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Title: Essays AEsthetical

Author: George Calvert

Release Date: July 12, 2004 [EBook #12896]

Language: English

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ESSAYS AESTHETICAL

by

GEORGE H. CALVERT


1875




  CONTENTS.

     I. THE BEAUTIFUL

    II. WHAT IS POETRY?

   III. STYLE

    IV. DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS

     V. SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC

    VI. THOMAS CARLYLE

   VII. ERRATA

  VIII. NATIONAL DRAMA

    IX. USEFULNESS OF ART




ESSAYS AESTHETICAL.




I.

THE BEAUTIFUL.


The Beautiful is one of the immortal themes. It cannot die; it grows
not old. On the same day with the sun was beauty born, and its life
runs parallel with the path of that great beautifier. As a subject for
exposition, it is at once easy and difficult: easy, from the affluence
of its resources; difficult, from the exactions which its own spirit
makes in the use of them.

Beauty--what is it? To answer this question were to solve more than
one problem. Shall we attempt what has been so often attempted and
never fully achieved? Such attempts are profitable. What though we
reach not the very heart of the mystery, we may get near enough to
hearken to the throb of its power, and our minds will be nerved by the
approximation.

To him who has the gift to feel its presence, nature teems with
beauty. Whithersoever the senses reach, whenever emotion kindles,
wherever the mind seeks food for its finer appetites, there is beauty.
It expects us at the dawn; it is about us, "an hourly neighbor,"
through the day; at night it looks down on us from star-peopled
immensities. Glittering on green lawns, glowing in sunsets, flashing
through storm-clouds, gilding our wakeful hours, irradiating sleep, it
is ever around, within us, eager to sweeten our labors, to purify our
thoughts. Nature is a vast treasure-house of beauty, whereof the key
is in the human heart.

But many are the hearts that have never opened far enough to disclose
the precious key enfolded in their depths. Whole peoples are at this
moment ignorant that they live amid such wealth. As with them now, so
in the remote primitive times of our own race, before history was,
nature was almost speechless to man. The earth was a waste, or but a
wide hunting ground or pasturage; and human life a round of petty
animal circles, scarcely sweeping beyond the field of the senses;
until there gradually grew up the big-eyed Greek and the deep-souled
Hebrew. Then, through creative thought,--that is, thought quickened
and exalted by an inward thirst for the beautiful,--one little corner
of Europe became radiant, and the valley of Tempe and the wooded glens
of Parnassus shone for the first time on the vision of men; for their
eyes--opened from long sleep by inward stirring--were become as
mirrors, and gave back the light of nature:

                              "Auxiliar light
  Came from their minds, which on the setting sun
  Bestowed new splendor."[1]

    [1] Wordsworth.

And man, heated by the throbs of his swelling heart, made gods after
his own image,--forms of such life and power and harmony that the
fragments of them, spared by time, are still guarded as faultless
models of manhood. And the vales and groves and streams were peopled
with beauteous shapes. And the high places were crowned with temples
which, in their majestic purity, look as though they had been posited
there from above by heavenly hands. And by the teemful might of
sculptors and painters and poets the dim past was made resurgent and
present in glorious transfiguration. And the moral law was grasped at
by far-reaching philosophies. In this affluence of genial activity so
much truth was embodied in so much beauty, that by the products of the
Greek mind even the newer, the deeper, the wiser Christian spirit is
still instructed, still exalted.

In Asia, too, a chosen people early made a revelation of the
beautiful. The Hebrews were introspective. At once ardent and
thoughtful, passionate and spiritual, their vigorous natures were
charged with fiery materials for inward conflicts. Out of the secret
chambers of troubled souls their poets and prophets sent forth cries
of despair and of exultation, of expostulation and self-reproach, that
ever find an echo in the conscience-smitten, sorrow-laden bosom of
man. The power and wisdom of God they saw as no other ancient people
had seen them. In the grandeurs and wonders of creation they could
behold the being and the might and the goodness of the Creator. The
strong, rich hearts of their seers yearned for a diviner life, in the
deep, true consciousness they felt that there can be peace and joy to
man only through reconcilement with God. And feeling their own
unworthiness and impurity, as well as that of their people, they
uttered their spiritual desires, and their aspirations and
disappointments and indignations and humiliations, in strains that
make their great writings sound like one long, impassioned, rhythmic
wail through the bars of a dungeon. Gloomy, wrathful, and intense,
their utterances are grand and pathetic and sublime; but the beautiful
plays through them, and gilds their highest points as the white crests
do the billows of a black, tempestuous sea.

Save these two, no other nations of antiquity, except the Hindoos,
seem to have had more than a superficial susceptibility to the
beautiful. The Romans learnt the arts from the Greeks, whom they
imitated, at a wide distance, in poetry as well as in sculpture and
architecture. The remnants of art found in the valley of the Nile
prove the Egyptians to have had the germ without the vitality to
unfold it. In the literature of the Hindoos there are currents of pure
poetry and of biblical depth. In passing down from ancient to modern
times the Persians and the Arabians light the long way with
scintillations from the beautiful.

The ugly semi-barbarian darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe was
first broken by the light that shone from the spires of Gothic
cathedrals in the eleventh century. About the twelfth century the
German mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary,
titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later
appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers
(love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then
Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century,
poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,--and who can have
no other parentage,--had established themselves in the modern European
mind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselves
among Christian nations. To these they are now confined. In the most
advanced of Mahometan and heathen peoples sensibility to beauty is
hardly awakened, and among savages it seems scarcely to exist, so
deeply is it dormant.

Thus to indicate when and by whom the beautiful has been recognized
will further us in the endeavor to learn wherein consists that which,
enriching the world of man so widely and plenteously, is deeply
enjoyed by so few.

Were the beautiful, like size and shape and strength and nimbleness,
cognizable by intellectual perception, even the Hottentot would get to
know something of it in the forest, along with the grosser qualities
of trees and valleys. Were it liable to be seized by the discursive
and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or
general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the
Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not have
been so barren where the Athenian was so prolific. But beauty is
_felt_, not intellectually apprehended or logically deduced. Its
presence is acknowledged by a gush from the soul, by a joyous
sentimental recognition, not by a discernment of the understanding.
When we exclaim, How beautiful! there is always emotion, and
delightful, expansive, purifying emotion. Whence this mysterious
cleansing thrill? Thence, that the recognition of beauty ever denotes,
ever springs out of, sympathy with the creative spirit whence all
things have their being.

