
powers or of their moral insight, but is the one quality which
essentially distinguishes the artist from the mere man of genius. Among
the English poets of the last generation, Keats is the only one who
early showed unmistakable signs of it, and developed it more and more
fully until his untimely death. Wordsworth, though in most respects a
far profounder man, attained it only now and then, indeed only once
perfectly,—in his "Laodamia." Now, though it be undoubtedly true from
one point of view that what a man has to say is of more importance than
how he says it, and that modern criticism especially is more apt to be
guided by its moral and even political sympathies than by aesthetic
principles, it remains as true as ever that only those things have been
said finally which have been said perfectly, and that this finished
utterance is peculiarly the office of poetry, or of what, for want of
some word as comprehensive as the German Dichtung, we are forced to
call imaginative literature. Indeed, it may be said that, in whatever
kind of writing, it is style alone that is able to hold the attention of
the world long. Let a man be never so rich in thought, if he is clumsy
in the expression of it, his sinking, like that of an old Spanish
treasureship, will be hastened by the very weight of his bullion, and
perhaps, after the lapse of a century, some lucky diver fishes up his
ingots and makes a fortune out of him.
That Mr. Howells gave unequivocal indications of possessing this fine
quality interested us in his modest preludings. Marked, as they no doubt
were, by some uncertainty of aim and indefiniteness of thought, that
"stinting," as Chaucer calls it, of the nightingale "ere he beginneth
sing," there was nothing in them of the presumption and extravagance
which young authors are so apt to mistake for originality and vigor.
Sentiment predominated over reflection, as was fitting in youth; but
there was a refinement, an instinctive reserve of phrase, and a felicity
of epithet, only too rare in modern, and especially in American writing.
He was evidently a man more eager to make something good than to make a
sensation,—one of those authors more rare than ever in our day of
hand-to-mouth cleverness, who has a conscious ideal of excellence, and,
as we hope, the patience that will at length reach it. We made occasion
to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase
our interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the
rough-and-ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with
no advantage of college-training, who, passing from the compositor's
desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of
the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated. A
singular fruit, we thought, of our shaggy democracy,—as interesting a
phenomenon in that regard as it has been our fortune to encounter. Where
is the rudeness of a new community, the pushing vulgarity of an
imperfect civilization, the licentious contempt of forms that marks our
unchartered freedom, and all the other terrible things which have so
long been the bugaboos of European refinement? Here was a natural
product, as perfectly natural as the deliberate attempt of "Walt
Whitman" to answer the demand of native and foreign misconception was
perfectly artificial. Our institutions do not, then, irretrievably doom
us to coarseness and to impatience of that restraining precedent which
alone makes true culture possible and true art attainable. Unless we are
mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells
which is a better argument for the American social and political system
than any empirical theories that can be constructed against it.
We know of no single word which will so fitly characterize Mr. Howells's
new volume about Venice as "delightful." The artist has studied his
subject for four years, and at last presents us with a series of
pictures having all the charm of tone and the minute fidelity to nature
which were the praise of the Dutch school of painters, but with a higher
sentiment, a more refined humor, and an airy elegance that recalls the
better moods of Watteau. We do not remember any Italian studies so
faithful or the result of such continuous opportunity, unless it be the
"Roba di Roma" of Mr. Story, and what may be found scattered in the
works of Henri Beyle. But Mr. Story's volumes recorded only the chance
observations of a quick and familiar eye in the intervals of a
profession to which one must be busily devoted who would rise to the
acknowledged eminence occupied by their author; and Beyle's mind, though
singularly acute and penetrating, had too much of the hardness of a man
of the world and of Parisian cynicism to be altogether agreeable. Mr.
Howells, during four years of that consular leisure which only Venice
could make tolerable, devoted himself to the minute study of the superb
prison to which he was doomed, and his book is his "Prigioni." Venice
has been the university in which he has fairly earned the degree of
Master. There is, perhaps, no European city, not even Bruges, not even
Rome herself, which, not yet in ruins, is so wholly of the past, at once
alive and turned to marble, like the Prince of the Black Islands in the
story. And what gives it a peculiar fascination is that its antiquity,
though venerable, is yet modern, and, so to speak, continuous; while
that of Rome belongs half to a former world and half to this, and is
broken irretrievably in two. The glory of Venice, too, was the
achievement of her own genius, not an inheritance; and, great no longer,
she is more truly than any other city the monument of her own greatness.
She is something wholly apart, and the silence of her watery streets
accords perfectly with the spiritual mood which makes us feel as if we
were passing through a city of dream. Fancy now an imaginative young man
from Ohio, where the log-hut was but yesterday turned to almost less
enduring brick and mortar, set down suddenly in the midst of all this
almost immemorial permanence of grandeur. We cannot think of any one on
whom the impression would be so strangely deep, or whose eyes would be
so quickened by the constantly recurring shock of unfamiliar objects.
Most men are poor observers, because they are cheated into a delusion of
intimacy with the things so long and so immediately about them; but
surely we may hope for something like seeing from fresh eyes, and those
too a poet's, when they open suddenly on a marvel so utterly alien to
their daily vision and so perdurably novel as Venice. Nor does Mr.
Howells disappoint our expectation. We have here something like a
full-length portrait of the Lady of the Lagoons.
We have been struck in this volume, as elsewhere in writings of the same
author, with the charm of tone that pervades it. It is so constant as
to bear witness, not only to a real gift, but to the thoughtful
cultivation of it. Here and there Mr. Howells yields to the temptation
of execution, to which persons specially felicitous in language are
liable, and pushes his experiments of expression to the verge of being
unidiomatic, in his desire to squeeze the last drop of significance from
words; but this is seldom, and generally we receive that unconscious
pleasure in reading him which comes of naturalness, the last and highest
triumph of good writing. Mr. Howells, of all men, does not need to be
told that, as wine of the highest flavor and most delicate bouquet is
made from juice pressed out by the unaided weight of the grapes, so in
expression we are in danger of getting something like acridness if we
crush in with the first sprightly runnings the skins and kernels of
words in our vain hope to win more than we ought of their color and
meaning. But, as we have said, this is rather a temptation to which he
now and then shows himself liable, than a fault for which he can often
be blamed. If a mind open to all poetic impressions, a sensibility too
sincere ever to fall into maudlin sentimentality, a style flexible and
sweet without weakness, and a humor which, like the bed of a stream, is
the support of deep feeling, and shows waveringly through it in spots of
full sunshine,—if such qualities can make a truly delightful book, then
Mr. Howells has made one in the volume before us. And we give him
warning that much will be expected of one who at his years has already
shown himself capable of so much.
EDGAR A. POE[1]
[Footnote 1: The following notice of Mr. Poe's life and works was
written at his own request, and accompanied a portrait of him published
in Graham's Magazine for February, 1845. It is here [in R.W.
Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)] given with a few alterations
and omissions.]
The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or,
if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into
many systems, each revolving round its several sun, and often presenting
to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capital
city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from which
life and vigor radiate to the extremities, but resembles more an
isolated umbilicus, stuck down as near as may be to the centre of the
land, and seeming rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to
serve any present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its
literature almost more distinct than those of the different dialects of
Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one of her own, of
which some articulate rumor barely has reached us dwellers by the
Atlantic.
Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism of
contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give praise where
it is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often seduces
the iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she writes what
seems rather like an epitaph than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as
an alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into any man's hat. The
critic's ink may suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls
or of sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we
might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding-place
of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we usually find
mixed with it.
Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life of
imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and
peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of a
romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by
Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed the
warranty of a large estate to the young poet. Having received a
classical education in England, he returned home and entered the
University of Virginia, where, after an extravagant course, followed by
reformation at the last extremity, he was graduated with the highest
honors of his class. Then came a boyish attempt to join the fortunes of
the insurgent Greeks, which ended at St. Petersburg, where he got into
difficulties through want of a passport, from which he was rescued by
the American consul, and sent home.[1] He now entered the military
academy at West Point from which he obtained a dismissal on hearing of
the birth of a son to his adopted father, by a second marriage, an event
which cut off his expectations as an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, in
whose will his name was not mentioned, soon after relieved him of all
doubt in this regard, and he committed himself at once to authorship for
a support. Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) a
small volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, and
excited high expectations of its author's future distinction in the
minds of many competent judges.
[Footnote 1: There is little evidence for this story, which some
biographers have dismissed as a myth created by Poe himself. See
Woodberry's Poe, v. i, p. 337.]
That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet's earliest lispings
there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare's first poems, though
brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness, give but a very faint
promise of the directness, condensation, and overflowing moral of his
maturer works. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare is hardly a case in point,
his "Venus and Adonis" having been published, we believe, in his
twenty-sixth year. Milton's Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye for
nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint
of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all
the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and
eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow
namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius
which he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lost
more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator
of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is
called) the interest of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke
White's promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey
but surely with no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a
traditional piety, which, to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less
objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment
of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning
pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional
simple, lucky beauty. Burns, having fortunately been rescued by his
humble station from the contaminating society of the "best models" wrote
well and naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough to
have had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from
which, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from
the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever
of that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest,
most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's
"Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid
and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is
but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early
poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient
investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer
of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and
more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest
specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that
ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions
of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope
of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a
wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for
rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional
combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate
physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only
remarkable when it displays an effort of reason, and the rudest verses
in which we can trace some conception of the ends of poetry, are worth
all the miracles of smooth juvenile versification. A schoolboy, one
would say, might acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by an
association with the motion of the play-ground tilt.
Mr. Poe's early productions show that he could see through the verse to
the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the life
and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of the
other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever
read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of
purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre.
Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express
by the contradictory phrase of innate experience. We copy one of the
shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a
little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and symmetry of the
outline are such as few poets ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosia
about it.
TO HELEN
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
It is the tendency of the young poet that impresses us. Here is no
"withering scorn," no heart "blighted" ere it has safely got into its
teens, none of the drawing-room sans-culottism which Byron had brought
into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the Greek
Helicon in it. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It is not of
that kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of the
fingers. It is of that finer sort which the inner ear alone can
estimate. It seems simple, like a Greek column, because of its
perfection. In a poem named "Ligeia," under which title he intended to
personify the music of nature, our boy-poet gives us the following
exquisite picture:
Ligeia! Ligeia!
My beautiful one,
Whose harshest idea
Will to melody run,
Say, is it thy will,
On the breezes to toss,
Or, capriciously still,
Like the lone albatross,
Incumbent on night,
As she on the air,
To keep watch with delight
On the harmony there?
John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too long
capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similar
passages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.
Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to call
genius. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there
is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power. Let
talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such magnetism.
Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting. Talent
sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of
clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so
that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton, and if
Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses
shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may
make friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the
divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to
what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has
not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are
allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away
by their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely
prisoned in the pommel of its sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of
the spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive the
ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man of
mere talent ever flung his inkstand at the devil.
When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he has
produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it at all
is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence for the
trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and the greenest
laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses and Aristotles of our
newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order to
render a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness of
attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is,
according to these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of
the country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable
residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude
be, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of their
idiosyncrasy.
Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous
yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first
of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge
of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to
conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a
correct outline, while the second groups, fills up, and colors. Both of
these Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his prose
works, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the first in his
later ones. In judging of the merit of an author, and assigning him his
niche among our household gods, we have a right to regard him from our
own point of view, and to measure him by our own standard. But, in
estimating the amount of power displayed in his works, we must be
governed by his own design, and, placing them by the side of his own
ideal, find how much is wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions
of the objects of art. He esteems that object to be the creation of
Beauty, and perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that we
disagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we shall
take his own standard as our guide. The temple of the god of song is
equally accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it for
all who bring offerings, or seek an oracle.
In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that
dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable
into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a
very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a
power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of
mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a
button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the
predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded,
analysis. It is this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at once
reaches forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bring
about certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate parts
tend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to
his own mind. To him x is a known quantity all along. In any picture
that he paints, he understands the chemical properties of all his
colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the
shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a
geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with
Mysticism. The Mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it;
it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and
the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other
hand, is a spectator ab extrà. He analyzes, he dissects, he watches
——with an eye serene,
The very pulse of the machine,
for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and piston-rods,
all working to produce a certain end.
This analyzing tendency of his mind balances the poetical, and, by
giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful
reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great
power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to
trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of
horror, also, he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by a
dusky hint some terrible doubt which is the secret of all horror. He
leaves to imagination the task of finishing the picture, a task to which
only she is competent.
For much imaginary work was there;
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles' image stood his spear
Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind.
Beside the merit of conception, Mr. Poe's writings have also that of
form. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly classical. It
would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied
powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales,
"The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque
and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one
could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre
beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been
enough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master of a classic
style. In this tale occurs, perhaps, the most beautiful of his poems.
The great masters of imagination have seldom resorted to the vague and
the unreal as sources of effect. They have not used dread and horror
alone, but only in combination with other qualities, as means of
subjugating the fancies of their readers. The loftiest muse has ever a
household and fireside charm about her. Mr. Poe's secret lies mainly in
the skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mystery
and terror. In this his success is so great and striking as to deserve
the name of art, not artifice. We cannot call his materials the noblest
or purest, but we must concede to him the highest merit of construction.
As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient. Unerring in his
analysis of dictions, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in the
faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art. His criticisms are,
however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic.
They have the exactness, and at the same time, the coldness of
mathematical demonstrations. Yet they stand in strikingly refreshing
contrast with the vague generalisms and sharp personalities of the day.
If deficient in warmth, they are also without the heat of partizanship.
They are especially valuable as illustrating the great truth, too
generally overlooked, that analytic power is a subordinate quality of
the critic.
On the whole, it may be considered certain that Mr. Poe has attained an
individual eminence in our literature, which he will keep. He has given
proof of power and originality. He has done that which could only be
done once with success or safety, and the imitation or repetition of
which would produce weariness.
THACKERAY
ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death of
Thackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still our
social and literary capital. Not even the loss of Irving called forth so
universal and strong an expression of sorrow. And yet it had been the
fashion to call Thackeray a cynic. We must take leave to doubt whether
Diogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been so
tenderly regretted. We think there was something more in all this than
mere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius. There was
a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,—a
true man.
Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist,
and could not have been one if he would. Your true cynic is a sceptic
also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish
suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself,
but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest quality
always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees,
and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is
and man as he might be, between the real snob and the ideal image of his
Creator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm;
the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from
the harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to
say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and
teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of
all manner of shams, an equally intense love for every kind of
manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye
for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever
it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to
betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have
been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison
between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid
light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that
flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that
ingenium perfervidum of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-Mall
Jeremiah after all.
It is curious to see how often Nature, original and profuse as she is,
repeats herself; how often, instead of sending one complete mind like
Shakespeare, she sends two who are the complements of each
other,—Fielding and Richardson, Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and George
Sand, and now again Thackeray and Dickens. We are not fond of
comparative criticism, we mean of that kind which brings forward the
merit of one man as if it depreciated the different merit of another,
nor of supercilious criticism, which measures every talent by some ideal
standard of possible excellence, and, if it fall short, can find nothing
to admire. A thing is either good in itself or good for nothing. Yet
there is such a thing as a contrast of differences between two eminent
intellects by which we may perhaps arrive at a clearer perception of
what is characteristic in each. It is almost impossible, indeed, to
avoid some sort of parallel à la Plutarch between Thackeray and
Dickens. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they may
be equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a few
striking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints
character, and Dickens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages are
all men, those of Dickens personified oddities. The one is an artist,
the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.
Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the
illustrations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as
we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for Dickens
invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is
perfect, that of Dickens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast
less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.
Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from the
reporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of the
greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more
types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is
marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is
very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had
pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are
masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon
by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never
act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.
Thackeray's style is beyond praise,—so easy, so limpid, showing
everywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture,
it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was natural
to him,—his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond," for example)
being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respects
the most finished example we have of what is called a man of the world.
In the pardonable eulogies which were uttered in the fresh grief at his
loss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked above
Fielding,—a position which no one would have been so eager in
disclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on their
pedestals. Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written in
English since Shakespeare. Of a broader and deeper nature, of a larger
brain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter is
Society. The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common was
Richard Steele, as these "Roundabout Papers" show plainly enough. He
admired Fielding, but he loved Steele.
TWO GREAT AUTHORS
SWIFT[1]
I
[Footnote 1: [A review of The Life of Jonathan Swift, by John Forster.]]
The cathedral of St. Patrick's, dreary enough in itself seems to grow
damper and chillier as one's footsteps disturb the silence between the
grave of its famous Dean and that of Stella, in death as in life near
yet divided from him, as if to make their memories more inseparable and
prolong the insoluble problem of their relation to each other. Nor was
there wanting, when we made our pilgrimage thither, a touch of grim
humor in the thought that our tipsy guide (Clerk of the Works he had
dubbed himself for the nonce), as he monotonously recited his
contradictory anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane," varied by times with
an irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinary
biographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled our
cicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse into
rhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind of
conjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servant
Patrick, but in that sad presence his grotesqueness was as shocking as
the clown in one of Shakespeare's tragedies to Châteaubriand. A shilling
sent him back to the neighboring pot-house whence a half-dozen ragged
volunteers had summoned him, and we were left to our musings. One
dominating thought shouldered aside all others—namely, how strange a
stroke of irony it was, how more subtle even than any of the master's
own, that our most poignant association with the least sentimental of
men should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to that
of Abélard and Héloïse should invest the memory of him who had done more
than all others together to strip life and human nature of their last
instinctive decency of illusion. His life, or such accounts as we had of
it, had been full of antitheses as startling as if some malign enchanter
had embodied one of Macaulay's characters as a conundrum to bewilder the
historian himself. A generous miser; a sceptical believer; a devout
scoffer; a tender-hearted misanthrope; a churchman faithful to his order
yet loathing to wear its uniform; an Irishman hating the Irish, as Heine
did the Jews,[1] because he was one of them, yet defending them with the
scornful fierceness of one who hated their oppressors more; a man honest
and of statesmanlike mind, who lent himself to the basest services of
party politics for purely selfish ends; a poet whose predominant faculty
was that of disidealizing; a master of vernacular style, in whose works
an Irish editor finds hundreds of faults of English to correct;
strangest of all, a middle-aged clergyman of brutal coarseness, who
could inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with a
fruitless passion that broke her heart, the other with a love that
survived hope and faith to suck away the very sources of that life
whereof it was the only pride and consolation. No wonder that a new life
of so problematic a personage as this should be awaited with eagerness,
the more that it was to be illustrated with much hitherto unpublished
material and was to be written by the practised hand of Mr. Forster.
Inconsistency of conduct, of professed opinion, whether of things or
men, we can understand; but an inconsistent character is something
without example, and which nature abhors as she does false logic.
Opportunity may develop, hindrance may dwarf, the prevailing set of
temptation may give a bent to character, but the germ planted at birth
can never be wholly disnatured by circumstance any more than soil or
exposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it is
cumulative, whether for good or ill; the general tenor of the life is a
logical sequence from it, and a man can always explain himself to
himself, if not to others, as a coherent whole, because he always knows,
or thinks he knows, the value of x in the personal equation. Were it
otherwise, that sense of conscious identity which alone makes life a
serious thing and immortality a rational hope, would be impossible. It
is with the means of finding out this unknown quantity—in other words,
of penetrating to the man's motives or his understanding of them—that
the biographer undertakes to supply us, and unless he succeed in this,
his rummaging of old papers but raises a new cloud of dust to darken our
insight.
[Footnote 1: Lowell was mistaken. Heine never lost his love for the
Jews. He regretted his apostasy and always regarded himself as a Jew,
and not a Christian. His own genius was Hebraic, and not, as Matthew
Arnold thought, Hellenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowell
had great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitchell once told
me that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even wished that he
had a Hebraic nose. Several documents attest to Lowell's ideas on the
subject. He even claimed that his middle name "Russell" showed that he
had Jewish blood. A.M.]
If Mr. Forster's mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality of
genius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for his
task. The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which is
beset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer. A finer sense might recoil
before investigations whose importance is not at first so clear as their
promise of unsavoriness. So far as Mr. Forster has gone, we think he has
succeeded in the highest duty of a biographer: that of making his
subject interesting and humanly sympathetic to the reader—a feat surely
of some difficulty with a professed cynic like Swift. He lets him in the
main tell his own story—a method not always trustworthy, to be sure,
but safer in the case of one who, whatever else he may have been, was
almost brutally sincere when he could be so with safety or advantage.
Still, it should always be borne in mind that he could lie with an air
of honest candor fit to deceive the very elect. The author of the
"Battle of the Books" (written in 1697) tells us in the preface to the
Third Part of Temple's "Miscellanea" (1701) that he "cannot well inform
the reader upon what occasion" the essay upon Ancient and Modern
Learning "was writ, having been at that time in another kingdom"; and
the professed confidant of a ministry, whom the Stuart Papers have
proved to have been in correspondence with the Pretender, puts on an air
of innocence (in his "Enquiry into the Behavior of the Queen's last
Ministry") and undertakes to convince us that nothing could be more
absurd than to accuse them of Jacobitism. It may be, as Orrery asserted,
that Swift was "employed, not trusted," but this is hardly to be
reconciled with Lewis's warning him on the Queen's death to burn his
papers, or his own jest to Harley about the one being beheaded and the
other hanged. The fact is that, while in certain contingencies Swift was
as unscrupulous a liar as Voltaire, he was naturally open and truthful,
and showed himself to be so whenever his passions or his interest would
let him. That Mr. Forster should make a hero of the man whose life he
has undertaken to write is both natural and proper; for without sympathy
there can be no right understanding, and a hearty admiration is alone
capable of that generosity in the interpretation of conduct to which all
men have a right, and which he needs most who most widely transcends the
ordinary standards or most resolutely breaks with traditionary rules.