The beautiful, then, is not subject to the intellect. We cannot
demonstrate or coldly discover it; we cannot weigh or measure it.
Further to illustrate this position: we do not see with our outward
eye any more than we do with spectacles. The apparent ocular apparatus
is but the passive, unconscious instrument to transmit images thrown
through it upon a fine interior fibre, the optic nerve; and even this
does not take cognizance of the object, but is only another conductor,
carrying the image still farther inward, to the intellectual nerves of
the brain; and not until it reaches them do we see the object, not
until then is its individuality and are its various physical
qualities, size, shape, etc., apprehended. And now the intellect
itself becomes a conductor, transmitting still deeper inward to the
seat of emotion the image of the object; and not until it reaches that
depth is its beauty recognized.

In all her structures and arrangements Nature is definite, precise,
and economical. In subdivision of labor she is minute and absolute,
providing for every duty its special exclusive agent. In the mind
there is as severe a sundering of functions as in the body, and the
intellect can no more encroach upon or act for the mental
sensibilities than the stomach can at need perform the office of the
heart, or the liver that of the lungs. True, no ripe results in the
higher provinces of human life can be without intimate alliance
between the mental sensibilities and the intellect; nevertheless they
are in essence as distinct from one another as are the solar heat and
the moisture of the earth, without whose constant cooeperation no grain
or fruit or flower can sprout or ripen.

We live not merely in a world of material facts, and of objects and
things cognizable through the senses, but also in a spiritual world.
We live not only in presence of visible creation, but in presence of
the invisible Creator. With the creation we are in contact through the
intellect. Knowledge of all objects and the qualities of objects that
are within reach of the senses; distance and other material relations;
the bonds of cause and effect and of analogy, that bind all created
things in countless multiplicity of subtle relations,--these the
intellect gathers in its grasp. But with the Creator we are in
communication only through feeling. The presence, the existence of God
cannot by pure intellect be demonstrated: it must be felt in order to
be proved. The mass of objects and relations presented to us in nature
the intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life that
incessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looks
out from every object and every fact,--of the range and pitch of whose
power we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake,--of
this divine essence we should not have even an intimation through the
intellect alone. Not chemists, astronomers, mechanicians have uttered
the deepest thoughts about God, but prophets and poets: not Davys, but
Coleridges; not Herschels, but Wordsworths. It is a common belief,
indeed, that men addicted to the exact sciences are rather wanting
than otherwise in power to appreciate the invisible, a belief
pungently embodied by Wordsworth in the lines,--

  "Physician art thou? one all eyes,
  Philosopher! a fingering slave,
  One that would peep and botanize
  Upon his mother's grave?"


This is as much under the mark as is above it that saying of some one,
"An undevout astronomer is mad." A man's being endowed with rare
mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout.
His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; and
nature being seldom profuse upon one individual,--as she was upon
Pascal and Newton,--the presumption as to an astronomer, of whom we
know nothing, would be that what may be termed his emotive
appreciation of stars and stellar systems is probably not so full as
his intellectual. And no amount or quality of intellectual insight can
supply or compensate a want of sensibility. No matter how many
hundreds of millions of miles he may pierce into space, he has still
to do with the visible and calculable. But religion is the putting of
the human mind in relation with the invisible, the incalculable. A man
gets no nearer to God through a telescope than through a microscope,
and no nearer through either than through the naked eye. Who cannot
recognize the divine spirit in the hourly phenomena of nature and of
his own mind will not be helped by the differential calculus, or any
magnitude or arrangement of telescopic lenses.

That we ever live not only in a material, but also in a spiritual
world, can be easily apprehended without at all entangling ourselves
in the web-work of metaphysics. The least of our acts or motions, is
it not always preceded by a thought, a volition, a something
intangible, invisible? All that we voluntarily do is, must be, an
offspring of mind. The waving of the hand is never a simple, it is a
compound process: mind and body, spirit and matter, concur in it. The
visible, corporeal movement is but the outward expression of an
inward, incorporeal movement. And so in all our acts and motions, from
birth till death; they issue out of the invisible within us; they are
feelings actualized, thoughts embodied. The embodiment is perishable,
the source of it imperishable. It is not a recondite, super-subtle,
metaphysical or psychological postulate, it is a palpable, and may be
and ought to be a familiar fact, that each one of us is ruled by the
eternal and invisible within us.

Now, just as our words and deeds and movements stand to our mind, as
being the utterance and embodiment of that, so do we stand towards
Deity, being the utterance and embodiment of the divine thought and
will. As all our doings are but exhibitions of our minds, so ourselves
are manifestations of God. Through all things shines the eternal soul.
The more perfect the embodiment, the more translucent is the soul; and
when this is most transparent, making the body luminous with the
fullness of its presence, there is beauty, which may be said to be the
most intense and refined incarnation and exhibition of the divine
spirit.

Behind and within every form of being is immanent the creative power;
and thence, in proportion as this power discloses itself, is object,
act, or emotion beautiful. Thus is beauty always spiritual, a
revelation more or less clear of the creative spirit. Hence our
emotion in presence of the truly beautiful, which calms and exalts us.
Hence evil never is, cannot be, beautiful: the bad is, must be, ugly.
Evil consists in the deficiency of the divine creative spirit, whose
fullness gives, is, beauty. Evil is imperfection, unripeness,
shapelessness, weakness in, or opposition to, the creative spirit.
Evil is life that is unhealthy, short-coming. Wherever there is full,
unperverted life, there is, there must be, beauty. The beautiful
blossoms on every stem of unpoisoned power. The sap of sound life ever
molds itself into forms of beauty.

But however rich the exhibition of the divine soul, however glowing
with perfection the form, however noble the act and pure the feeling,
the richness, the perfection, the nobleness, the purity will be lost
on us, unless within us there be sympathy with the spirit whence they
flow. Only by spirit can spirit be greeted.