That so virile a character as Swift should have been attractive to women
is not wonderful, but we think Mr. Forster has gone far towards proving
that he was capable of winning the deep and lasting affection of men
also. Perhaps it may not always be safe to trust implicitly the fine
phrases of his correspondents; for there can be no doubt that Swift
inspired fear as well as love. Revengefulness is the great and hateful
blot on his character; his brooding temper turned slights into injuries,
gave substance to mere suspicion, and once in the morbid mood he was
utterly reckless of the means of vengeance. His most playful scratch had
poison in it. His eye was equally terrible for the weak point of friend
and foe. But giving this all the value it may deserve, the weight of the
evidence is in favor of his amiability. The testimony of a man so
sweet-natured and fair-minded as Dr. Delany ought to be conclusive, and
we do not wonder that Mr. Forster should lay great stress upon it. The
depreciatory conclusions of Dr. Johnson are doubtless entitled to
consideration; but his evidence is all from hearsay, and there were
properties in Swift that aroused in him so hearty a moral repulsion as
to disenable him for an unprejudiced opinion. Admirable as the
rough-and-ready conclusions of his robust understanding often are, he
was better fitted to reckon the quantity of a man's mind than the
quality of it—the real test of its value; and there is something almost
comically pathetic in the good faith with which he applies his
beer-measure to juices that could fairly plead their privilege to be
gauged by the wine standard. Mr. Forster's partiality qualifies him for
a fairer judgment of Swift than any which Johnson was capable of
forming, or, indeed, would have given himself the trouble to form.
But this partiality in a biographer, though to be allowed and even
commended as a quickener of insight, should not be strong enough to warp
his mind from its judicial level. While we think that Mr. Forster is
mainly right in his estimate of Swift's character, and altogether so in
insisting on trying him by documentary rather than hearsay evidence, it
is equally true that he is sometimes betrayed into overestimates, and
into positive statement, where favorable inference would have been
wiser. Now and then his exaggeration is merely amusing, as where he
tells us that Swift, "as early as in his first two years after quitting
Dublin, was accomplished in French," the only authority for such a
statement being a letter of recommendation from Temple saying that he
"had some French." Such compulsory testimonials are not on their voir
dire any more than epitaphs. So, in speaking of Betty Jones, with whom
in 1689 Swift had a flirtation that alarmed his mother, Mr. Forster
assumes that she "was an educated girl" on the sole ground, so far as
appears, of "her mother and Swift's being cousins." Swift, to be sure,
thirty years later, on receiving some letters from his old sweetheart,
"suspects them to be counterfeit" because "she spells like a
kitchen-maid," and this, perhaps, may be Mr. Forster's authority. But,
as the letters were genuine, the inference should have been the other
way. The "letters to Eliza," by the way, which Swift in 1699 directs
Winder, his successor at Kilroot, to burn, were doubtless those
addressed to Betty Jones. Mr. Forster does not notice this; but that
Swift should have preserved them, or copies of them, is of some
consequence, as tending to show that they were mere exercises in
composition, thus confirming what he says in the remarkable letter to
Kendall, written in 1692, when he was already off with the old love and
on with a new.
These instances of the temptation which most easily besets Mr. Forster
are trifles, but the same leaning betrays him sometimes into graver
mistakes of overestimate. He calls Swift the best letter-writer in the
language, though Gray, Walpole, Cowper, and Lamb be in some essential
qualities his superiors. He praises his political writing so
extravagantly that we should think he had not read the "Examiner," were
it not for the thoroughness of his work in other respects. All that
Swift wrote in this kind was partisan, excellently fitted to its
immediate purpose, as we might expect from his imperturbable good sense,
but by its very nature ephemeral. There is none of that reach of
historical imagination, none of that grasp of the clue of fatal
continuity and progression, none of that eye for country which divines
the future highways of events, that makes the occasional pamphlets of
Burke, with all their sobs of passionate sentiment, permanent
acquisitions of political thinking. Mr. Forster finds in Swift's
"Examiners" all the characteristic qualities of his mind and style,
though we believe that a dispassionate reader would rather conclude that
the author, as we have little doubt was the fact, was trying all along
to conceal his personality under a disguise of decorous commonplace. In
the same uncritical way Mr. Forster tells us that "the ancients could
show no such humor and satire as the 'Tale of a Tub' and the 'Battle of
the Books.'" In spite of this, we shall continue to think Aristophanes
and even Lucian clever writers, considering the rudeness of the times in
which they lived. The "Tale of a Tub" has several passages of
rough-and-tumble satire as good as any of their kind, and some hints of
deeper suggestion, but the fable is clumsy and the execution unequal and
disjointed. In conception the "Battle" is cleverer, and it contains
perhaps the most perfect apologue in the language, but the best strokes
of satire in it are personal (that of Dryden's helmet, for instance),
and we enjoy them with an uneasy feeling that we are accessaries in
something like foul play. Indeed, it may be said of Swift's humor
generally that it leaves us uncomfortable, and that it too often
impregnates the memory with a savor of mortal corruption proof against
all disinfectants. Pure humor cannot flow from so turbid a source as
soeva indignatio, and if man be so filthy and disgusting a creature as
Swift represents him to be, if he be truly "by nature, reason, learning,
blind," satire is thrown away upon him for reform and cruel as
castigation.
Mr. Forster not only rejects the story of Stella's marriage with Swift
as lacking substantial evidence, but thinks that the limits of their
intercourse were early fixed and never overpassed. According to him,
their relation was to be, from the first, one "of affection, not
desire." We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only woman
Swift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, that
he probably did marry her,[1] but only when all hope of the old
open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault,
if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa,
and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no
explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief
folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened
his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with
remorseful self-contempt. Nothing could be more galling to a proud man
than the feeling that he had been betrayed by his vanity. It is commonly
assumed that pride is incompatible with its weaker congener. But pride,
after all, is nothing more than a stiffened and congealed vanity, and
melts back to its original ductility when exposed to the milder
temperature of female partiality. Swift could not deny himself the
flattery of Vanessa's passion, and not to forbid was to encourage. He
could not bring himself to administer in time the only effectual remedy,
by telling her that he was pledged to another woman. When at last he did
tell her it was too late; and he learned, like so many before and since,
that the most dangerous of all fires to play with is that of love. This
was the extent of his crime, and it would have been none if there had
been no such previous impediment. This alone gives any meaning to what
he says when Vanessa declared her love:
Cadenus felt within him rise
Shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise.
[Footnote 1: Most of the authorities conclude that Swift never married
Stella. A.M.]