Thus beauty only becomes visible--I might say only becomes actual--by
the fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and an
inward appetite therefor. And it is the flaming of this fire, thus
kindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, the
inward and the outward. This fire unlighted, and on the face of nature
there is darkness, in our own minds there is darkness. For though all
nature teems with the essence and the outward mold of beauty, to the
unkindled mind beauty is no more present then was Banquo's ghost to
the guests of Macbeth. Macbeth's individual conscience made him see
the ghost; nay, by a creative potency summoned it: and so is beauty
created there where, without what I may call the aesthetic conscience,
it no more exists than do the glories of Titian and Claude to the
affectionate spaniel who follows his master into a picture-gallery. To
the quadruped, by the organic limitation of his nature, dead forever
is this painted life. By the organic boundlessness of _his_ nature,
man can grasp the life of creation in its highest, its finest, its
grandest manifestations; and from these beauty is indivisible.
Wherever the divine energy is most subtle and expressive, there glows
ever, in its celestial freshness, the beautiful.

Beauty is the happiest marriage between the invisible and the visible.
It may be termed the joyfullest look of God. Blessed is he who can
watch and reflect this radiant look. The faculties of such a one
become fortified by creative influx. Through the exquisite shock of
the beautiful he reaps an accession of mental magnetism. Thus through
the beautiful we commune the most directly with the divine; and, other
things being equal, to the degree that men respond to, are thrilled
by, this vivacity of divine presence, as announced by the beautiful,
to that degree are they elevated in the scale of being.

Nature being minute and absolute in subdivision of function, the law
of severalty and independence--than which there is no law more
important and instructive--pervades creation. Thence the intellectual,
the religious, the true, the good, cannot interchange functions. A man
may be sincerely religious and do little for others, as is seen in
anchorites, and in many one-sided people, of Christian as well as of
Mahometan parentage, who are not anchorites. A man may be immensely
intellectual and not value truth. But neither a man's intellect, nor
his preference for truth, nor his benevolent nor his religious
sentiment, can yield its best fruit without the sunshine of the
beautiful. Sensibility to the beautiful--itself, like the others, an
independent inward power--stands to each one of them in a relation
different from that which they hold one to the other. The above and
other faculties _indirectly_ aid one the other, and to the complete
man their united action is needed; but feeling for the beautiful
_directly_ aids each one, aids by stimulating it, by expanding, by
purifying.

To the action of every other faculty this one gives vividness and
grace. It indues each with privilege of insight into the _soul_ of the
object which it is its special office to master. By help of
sensibility to the beautiful we have inklings of the essence of
things, we sympathize with the inward life that molds the outward
form. Hence men highly gifted with this sensibility become creative,
in whatever province of work they strive; and no man in any province
is truly creative except through the subtle energy imparted to him by
this sensibility, this competence to feel the invisible in the
visible.

The idea is the invisible; the embodiment thereof is the visible.
Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces,
represents, with more or less success, the idea out of which springs
the object it illuminates: it brilliantly enrobes a germinal
essence. It is thus a sparkling emanation out of the Infinite, and it
leads us thither whence it has come.

Sensibility to the beautiful is thus the light of the whole mind,
illuminating its labors. Without it we work in the dark, and therefore
feebly, defectively. Infer thence the immensity of its function.
Hereby it becomes the chief educator of men and of man; and where its
teaching has not been conspicuous, there no elevation has been
reached. The Greeks and the Hebrews would not have been so deeply, so
greatly, so feelingly known to us, would not have been the pioneers
and inspirers of European civilization, would not have lived on
through thousands of years in the minds of the highest men, had they
not, along with their other rare endowments, possessed, in superior,
in unique quality, this priceless gift of sensibility to the
beautiful. Through this gift Shakespeare is the foremost man of
England, and through it has done more than any other man to educate
and elevate England. Because the Italians of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries were so rich in this gift, therefore it is that
Italy is still a shrine to which the civilized world makes annual
pilgrimage.

The supreme function of this sensibility is to develop, to
educate, to chasten the highest faculties, our vast discourse of
reason, our unselfish aspiration, our deep instinct of truth, our
capacious love. To educate these is its cardinal duty, and lacking
this they remain uneducated. But its beneficent influence is felt
likewise in the less elevated of our efforts. The man who makes shoes,
as well as he who makes laws and he who makes poems; the builder of
houses, with the builder of theologies or cosmogonies; the engineer,
as well as the artist, all work under the rays of this illuminator;
and, other things being equal, he excels all others on whose work
those rays shine with the most sustained and penetrative force.

              "'T is the eternal law,
  That first in beauty shall be first in might."[2]

    [2] Keats.

In short, whatever the mental gift, in order to get from that gift its
best fruit, the possessor must be incited, upborne, enlightened,
inspired by the ideal, which burns as a transfiguring flame in his
mind, and throws thence its joyful light with every blow of his hand.

All good work is more or less creative, that is, a co-working with the
eternal mind; and work is good and productive in proportion to
the intensity of this cooeperation. Why is it that we so prize a
fragment of Phidias, a few lines traced by Raphael? Because the minds
of those workers were, more than the minds of most others, in sympathy
with the Infinite mind. While at work their hands were more distinctly
guided by the Almighty hand; they felt and embodied more of the spirit
which makes, which is, life.

Here is a frame of canvas, a block of marble, a pile of stones, a
vocabulary. Of the canvas you make a screen, you build a dwelling with
the pile of stones, chisel a door-sill out of the block, with the
vocabulary you write an essay. And in each case you work well and
creatively, if your work be in harmony with God's laws, if your screen
be light, sightly, and protective, your dwelling healthful and
commodious, your sill lie solid and square, your essay be judicious
and sound. But if on the canvas you have a Christ's head by Leonardo,
out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block of
marble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you
have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the
vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the
works of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so through
the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative
principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators,
that is, poets. And we sacredly guard their creations among our best
treasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive that
whenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, they
spiritualize our thoughts; and this they do because the minds whence
they issued were radiant centers of ideal power, that is, power to
conceive the beautiful.

But what is ideal power? the reader may ask. He might likewise ask,
What is moral power? And unless he has in his own mind some faculty of
moral estimation, no answer will help him. That which comes to us
through feeling cannot be intellectually defined, can only be
appreciated through feeling. By describing its effects and
accompaniments we approach to a knowledge of what it is. By means of a
foot-rule you can make clear to every member of a crowd what is the
height of the Apollo Belvedere, and the exact length of the statue's
face; and each one can for himself verify the accuracy of your
statement. But not with a like distinctness and vivacity of assent can
you get the crowd to go along with you as to the Apollo's beauty.
Acknowledgment of the beautiful in art implies a degree of culture and
a native susceptibility not to be found in every accidental gathering.
Full and sincere assent to your declaration that the statue is very
beautiful presupposes a high ideal in the mind; that is, a lofty
pre-attained idea of what is manly beauty. But after all, the want of
unanimity of assent to a moral or an aesthetic position, does it not
come from the difficulty and subtlety of the idea to be pre-attained?
Assent even to an intellectual proposition, does not it too presuppose
an ideal in the mind of him who assents? When you show by visible
measurement that the statue is eight feet high, whoever understands
what you mean must have already in his head the idea of what one foot
is; that is, he must carry within him an ideal. No tittle of
information, not the slightest accession of knowledge, will you derive
from the measurement even of the area of a hall or of the cubic
contents of a block, unless you bring with you in your mind an idea,
an ideal, of what is a superficial or a cubic square foot.

Attempts to give a notion of what the beautiful is, by
enumerating some of the physical conditions that are found to be
present in artistic figures or persons distinguished for beauty, or
attempts to produce what shall be beautiful, by complying with these
conditions, come no nearer to the aim than do compounded mineral
waters to the briskness and flavor of a fresh draught from the
original spring. In the analysis there may be no flaw; the ingredients
are chemically identical in quality and proportion; but the nameless,
inimitable, inscrutable life is wanting: the mixing has been done by a
mechanical, not by a creative hand. Haydon says, "The curve of the
circle is excess, the straight line is deficiency, the ellipsis is the
degree between, and that curve, added to or united with proportion,
regulates the form and features of a perfect woman." Mr. D.R. Hay, in
a series of books, professes to have discovered the principles of
beauty in the law of harmonic ratio, without, however, "pretending,"
as he modestly and wisely declares, "to give rules for that kind of
beauty which genius alone can produce in high art." The discovery of
Mr. Hay is curious and fascinating, and, like the announcement of
Haydon, may give practical hints to artists and others. But no
intellectual process or ingenuity can make up for the absence of
emotional warmth and refined selection. "Beauty, the foe of excess and
vacuity, blooms, like genius, in the equilibrium of all the forces,"
says Jean Paul. "Beauty," says Hemsterhuis, "is the product of the
greatest number of ideas in the shortest time," which is like the
Italian definition, _il piu nel uno_, unity in multiplicity, believed
by Coleridge to contain the principle of beauty. On another page of
the "Table Talk" Coleridge is made to say, "You are wrong in resolving
beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed, it
is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence,
between which and the beholder _nihil est_. It is always one and
tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed."
Hegel, in his "AEsthetic," defines natural beauty to be "the idea as
immediate unity, in so far as this unity is visible in sensuous
reality." And a few pages earlier he is more brief and distinct,
calling the beautiful "the sensuous shining forth of the idea." And
Schelling, in his profound treatise on "The Relation of the Plastic
Arts to Nature," says, "The beautiful is beyond form; it is substance,
the universal; it is the look and expression of the spirit of
Nature." Were it not better and more precise to say that it is to us
the look and expression of the spiritual when this is peering through
choicest embodiments? But we will stop with definitions. After
endeavoring, by means of sentences and definitions to get a notion of
the beautiful, one is tempted to say, as Goethe did when "the idea of
the Divinity" was venturously mentioned to him by Eckermann, "Dear
child, what know we of the idea of the Divinity? and what can our
narrow ideas tell of the Highest Being? Should I, like a Turk, name it
with a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparison
with the infinite attributes, have said nothing."

We have called the beautiful the light of the mind; but there must be
mind to be illuminated. If your torch be waved in a chamber set round
with bits of granite and slate and pudding-stone, you will get no
luminous reverberation. But brandish it before rubies and emeralds and
diamonds! The qualities in the mind must be precious, in order that
the mind become radiant through beauty. To take a broad example.

The Hindoos in their organization have a fine sense of the
beautiful, but they lack mental breadth and bottom; and hence their
life and literature are not strong and manifold, although in both
there are exhibitions of that refinement which only comes of
sensibility to the beautiful. The Chinese, on the other hand, are
wanting in this sensibility; hence their prosaic, finite civilization.
But most noteworthy is the contrast between them in religious
development. In that of the Hindoos there was expansion, vastness,
self-merging in infinitude; the Chinese are religiously contracted,
petty, idolatrous; a contrast which I venture to ascribe, in large
measure, to the presence in the one case, and the absence in the
other, of the inspiration of the beautiful.

To the same effect individual examples might be cited innumerable.
Look at Wordsworth and Byron, both preeminent for sensibility to the
beautiful; but, from deep diverseness in other leading mental gifts,
the one, through the light of this vivifying power, became a poet of
the propensities and the understanding, a poet of passion and wit; the
other, a poet of the reason, a poet of nature and meditative emotion.

To do their best the moral feelings, too, need the light and inward
stimulus of the beautiful; but if these feelings are by nature
weak, no strength or intensity of the sense of beauty will have power
to get from a mind thus deficient high moral thought or action. If
there be present the accomplishment of verse, we shall have a Byron;
or, the other poetic gifts in full measure, with lack of this
accomplishment, and we may get a Beckford, who builds Fonthill Abbeys,
and with purity and richness of diction describes palaces, actual or
feigned, and natural scenery with picturesqueness and genial glow; or,
the intellectual endowments being mediocre, we shall have merely a man
of superficial taste; or, the moral regents being ineffective, an
intellectual sybarite, or a refined voluptuary. Like the sun, the
beautiful shines on healthful field and poisonous fen; and her warmth
will even make flowers to bloom in the fen, but it is not in her to
make them bear refreshing odors or nourishing fruit.

As men have body, intellect, and moral natures, so is there physical,
intellectual, and spiritual beauty, and each distinct from the others.
Take first a few examples from the domain of art. The body and limbs
of the Gladiator in the Louvre may be cited as the exponent of
corporeal beauty; the face of the Apollo Belvedere as that of
intellectual and physical; and the Santo Sisto Madonna of Raphael, and
the Christ of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, for spiritual.
Through these radiant creations we look into the transcendent minds of
their artists with a chastened, exalting joy, not unmingled with pride
in our brotherhood with such beauty-lifted co-workers with God.