Shame there might have been, but surely no guilt on any theory except
that of an implicit engagement with Stella. That there was something of
the kind, more or less definite, and that it was of some ten years'
standing when the affair with Vanessa came to a crisis, we have no
doubt. When Tisdall offered her marriage in 1704, and Swift wrote to him
"that if my fortunes and humor served me to think of that state, I
should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice," she
accepted the implied terms and rejected her suitor, though otherwise not
unacceptable to her. She would wait. It is true that Swift had not
absolutely committed himself, but she had committed him by dismissing
Tisdall. Without assuming some such tacit understanding, his letters to
her are unintelligible. He repeatedly alludes to his absence from her as
only tolerable because it was for her sake no less than his own, and the
details of his petty economies would be merely vulgar except to her for
whom their motive gave them a sweetness of humorous pathos. The evidence
of the marriage seems to be as conclusive as that of a secret can well
be. Dr. Delany, who ought to have been able to judge of its probability,
and who had no conceivable motive of misstatement, was assured of it by
one whose authority was Stella herself. Mr. Monck-Berkeley had it from
the widow of Bishop Berkeley, and she from her husband, who had it from
Dr. Ashe, by whom they were married. These are at least unimpeachable
witnesses. The date of the marriage is more doubtful, but Sheridan is
probably not far wrong when he puts it in 1716. It was simply a
reparation, and no union was implied in it. Delany intimates that
Vanessa, like the young Chevalier, vulgarized her romance in drink. More
than this, however, was needful to palliate even in Swift the brutal
allusion to her importunacy in "Gulliver," unless, as is but too
possible, the passage in question be an outbreak of ferocious spleen
against her victorious rival. Its coarseness need not make this seem
impossible, for that was by no means a queasy age, and Swift continued
on intimate terms with Lady Betty Germaine after the publication of the
nasty verses on her father. The communication of the secret to Bishop
Berkeley (who was one of Vanessa's executors) may have been the
condition of the suppressing Swift's correspondence with her, and would
have exasperated him to ferocity.
II
We cannot properly understand Swift's cynicism and bring it into any
relation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiability
without taking his whole life into account. Few give themselves the
trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough
to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature
was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it
effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet.
With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole
which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of
momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the Cowleian
Pindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint of
Parisian rather than Theban origin. If the master was but a fresh
example of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of the
flying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not even
the secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earth
while with perfect good faith he went through all the motions of
soaring? Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment,
though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and
the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent. He who
could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if
he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the
simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a
trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything
something else than it was, he would see things as they were—or as, in
his sullen disgust, they seemed to be—and call them all by their right
names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a
Hottentot—nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble
compromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and not
ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious
exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical
fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with the
brutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed
and aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with
himself. He despised mankind because he found something despicable in
Jonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion to
their likeness with himself. He had more or less consciously sacrificed
self-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man's
accidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, as
no other "man of his level" in Ireland was, to being happy with the
woman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and the
independence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude after
all. "Money," he was fond of saying, "is freedom," but he never learned
that self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect. With a
hearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yet
bring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier of
three royal strumpets. How should he be happy who had defined happiness
to be "the perpetual possession of being well deceived," and who could
never be deceived himself? It may well be doubted whether what he
himself calls "that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of
things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries
that in the inside they are good for nothing," be of so penetrative an
insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather
that to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had the
microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the
loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that
tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with
all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his
shallow friend Gay that life was a jest. To his nobler temper it was
always profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, we
suspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears. The lesson is
worth remembering that his apples of Sodom, like those of lesser men,
were plucked from boughs of his own grafting.
But there are palliations for him, even if the world were not too ready
to forgive a man everything if he will only be a genius. Sir Robert
Walpole used to say "that it was fortunate so few men could be prime
ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking
wickedness of mankind." Swift, from his peculiar relation to two
successive ministries, was in a position to know all that they knew, and
perhaps, as a recognized place-broker, even more than they knew, of the
selfish servility of men. He had seen the men who figure so imposingly
in the stage-processions of history too nearly. He knew the real Jacks
and Toms as they were over a pot of ale after the scenic illusion was
done with. He saw the destinies of a kingdom controlled by men far less
able than himself; the highest of arts, that of politics, degraded to a
trade in places, and the noblest opportunity, that of office, abused for
purposes of private gain. His disenchantment began early, probably in
his intimacy with Sir William Temple, in whom (though he says that all
that was good and great died with him) he must have seen the weak side
of solemn priggery and the pretension that made a mystery of statecraft.
In his twenty-second year he writes:
Off fly the vizards and discover all:
How plain I see through the deceit!
How shallow and how gross the cheat!
* * * * *
On what poor engines move
The thoughts of monarchs and designs of states!
What petty motives rule their fates!
I to such blockheads set my wit!
I damn such fools! go, go, you're bit!
Mr. Forster's own style (simpler now than when he was under the
immediate influence of Dickens, if more slipshod than when repressed by
Landor) is not in essentials better or worse than usual. It is not
always clear nor always idiomatic. On page 120 he tells us that "Scott
did not care to enquire if it was likely that stories of the kind
referred to should have contributed to form a character, or if it were
not likelier still that they had grown and settled round a character
already famous as well as formed." Not to speak of the confusion of
moods and tenses, the phrase "to form a character" has been so long
appropriated to another meaning than that which it has here, that the
sense of the passage vacillates unpleasantly. He tells us that Swift was
"under engagement to Will Frankland to christen the baby his wife is
near bringing to bed." Parthenogenesis is a simple matter to this. And
why Will Frankland, Joe Beaumont, and the like? We cannot claim so
much intimacy with them as Swift, and the eighteenth century might be
allowed to stand a little on its dignity. If Mr. Forster had been
quoting the journal to Stella, there would be nothing to say except that
Swift took liberties with his friends in writing to her which he would
not have ventured on before strangers. In the same odd jargon, which the
English journals are fond of calling American, Mr. Forster says that
"Tom [Leigh] was not popular with Swift." Mr. Forster is not only no
model for contemporary English, but (what is more serious) sometimes
mistakes the meaning of words in Swift's day, as when he explains that
"strongly engaged" meant "interceded with or pressed." It meant much
more than that, as could easily be shown from the writings of Swift
himself.
All the earlier biographers of Swift Mr. Forster brushes contemptuously
aside, though we do not find much that is important in his own biography
which industry may not hit upon somewhere or other in the confused
narrative of Sheridan, for whom and for his sources of information he
shows a somewhat unjust contempt. He goes so far as sometimes to
discredit anecdotes so thoroughly characteristic of Swift that he cannot
resist copying them himself. He labors at needless length the question
of Swift's standing in college, and seems to prove that it was not
contemptible, though there can be no doubt that the contrary opinion was
founded on Swift's own assertion, often repeated. We say he seems to
prove it, for we are by no means satisfied which of the two Swifts on
the college list, of which a facsimile is given, is the future Dean. Mr.