Among the higher races, life is affluent in examples of the three
kinds of beauty, two of them, and even all three, at times united in
one subject. Children and youth offer the most frequent instances of
physical beauty. Napoleon's face combined in high degree both physical
and intellectual, without a trace of moral beauty. Discoveries in
science, and the higher scientific processes, as likewise broad and
intense intellectual action, exemplify often intellectual beauty. Of
moral beauty history preserves examples which are the brightest
jewels, and the most precious, in the casket of mankind's memory;
among the most brilliant of which are the trust of Alexander, when he
drank the draught from the hand of his physician, though warned that
it was poisoned; the fidelity of the paroled Regulus, returning from
Rome to the enemy into the jaws of a certain and cruel death;
Sir Philip Sidney, wounded unto death, taking the cup of water
untasted from his parched lips, to give it to a dying soldier; Luther
at the Diet of Worms; the public life of Washington; the life and
death of Socrates, and especially that last act of washing his body to
save the women the trouble of washing it a few hours later, when it
would be a corpse; and, lastly, that most beautiful of lives and most
sublime of deaths, which live in the heart of Christendom as its
exemplar and ever fresh ideal.

There is no province of honorable human endeavor, no clean inlet
opened by the senses or the intellect or the feelings, into which from
that vast, deep, oceanic spring, the human soul, the beautiful does
not send its fructifying tides. There is no height in history but is
illuminated by its gleam. Only through the beautiful can truth attain
its full stature; only through the beautiful can the heart be
perfectly purified; only with vision purged by the beautiful can
anything be seen in its totality. All other faculties it makes
prolific; it is the mental generator. It helps to unveil, and then
welds, the link between the visible and the invisible. It inspires
feeling (which is ever the source of deepest insight) to discover
excellence; it quickens the mind to creative activity; it is
forever striving upward. Without the spiritual fervor of the
beautiful, your religion is narrow and superstitious, your science
cramped and mortal, your life unripened. In the mind it kindles a
flame that discloses the divinity there is in all things. Lightning
bares to the awed vision the night-shrouded earth; more vivid than
lightning, the flash of the beautiful reveals to the soul the presence
of God.




II.

WHAT IS POETRY?


The better to meet the question, _What_ is poetry? we begin by putting
before it another, and ask, _Where_ is poetry? Poetry is in the mind.
Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the
stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no
appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining
intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught
but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal
life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in
the best and deepest part of that life.

The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world of
his inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another or
be started and modified by what is without them, all this--that is,
all human life, in its endless forms, varieties, degrees, all that can
come within the scope of man--is the domain of poetry; only, to
enjoy, to behold, to move about in, even to enter this domain, the
individual man must bear within him a light that shall transfigure
whatever it falls on, a light of such subtle quality, of such
spiritual virtue, that wherever it strikes it reveals something of the
very mystery of being.

In many men, in whole tribes, this light is so feebly nourished that
it gives no illumination. To them the two vast worlds, the inner and
the outer, are made up of opaque facts, cognizable, available, by the
understanding, and by it handled grossly and directly. Things,
conditions, impressions, feelings, are not taken lovingly into the
mind, to be made there prolific through higher contacts. They are not
dandled joyfully in the arms of the imagination. Imagination! Before
proceeding a step further,--nay, in order that we be able to proceed
safely,--we must make clear to ourselves what means this great word,
imagination.

The simplest intellectual work is to perceive physical objects. Having
perceived an object several times, the intellect lifts itself to a
higher process, and knows it when it sees it again, remembers it.
_Perception_ is the first, the simplest, the initiatory intellectual
process, _memory_ is the second. Higher than they, and rising
out of them, is a third process, the one whereby are modified and
transmuted the mental impressions of what is perceived or remembered.
A mother, just parted from her child, recalls his form and face,
summons before _her mind's eye_ an image of him; and this image is
modified by her feelings, she seeing him in attitudes and relations in
which she had never seen him before, cheerful or sad according to her
mood. This she could not do by aid of memory alone; she could not vary
the impress of her boy left on the brain; she could not vividly
reproduce it in shifting, rapidly successive conditions; she could not
modify and diversify that impress; in a word, she could not liberate
it. Memory could only re-give her, with single, passive fidelity, what
she had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture of
her boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase above
memory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes a
changeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights and
shadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plastic
power, varying the image in position and expression, obedient
to the demands of the feelings, of which it is ever the ready
instrument. This third process is _imagination_.

Through this mode of intellectual action the materials gathered in the
mind are endlessly combined and modified. In all intellectual
activity, beyond bare perception and memory, imagination in some
degree is and must be present. It is in fact the mind handling its
materials, and in no sphere, above the simplest, can the mind move
without this power of firmly holding and molding facts and relations,
phenomena and interior promptings and suggestions. To the forensic
reasoner, to the practical master-worker in whatever sphere, such a
power is essential not less than to the ideal artist or to the weaver
of fictions. Imagination is thus the abstract action, that is, the
most intense action, of the intellect.

When I run over in my mind, and in the order of their service, the
first seven presidents of the United States, Washington, Adams,
Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, I exert only memory. The
moment I begin to compare or contrast one with another, or to give the
character of any of them, I put into play the higher, the imaginative
action; for, to draw an historical character, the facts collected by
memory must be shaped and colored and organized, the details
gathered must be combined into a whole by the intellect, which being a
mere tool, the success of the result (the tool being of a temper to do
the work laid on it) will depend on the quality of the powers that
handle it, that is, on the writer's gifts of sympathy.

The degree and fullness wherewith the imaginative power shall be
called upon depending thus on faculties of feeling, thence it is that
the word _imagination_ has come to be appropriated to the highest
exercise of the power, that, namely, which is accomplished by those
few who, having more than usual emotive capacity in combination with
sensibility to the beautiful, are hereby stimulated to mold and shape
into fresh forms the stores gathered by perception and memory, or the
material originated within the mind through its creative fruitfulness.
In strictness, this exaltation of intellectual action should be called
_poetic_ imagination.

To imagine is, etymologically speaking, _with_ the mind to form _in_
the mind an image; that is, by inward power to produce an interior
form, a something substantial made out of what we term the
unsubstantial. To imagine is thus always, in a certain sense, to
create; and even men of dullest mentality have this power in
_kind_. The _degree_ in which men have it makes one of the chief
differences among them. The power is inherent, is implied in the very
existence of the human mind. When it is most lively the mind creates
out of all it feels and hears and sees, taking a simple sight or hint
or impression or incident, and working out images, making much out of
little, a world out of an atom. Akin herein to the supreme creative
might, the man of highest imagination, the poet, unrolls out of his
brain, through vivid energy, new worlds, peopled with thought,
throbbing with humanity.

When we imagine, therefore, we hold an image in the mind, grasping it
with spiritual fingers, just as by our corporeal fingers a physical
substance is grasped. Now the poetic mind in handling the image tosses
it with what might be called a sportive earnest delight, and through
this power and freedom of _play_ elicits by sympathetic fervor, from
its very core, electric rays, wherein the subject glows like the
sculpture on an inwardly illuminated urn; rare insights being thus
vouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision,--insights gained never but
through sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirations
after, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellect
being used as an obedient cheerful servant.

The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses,
revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole might
seeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearer
than others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is ever
plying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing,
according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholding
everywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting nature
and humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in those
richer, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetrating
insight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are than
minds less creatively endowed.

Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all
intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a
power without which the daily business of life even could not go on,
being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, its
materials. In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellect
stimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling;
and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged by
emotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation.

Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and the
intellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with the
effective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings or
conditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in the
production of poetry?

Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare's
plays. What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then run
over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how
rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you
shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic,
comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought,
accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide
provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion
so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most
precious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on the
morning when the paper was moist with the ink wherewith they were
first written? Because they have in them more fullness and fineness
and fidelity than any others. The poet has more life in him
than other men, and Shakespeare has in him more life than any other
poet, life manifested through power of intellect exalted through union
with power of sympathy, the embodiments whereof are rounded, enlarged,
refined, made translucent by that gift of _sensibility to the fair and
perfect_[3] whereby, according to its degree, we are put in more
loving relation to the work of God, and gain the clearest insights
into his doings and purposes; a gift without which in richest measure
Shakespeare might have been a notable historian or novelist or
philosopher, but never the supreme poet he is.

    [3] See preceding Essay.

When Coriolanus, having led the Volscians to Rome, encamps under its
walls, and the Romans, in their peril and terror, send to him a
deputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies,--the
foremost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends of
Coriolanus,--having "declared their business in a very modest and
humble manner," he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere,
answering them with "much bitterness and high resentment of the
injuries done him." What was the temper as well as the power of
Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of
Plutarch. But the task of the poet is more than this. To our
imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy
to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to
fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that
momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us
to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and
warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur
of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so
mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. This vast history, to be
for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to
quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial
metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensions
must he be, this Roman! Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirer
of Coriolanus, depict him. Having described, in those compressed
sinewy phrases which Shakespeare has at command, the change in his
nature, he adds, "When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the
ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a
corselet with his eye; he talks like a knell, and his hum is a
battery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What he
bids be done is finished with his bidding: he wants nothing of a god
but eternity and a heaven to throne in."

Hear how a mother's heart, about to break, from the loss of her son,
utters its grief when it has the privilege of using a voice quivering
with poetic fervor. The French king bids Lady Constance be comforted:
she answers,--

  "No, I defy all counsel, all redress,
  But that which ends all counsel, true redress,
  Death, death. O amiable lovely death!
  Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness!
  Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
  Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
  And I will kiss thy detestable bones;
  And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows;
  And ring these fingers with thy household worms;
  And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,
  And be a carrion monster like thyself:
  Come, grin on me; and I will think thou smil'st:
  And buss thee as thy wife! Misery's love,
  O, come to me!"

In these two passages from "Coriolanus" and "King John" what
magnificence of hyperbole! The imagination of the reader, swept on
from image to image, is strained to follow that of the poet.
And yet, to the capable, how the pile of amplification lifts out the
naked truth. Read these passages to a score of well-clad auditors,
taken by chance from the thoroughfare of a wealthy city, or from the
benches of a popular lecture-room. To the expanded mold wherein the
passages are wrought, a few--five or six, perhaps, of the
twenty--would be able to fit their minds, zestfully climbing the
poet's climax. To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensive
extravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by,
the poetically imaginative light. And to some they would be grossly
unintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming to
them unnatural or affected.

Now, the enjoyment of the few appreciators, what is its source? By
these passages certain feelings in them are made to vibrate and are
pitched to a high key. A very comprehensive word is feelings. What is
the nature of those feelings thus wrought upon?

The elementary feelings of our nature, when in healthful function, are
capable of emitting spiritual light; and, when exalted to their purest
action, do and must emit such, the inward fire sending forth clear
flame unmixed with smoke. To perceive this light, and, still
more, to have your path illuminated thereby, implies the present
activity of some of the higher human sensibilities; and to be so
organized as to be able to embody in words, after having imagined,
personages, conditions, and conjunctions whence this light shall flash
on and ignite the sensibilities of others, implies, besides vivid
sympathies and delight in the beautiful, a susceptibility to the
manifestations of moral and intellectual life which is enjoyed only by
him in whom the nobler elements of being are present in such
intensity, proportions, and quality, and are so commingled, that he
can reproduce life itself with translucent truthfulness, he becoming,
through this exalting susceptibility, poet or maker.

What constitutes the wealth of human life? Is it not fullness and
richness of feeling? To refine this fullness, to purify this richness,
to distill the essence out of this wealth, to educate the feelings by
revealing their subtle possibilities, by bringing to light the
divinity there is within and behind them, this is the poet's part; and
this, his great part, he can only do by being blest with more than
common sympathy with the spirit of the Almighty Creator, and thence
clearer insight into his work and will. Merely to embody in
verse the feelings, thoughts, deeds, scenes of human life, is not the
poet's office; but to exhibit these as having attained, or as capable
of attaining, the power and beauty and spirituality possible to each.
The glorifier of humanity the poet is, not its mere reporter; that is
the historian's function. The poet's business is not with facts as
such, or with inferences, but with truth of feeling, and the very
spirit of truth. His function is ideal; that is, from the prosaic, the
individual, the limited, he is to lift us up to the universal, the
generic, the boundless. In compassing this noble end he may, if such
be his bent, use the facts and feelings and individualities of daily
life; and, by illuminating and ennobling them he will approve his
human insight, as well as his poetic gift.