Forster assumes that the names are ranked in the order of seniority, but
they are more likely to have been arranged alphabetically, in which case
Jonathan would have preceded Thomas, and at best there is little to
choose between three mediocriters and one male, one bene, and one
negligenter. The document, whatever we may think of its importance,
has been brought to light by Mr. Forster. Of his other materials
hitherto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving that
Swift's Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707. This
shows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whig
to Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his former
associates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency if
not of desertion to the enemy. Whatever the motives of his change, it
would have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty,
and in spite of Mr. Forster's assertion that Addison continued to love
and trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was any
cordiality in their intercourse after 1710. No one familiar with Swift's
manner of thinking will deem his political course of much import in
judging of his moral character. At the bottom of his heart he had an
impartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aims
of both were more or less consciously selfish. Even if sincere, the
matters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment as
that which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput. With him the
question was simply one between men who galled his pride and men who
flattered it. Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceable
inferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footing
of friendship. To him they were all, more or less indifferently, rounds
in the ladder by which he hoped to climb. He always claimed to have been
a consistent Old Whig—that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchman
who accepted the Revolution of 1688. This, to be sure, was not quite
true, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on a
Cavalier grandfather, and whose first known verses were addressed to the
non-juring primate Sancroft after his deprivation, to become first a
Tory and then a conniver at the restoration of the Stuarts as the best
device for preventing a foreign succession and an endless chance of
civil war. A man of Swift's way of thinking would hardly have balked at
the scruple of creed, for he would not have deemed it possible that the
Pretender should have valued a kingdom at any lower rate than his
great-grandfather had done before him.
The more important part of Mr. Forster's fresh material is to come in
future volumes, if now, alas! we are ever to have them. For some of what
he gives us in this we can hardly thank him. One of the manuscripts he
has unearthed is the original version of "Baucis and Philemon" as it was
before it had passed under the criticism of Addison. He seems to think
it in some respects better than the revised copy though in our judgment
it entirely justifies the wisdom of the critic who counselled its
curtailment and correction. The piece as we have hitherto had it comes
as near poetry as anything Swift ever wrote except "Cadenus and
Vanessa," though neither of them aspires above the region of cleverness
and fancy. Indeed, it is misleading to talk of the poetry of one whose
fatal gift was an eye that disidealized. But we are not concerned here
with the discussion of Swift's claim to the title of poet. What we are
concerned about is to protest in the interests of good literature
against the practice, now too common, of hunting out and printing what
the author would doubtless have burned. It is unfair to the dead writer
and the living reader by disturbing that unitary impression which every
good piece of work aims at making, and is sure to make, only in
proportion to the author's self-denial and his skill in
The last and greatest art, the art to blot.
We do not wish, nor have we any right to know, those passages through
which the castigating pen has been drawn.
Mr. Forster may almost claim to have rediscovered Swift's journals to
Esther Johnson, to such good purpose has he used them in giving life and
light to his narrative. He is certainly wrong, however, in saying to the
disparagement of former editors that the name Stella was not invented
"till long after all the letters were written." This statement,
improbable in itself as respects a man who forthwith refined Betty,
Waring, and Vanhomrigh into Eliza, Varina, and Vanessa, is refuted by a
passage in the journal of 14th October, 1710, printed by Mr. Forster
himself. At least, we know not what "Stellakins" means unless it be
"little Stella." The value of these journals for their elucidation of
Swift's character cannot be overestimated, and Mr. Forster is quite
right in insisting upon the importance of the "little language," though
we are by no means sure that he is always so in his interpretation of
the cipher. It is quite impossible, for instance, that ME can stand for
Madam Elderly, and so for Dingley. It is certainly addressed, like the
other endearing epithets, to Esther Johnson, and may mean My Esther or
even Marry Esther, for anything we know to the contrary.
Mr. Forster brings down his biography no farther than the early part of
1710, so that we have no means of judging what his opinion would be of
the conduct of Swift during the three years that preceded the death of
Queen Anne. But he has told us what he thinks of his relations with
Esther Johnson; and it is in them, as it seems to us, that we are to
seek the key to the greater part of what looks most enigmatical in his
conduct. At first sight, it seems altogether unworthy of a man of
Swift's genius to waste so much of it and so many of the best years of
his life in a sordid struggle after preferment in the church—a career
in which such selfish ambitions look most out of place. How much better
to have stayed quietly at Laracor and written immortal works! Very good:
only that was not Swift's way of looking at the matter, who had little
appetite for literary fame, and all of whose immortal progeny were
begotten of the moment's overmastering impulse, were thrown nameless
upon the world by their father, and survived only in virtue of the vigor
they had drawn from his stalwart loins. But how if Swift's worldly
aspirations, and the intrigues they involved him in, were not altogether
selfish? How if he was seeking advancement, in part at least, for
another, and that other a woman who had sacrificed for him not only her
chances of domestic happiness, but her good name? to whom he was bound
by gratitude? and the hope of repairing whose good fame by making her
his own was so passionate in that intense nature as to justify any and
every expedient, and make the patronage of those whom he felt to be his
inferiors endurable by the proudest of men? We believe that this was the
truth, and that the woman was Stella. No doubt there were other motives.
Coming to manhood with a haughtiness of temper that was almost savage,
he had forced himself to endure the hourly humiliation of what could not
have been, however Mr. Forster may argue to the contrary, much above
domestic servitude. This experience deepened in him the prevailing
passions of his life, first for independence and next for consideration,
the only ones which could, and in the end perhaps did, obscure the
memory and hope of Stella. That he should have longed for London with a
persistency that submitted to many a rebuff and overlived continual
disappointment will seem childish only to those who do not consider that
it was a longing for life. It was there only that his mind could be
quickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dying
daily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, if
there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without
impair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age.
This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the world
is just opening. In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, "I
desire that you and all my friends will take a special care that my
disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I have
credible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from the
twenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age." His contempt for
mankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfuges
by which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify and
conceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of its
cleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than being
prime minister. How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody when
his old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophic
relief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty!
Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose also
with the "Tale of a Tub." Its levity, if it was not something worse,
twice balked him of the mitre when it seemed just within his reach.
Justly or not, he had the reputation of scepticism. Mr. Forster would
have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to
prove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimate
friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him
sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman.
Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession
which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect
independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes.
He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while he
was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among
savages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood
in his way. A man's little faults are more often the cause of his
greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever
respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly
had the advantage of him in that savoir vivre which makes so large an
element of worldly success. In judging him, however, we must take into
account that his first literary hit was made when he was already
thirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of others
and distrust of himself.
The reaction in Swift's temper and ambition told with the happiest
effect on his prose. For its own purposes, as good working English, his
style (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had no
style at all), has never been matched. It has been more praised than
studied, or its manifest shortcomings, its occasional clumsiness, its
want of harmony and of feeling for the finer genialities of language,
would be more often present in the consciousness of those who discourse
about it from a superficial acquaintance. With him language was a means
and not an end. If he was plain and even coarse, it was from choice
rather than because he lacked delicacy of perception; for in badinage,
the most ticklish use to which words can be put, he was a master.
PLUTARCH'S MORALS[1]
[Footnote 1: A review of the English translation edited by William W.
Goodwin with an Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson.]