The generic in sentiment, the universal, the infinite, can only be
reached and recognized through the higher feelings, through those
whose activity causes emotion. The simple impulses, the elementary
loves, are in themselves bounded in their action near and direct; but
growing round the very fountain of life, having their roots
in the core of being, they are liable to strike beyond their
individual limits, and this they do with power when under their sway
the whole being is roused and expanded. When by their movement the
better nature is urged to heroism and self-sacrifice, as in the story
of Damon and Pythias, the reader or beholder is lifted into the
atmosphere of finest emotion; for then the impulse has reached its
acme of function, and playing in the noonday of the beautiful, the
contemplation of it purges and dilates us. We are upraised to the
disinterested mood, the poetical, in which mood there is ever
imaginative activity refined by spiritual necessities. It is not
extravagant to affirm that when act or thought reaches the beautiful,
it resounds through the whole being, tuning it like a high strain of
sweetest music. Thus in the poetical (and there is no poetry until the
sphere of the beautiful is entered) there is always a reverberation
from the emotional nature. Reverberation implies space, an ample vault
of roof or of heaven. In a tight, small chamber there can be none. If
feeling is shut within itself, there is no reecho. Its explosion must
rebound from the roomy dome of sentiment, in order that it become
musical.

The moment you enter the circle of the beautiful, into which
you can only be ushered by a light within yourself, a light kindled
through livelier recognition of the divine spirit,--the moment you
draw breath in this circle you find yourself enlarged, spiritualized,
buoyed above the self. No matter how surrounded, or implicated, or
enthralled, while you are there, be it but for a few moments, you are
liberated.

  "No more--no more--oh! never more on me
  The freshness of the heart can fall like dew,
  Which out of all the lovely things we see
  Extracts emotions beautiful and new,
  Hived in our bosoms like the bag o' the bee.
  Think'st thou the honey with those objects grew?
  Alas! 't was not in them, but in thy power
  To double even the sweetness of a flower."

                "All who joy would win
  Must share it; happiness was born a twin."

  "He entered in the house,--his home no more,
  For without hearts there is no home--and felt
  The solitude of passing his own door
  Without a welcome; _there_ he long had dwelt,
  There his few peaceful days Time had swept o'er,
  There his worn, bosom and keen eye would melt
  Over the innocence of that sweet child,
  His only shrine of feelings undefiled."

These three passages are from a poem in which there is more wit than
poetry, and more cynicism than either; a poem in spirit unsanctified,
Mephistophelian, written by a man of the world, a terrible
egotist, _blase_ already in early manhood, in whose life, through
organization, inherited temperament, and miseducation, humanity was so
cramped, distorted, envenomed, that the best of it was in the fiery
sway of the more urgent passions, his inmost life being, as it must
always be with poets, inwoven into his verse. From the expiring
volcano in his bosom his genius, in this poem, casts upon the world a
lurid flame, making life look pale or fever-flushed. With unslumbering
vivacity, human nature is exhibited in that misleading light made by
the bursting of half-truths that relate to its lower side, a light the
more deceptions from the sparkling accompaniment of satire and wit.

Above the pungent secularities, the nimble intellectualities, the
specious animalism, the derisive skepticism, the snapping
personalities, the witty worldliness, that interlace and constitute
the successive cantos of "Don Juan," the passages just quoted and
similar ones (they are not many) rise, as above the desires and the
discontents, the plots and contentions, the shrewd self-seekings of a
heated, noisy city rises a Gothic spire, aspiring, beautiful, drawing
most of its beauty from its aspiration, on whose pinnacle, calmly
glistening in the upper air, plays the coming and the parting day,
while shadows fill the streets below, and whose beauty throws over the
town a halo that beckons men from afar. The spire, in its steadfast
tranquillity and its beauty, so unlike the restless wrangling
dissonance below it, grew nevertheless out of the same hearts that
make the dissonance, and, typifying what is spiritual and eternal in
them, tends by its ideal presence to enlarge and uplift those by whose
eyes it is sought. These upshootings in "Don Juan" irradiate the
cantos, giving an attractiveness which draws to them eyes that
otherwise would not have known them; and if too pure in their light
and too remote to mingle directly with the flare and flash that dazzle
without illuminating, silently they shine and steadily, an unconscious
heavenly influence, above these coruscations of earthly
thoughts,--thoughts telling from their lively numerousness, but
neither grand nor deep.

From the same solar center fall frequently single rays that make lines
and stanzas glisten, and but for which this poem, lacking their
perfusive light, would soon pass into oblivion; for from the
beautiful it is that the satire, the wit, the voluptuousness get their
sparkle and their sheen. If passages morally censurable are hereby
made more captivating, we are not content with saying that God's sun
fructifies and beautifies poison-oak and hemlock; but we affirm that
the beautiful, being by its nature necessarily pure, communicates of
its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure
counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad,
deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting
or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being
therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is
completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be made
captivating through the beautiful. Iago and Edmund are poetical as
parts of a whole; and when in speech they approach the upper region of
thought, it is because the details allotted to them have to be highly
wrought for the sake of the general plot and effect, and further,
because humanity and truth speak at times through strange organs.
Besides, the ideal may be used to show more glaringly the hideousness
of evil, and thence Iago and Edmund, as ideal villains, through the
very darkness in which only poetic art could have enveloped them, help
us by indirection to see and value the lights that surround the noble
and the good.

In healthy function all the feelings are pure and moral, those whose
action is most earthly and animal and selfish uniting themselves at
their highest with the spiritual, for performance whose compass
reaches beyond an individual, momentary good. A burglar or a murderer
may exhibit courage; but here, a manly quality backing baseness and
brutality for selfish, short-sighted ends, there is an introverted and
bounded action, no expansive upward tendency, and thence no poetry.
But courage, when it is the servant of principle for large, unselfish
ends, becomes poetical, exhibiting the moral beautiful, as in the
fable of Curtius and the fact (or fable) of Winkelried. In the
poetical there is always enlargement, exaltation, purification; animal
feeling, self-seeking propensity, becoming so combined with the higher
nature as to rise above themselves, above the self.