Plutarch is perhaps the most eminent example of how strong a hold simple
good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man
of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make
him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is
more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be
more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days
in the rose's neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his
temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he
always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as
shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born
middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner
and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the
problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic
interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his
worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish
to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better
Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas
Browne, love to lose himself in an O, altitudo! yet the sky-piercing
peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the
horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually
gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom
invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook
like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled
amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming
intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled
predilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet like
flowers." But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him
and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother
of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is
most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that
passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the
volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the
atrium (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the
great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and
who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become
human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his
lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible
virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion,
patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which
associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is
theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson
disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian
unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended
him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints
which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch
in the essay on "Physiognomy." After speaking of some "escripts encores
plus révérez," he asks, in his idiomatic way, "à, quoy faire nous allons
nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however,
Montaigne liked him because he was good talk, as it is called, a
better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are
noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation
between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style
is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in
Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived
perhaps from authors much more ancient." But if they are borrowed, they
have none of the discordant effect of the purpureus pannus, for the
warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them
his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly
original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this
selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural
elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or
sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We
are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are
trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and
there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has
flowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into the
ports of every nation," says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction
to Goodwin's Plutarch's "Morals." No doubt we are becalmed pretty often,
and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation,
so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and
quotation.
It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser,
in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose
mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative
(if we take the "Lives" and the "Morals" together) in the thought and
action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And on
the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether
good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them
over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was his
own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their
purpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among men
and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. His
influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any
other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the
Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a
remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years,
living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had
peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of
his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect
that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of
us. Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past was
inhabited by creatures like ourselves.
A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
I must beg allowance to use the first person singular. I cannot, like
old Weller, spell myself with a We. Ours is, I believe, the only
language that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (to
himself) as to erect the first personal pronoun into a kind of votive
column to the dignity of human nature. Other tongues have, or pretend, a
greater modesty.
I
What a noble letter it is! In it every reader sees himself as in a
glass. As for me, without my I's, I should be as poorly off as the great
mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of
reason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess I
always liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek drama
which were well sprinkled with ai ai, they were so grandly simple. The
force of great men is generally to be found in their intense
individuality,—in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this
essay will be similar.
What I was going to say is this.
My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics,
which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun
to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence and
Statuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for human
habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on very
well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the
fish which we cured, more medicorum, by laying them out. But this
summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association.
Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town
wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain number
of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their
own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call
their lectures "The Universal Brotherhood Course,"—for no other reason,
that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.
They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip
Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, from
what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the
introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything like
universal brotherhood. He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster,
without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into the
world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular.
Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of
vaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right of
Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public
Vituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand the
nature of philanthropy.
Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example. He loves his kind so much that
he has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother's son of
them. He goes about to save them by proving that not one of them is
worth damning. And he does it all from the point of view of an early (a
knurly) Christian. Let me illustrate. I was sauntering along Broadway
once, and was attracted by a bird-fancier's shop. I like dealers in
out-of-the-way things,—traders in bigotry and virtue are too
common,—and so I went in. The gem of the collection was a terrier,—a
perfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as a
Cockney would say, than the 'ole British hairystocracy. "A'n't he a
stunner?" said my disrespectable friend, the master of the shop. "Ah,
you should see him worry a rat! He does it like a puffic Christian!"
Since then, the world has been divided for me into Christians and
perfect Christians; and I find so many of the latter species in
proportion to the former, that I begin to pity the rats. They (the rats)
have at least one virtue,—they are not eloquent.
It is, I think, a universally recognized truth of natural history, that
a young lady is sure to fall in love with a young man for whom she feels
at first an unconquerable aversion; and it must be on the same principle
that the first symptoms of love for our neighbor almost always manifest
themselves in a violent disgust at the world in general, on the part of
the apostles of that gospel. They give every token of hating their
neighbors consumedly; argal, they are going to be madly enamored of
them. Or, perhaps, this is the manner in which Universal Brotherhood
shows itself in people who wilfully subject themselves to infection as a
prophylactic. In the natural way we might find the disease inconvenient
and even expensive; but thus vaccinated with virus from the udders
(whatever they may be) that yield the (butter-)milk of human kindness,
the inconvenience is slight, and we are able still to go about our
ordinary business of detesting our brethren as usual. It only shows that
the milder type of the disease has penetrated the system, which will
thus be enabled to out-Jenneral its more dangerous congener. Before long
we shall have physicians of our ailing social system writing to the
"Weekly Brandreth's Pill" somewhat on this wise:—"I have a very marked
and hopeful case in Pequawgus Four Corners. Miss Hepzibah Tarbell,
daughter of that archenemy of his kind, Deacon Joash T., attended only
one of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most
encouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family,—accusing
her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno
C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the
magnetic needle. If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of Primitive
Christian were well-founded, I think we may entertain them now."
What I chiefly object to in the general-denunciation sort of reformers
is that they make no allowance for character and temperament. They wish
to repeal universal laws, and to patch our natural skins for us, as if
they always wanted mending. That while they talk so much of the godlike
nature of man, they should so forget the human natures of men! The
Flathead Indian squeezes the child's skull between two boards till it
shapes itself into a kind of gambrel roof against the rain,—the
readiest way, perhaps, of uniforming a tribe that wear no clothes. But
does he alter the inside of the head? Not a hair's-breadth. You remember
the striking old gnomic poem that tells how Aaron, in a moment of
fanatical zeal against that member by which mankind are so readily led
into mischief, proposes a rhinotomic sacrifice to Moses? What is the
answer of the experienced law-giver?
Says Moses to Aaron,
"'T is the fashion to wear 'em!'"
Shall we advise the Tadpole to get his tail cut off, as a badge of the
reptile nature in him, and to achieve the higher sphere of the Croakers
at a single hop? Why, it is all he steers by; without it, he would be as
helpless as a compass under the flare of Northern Lights; and he no
doubt regards it as a mark of blood, the proof of his kinship with the
preadamite family of the Saurians. Shall we send missionaries to the
Bear to warn him against raw chestnuts, because they are sometimes so
discomforting to our human intestines, which are so like his own? One
sermon from the colic were worth the whole American Board.
Moreover, as an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Street
against a unanimity in goodness. Not to mention that a Quaker world, all
faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,—what should
we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, no
literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a
sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be
thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as
indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me
monthly,—what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband
forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The
pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the
very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and
him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the
curse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; she
is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been
feeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us.
Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in Nathaniel
Greene, and makes a general of him, to confute five generations of
Broadbrims. The Puritans were good in their way, and we enjoy them
highly as a preterite phenomenon; but they were not good at cakes and
ale, and that is one reason why they are a preterite phenomenon.
I suppose we are all willing to let a public censor like P.V. run amuck
whenever he likes,—so it be not down our street. I confess to a good
deal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in No. 21, have
plenty of stoicism to spare for the griefs of the dwellers in No. 23.
Indeed, I agreed with our young Cato heartily in what he said about
Statues. We must have an Act for the Suppression, either of Great Men,
or else of Sculptors. I have not quite made up my mind which are the
greater nuisances; but I am sure of this, that there are too many of
both. They used to be rare (to use a Yankeeism omitted by Bartlett),
but nowadays they are overdone. I am half inclined to think that the
sculptors club together to write folks up during their lives in the
newspapers, quieting their consciences with the hope of some day making
them look so mean in bronze or marble as to make all square again. Or do
we really have so many? Can't they help growing twelve feet high in this
new soil, any more than our maize? I suspect that Posterity will not
thank us for the hereditary disease of Carrara we are entailing on him,
and will try some heroic remedy, perhaps lithotripsy.
Nor was I troubled by what Mr. Vandal said about the late Benjamin
Webster. I am not a Boston man, and have, therefore, the privilege of
thinking for myself. Nor do I object to his claiming for women the right
to make books and pictures and (shall I say it?) statues,—only this
last becomes a grave matter, if we are to have statues of all the great
women, too! To be sure, there will not be the trousers-difficulty,—at
least, not at present; what we may come to is none of my affair. I even
go beyond him in my opinions on what is called the Woman Question. In
the gift of speech, they have always had the advantage of us; and though
the jealousy of the other sex have deprived us of the orations of
Xantippe, yet even Demosthenes does not seem to have produced greater
effects, if we may take the word of Socrates for it,—as I, for one,
very gladly do.
No,—what I complain of is not the lecturer's opinions, but the
eloquence with which he expressed them. He does not like statues better
than I do; but is it possible that he fails to see that the one nuisance
leads directly to the other, and that we set up three images of Talkers
for one to any kind of man who was useful in his generation? Let him
beware, or he will himself be petrified after death. Boston seems to be
specially unfortunate. She has more statues and more speakers than any
other city on this continent. I have with my own eyes seen a book called
"The Hundred Boston Orators." This would seem to give her a fairer title
to be called the tire than the hub of creation. What with the
speeches of her great men while they are alive, and those of her
surviving great men about those aforesaid after they are dead, and those
we look forward to from her ditto ditto yet to be upon her ditto
ditto now in being, and those of her paulopost ditto ditto upon her
ditto ditto yet to be, and those—But I am getting into the house that
Jack built.
And yet I remember once visiting the Massachusetts State House and being
struck with the Pythagorean fish hung on high in the Representatives'
Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to be
observed except on Sundays. Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal to you as a
man and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there are
plenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-water
that threatens the land. Let us adopt as our creed these two
propositions:—
I. Tongues were given us to be held.
II. Dumbness sets the brute below the man: Silence elevates the man
above the brute.
Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than
that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account
how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be
commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception
is positively stunning.
Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late
Town Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA
NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general.
He, at least, never betrayed his clients. As it is, there is no end to
it. We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal
Schoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the same
ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man
had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.
We are the victims of a droll antithesis. Daniel would not give in to
Nebuchadnezzar's taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down
and worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have
gone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor. I do not
think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one is
so apt to encounter;—I met one once at an evening party. But I would be
thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that
statue. Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the
monumental line! Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of
convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late
visit, got off without a single speech. The cheerful hospitalities of
Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but
nothing more melancholy. In his case I doubt the expediency of the
omission. Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it
would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers
of the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together.
In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts our
friends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) are
put to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay for
it. The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the Stark
Mills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for making
a very dead bronze horse stand on his hind legs. For twenty-five cents I
have seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful,—make a very
living bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occurs
to me that hind legs is indelicate) posterior extremities to the
wayward music of an out-of-town (Scoticè, out-o'-toon) band. Now, I
will make a handsome offer to the public. I propose for twenty-five
thousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of a
distinguished general officer as he would have appeared at the Battle
of Buena Vista. This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown the
new dome of the Capitol at Washington. By this happy contrivance, the
horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth
at all,—thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for
originality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the
horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which
way the wind blows by going along with it. The inferior animal I have
resolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection. In
this way I shall combine two striking advantages. The advocates of the
Ideal in Art cannot fail to be pleased with a charger which embodies, as
it were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attention
of the spectator will not be distracted from the principal figure. The
material to be pure brass. I have also in progress an allegorical group
commemorative of Governor Wise. This, like-Wise, represents only a
potentiality. I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment when
and the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury at
Washington. His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of his
speeches. Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling on
his own steel pen; a broken telegraph wire hints at the weight of the
thoughts to which it has found itself inadequate; while the Army and
Navy of the United States are conjointly typified in a horse-marine who
flies headlong with his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. I
think I shall be able to have this ready for exhibition by the time Mr.
Wise is nominated for the Presidency,—certainly before he is elected.
The material to be plaster, made of the shells of those oysters with
which Virginia shall have paid her public debt. It may be objected, that
plaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itself
could hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor's speeches. But
it must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype,
have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of the
spectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some reasonable hope
of silence. This design, also, is intended only in terrorem, and will
be suppressed for an adequate consideration.
I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The
fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may
deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves
into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a
wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other
way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of
the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with
the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in
the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new
victims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the wooden
horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr.
Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever
material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short
of a general.
Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures. He counsels us to sell our real
estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's reputation with
posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor. To
a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose military
reputation insures his cutting and running (I mean, of course, in marble
and bronze), the question becomes an interesting one,—To whom, in case
of a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have the land all
to themselves,—until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancient
heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness will
revive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican Art. For my own
part, I never look at one of them now without thinking of at least one
human sacrifice.
I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing's proposal, and yet something
ought to be done. We must put up with what we have already, I suppose,
and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol
pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand
rests,—no bad type of the great man's state of mind after the
nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a
penal statue. But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that
Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues? I go
back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment. I had even gone so far
as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the
Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it
would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our
graven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects
enumerated in the divine ordinance. Perhaps a double-barrelled statute
might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the
monumental difficulty. Let a law be passed that all speeches delivered
more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all
eulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel of
the Deaf and Dumb asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds
of the Institution for the Blind. Let the penalty for infringement in
the one case be to read the last President's Message, and in the other
to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as
to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual
punishments.
Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should
pass so self-denying an ordinance. They might, perhaps, make all oratory
but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates
might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed
by a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be
by an appetite for slate pencils. Vita brevis, lingua longa. I protest
that among lawgivers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the
Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence. The ancient Greeks also
(though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions,
especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the
advantage of communication with America. Now the Greeks had a Muse of
Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how
hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more
excellent Muse of Leaving-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her out
and kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a goddess to be
worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!
Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch's
lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts
and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in
comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine
lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are
as dust in the balance to those of speech.
We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.
There are now two debating clubs, seminaries of multiloquence. A few of
us old-fashioned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it
"The Jolly Oysters." No member is allowed to open his mouth except at
high-tide by the calendar. We have biennial festivals on the evening of
election day, when the constituency avenges itself in some small measure
on its Representative elect by sending a baker's dozen of orators to
congratulate him.
But I am falling into the very vice I condemn,—like Carlyle, who has
talked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue. And yet
something should be done about it. Even when we get one orator safely
underground, there are ten to pronounce his eulogy, and twenty to do it
over again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue. I go to
listen: we all go: we are under a spell. 'T is true, I find a casual
refuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he called
Sleep the child of Silence. Speech begets her as often. But there is no
sure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, let
there be written on my head-stone, with impartial application to these
Black Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to our
equestrian statues,—
Os sublime did it!
THE END
.jpg "Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás")
.jpeg "How to Write Poetry by Ethel Maude Colson")