The lioness, pursuing the robber of her cub, if in her rage she
scarcely heed that he (to stay her steps) has dropped the cub in her
path, but, casting at it a glance of recognition, bounds with a
wilder howl after the robber, the incident is purely bestial, an
exhibition of sheer brute fury, and as such repulsive and most
unpoetical. But let her, instantly drawing her fiery eye from the
robber, stop, and for the infuriated roar utter a growl of leonine
tenderness over her recovered cub, and our sympathy leaps towards her.
Through the red glare of rage there shines suddenly a stream of white
light, gushing from one of the purest fountains: wrathful fury is
suddenly subdued by love. A moment before she was possessed with
savage fierceness, her blood boiling with hate and revenge; now it
glows with a mother's joy. Her nature rises to the highest whereof it
is capable. It is the poetry of animalism.

In the poetical, thought is amplified and ripened, while purified, in
the calm warmth of emotion. From being emotive, poetry draws in more
of the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose. The poetical has,
must have, rotundity. No poet ever had a square head. Prose, in its
naked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving,
flesh-and-spirit-endowed body. From the skeleton you can learn
osteology, but neither aesthetics nor human nature. Imaginative prose
partakes of the spiritual character of poetry. When a page is
changed from poetry into prose it is flattened, deadened; when from
prose into poetry it is uplifted, enlivened. You get a something else
and a something more. Reduced to plain prose, the famous passage from
the mouth of Viola in "Twelfth Night" would read somewhat thus: "My
father had a daughter who loved a man and would let no one know of her
love, but concealed it, until her cheek grew pale with grief,
patiently bearing within her bosom the misery of an untold
attachment." Now hear the poet:--

                        "She never told her love,
  But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
  Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought:
  And with a green and yellow melancholy
  She sat like patience on a monument,
  Smiling at grief."

What has been done with the prose statement? Instead of a bare fact we
have a picture, a twofold picture; and this, in its compact, fresh,
rose-tinted vividness, carries the whole into our hearts with a
tenfold success. Through emotional joy we apprehend, as by the light
of an instantaneous ignition, the state of the sufferer. The
prose-report is a smoldering fire on the hearth, through whose sleepy
smoke there comes a partial heat; the poetic is the flame in
full fervor, springing upward, illuminating, warming the heart,
delighting the intellect. The imagination of the reader, quickened by
illustrations so apt and original, is by their beauty tuned to its
most melodious key, while by the rare play of intellectual vitality
his mind is dilated. He has become mentally a richer man, enriched
through the refining and enlarging of his higher sensibilities, and
the activity imparted to his intellect.

To say of a man that he is without imagination were to say he is an
idiot; that is, one lacking the inward force and the inward
instruments to grasp and handle the materials collected from without
by perception and memory, and from within by consciousness. To say of
a poet that he is without poetic imagination were to say he is no
poet. What is poetic imagination? This, for our theme, is a vital
question. Can there be given to it an approximate answer?

Figure to yourself a company of men and women in presence of a
September sunset near the sea, the eye taking in at once ocean and a
variegated landscape. The company must not be a score of tawny
American aborigines, nor of European peasants, nor of individuals
whose life of monotonous labor, whether for necessaries or
luxuries, has no opportunity or no will for the finer mental culture;
but, to give aptness to our illustration, should consist of persons
whose being has been unfolded to the tissue of susceptibility to the
wonders and beauties of nature, and whose intellect has been tilled
sufficiently to receive and nourish any fresh seed of thought that may
be thrown upon it; in short, a score of cultivated adults. The
impression made by such a scene on such a company is heightened by a
rare atmospheric calm. The heart of each gazer fills with emotion, at
first unutterable except by indefinite exclamation; when one of the
company says,--

  "A fairer face of evening cannot be."

These words, making a smooth iambic line, give some utterance, and
therefore some relief, to the feeling of all. Then another adds,--

  "The holy time is quiet as a nun
  Breathless with adoration."

Instantly the whole scene, steeped in the beams of the sinking sun, is
flooded with a light that illuminates the sunlight, a spiritual light.
The scene is transfigured before their eyes: it is as if the heavens
had opened, and inundated all its features with a celestial
subtilizing aura. How has this been accomplished? The first line has
little of the quality of poetic imagination.

  "A fairer face of evening cannot be."

is simple and appropriate, but in it there is no fresh glow, no
mysterious throb. Above the level of this line rise suddenly the first
three words of the second, "the holy time." The presence of a scene
where sky, earth, and ocean combine for the delight of the beholders
puts them in a mood which crowns the landscape with a religious halo.
That the time is holy they all feel; and now, to make its tranquillity
appreciable by filling the heart with it, the poet adds--"is quiet as
a nun breathless with adoration." By this master-stroke of poetic
power the atmospheric earthly calm is vivified with, is changed into,
super-earthly calm. By a fresh burst of spiritual light the mind is
set aesthetically aglow, as by the beams of the setting sun the
landscape is physically. By an exceptionally empowered hand the soul
is strung to a high key. Fullness and range of sensibility open to the
poet[4] a wide field of illustration; its exacting fineness reveals
the one that carries his thought into the depths of the
reader's mind, bringing him that exquisite joy caused by keen
intellectual power in the service of pure emotion.

    [4] Wordsworth.

Take now other samples from the treasury of choicest poetry. Here is
one from Coleridge:--

      "And winter, slumbering in the open air,
  Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring."

Here again the intellect is urged to its highest action, the abstract
or imaginative action, to do the hests of a sensibility so finely
wrought by the inward impulsion to seek for the most exquisite that
nature can furnish, that it yields similitudes most delicate, most
apt, most expressive.

Milton thus opens the fifth book of "Paradise Lost:"--

  "Now morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
  Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl."

Shakespeare makes Romeo describe daybreak:--

                        "And jocund day
  Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops."

Keats begins "Hyperion" with these lines:

  "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
  Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn."

In the Monody on Keats, Shelley, describing the lamentation of
nature at his death, concludes a stanza as follows:--

                      "Morning sought
    Her eastern watch-tower, and, her hair unbound,
    Wet with the tears that should adorn the ground,
    Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
    Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
    Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
  And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay."

Such passages are the very flower of poetry, thought exquisitely dyed
in sentiment, laying suddenly bare a picture with so much light in it
that each passage irradiates its page and the reader's mind. By their
happiness the similitudes emphasize and enforce the thought; and they
do a higher service than this; for, being a breath from the inner life
of genius, they blow power into the reader. To translate these
passages into prose were like trying to translate a lily into the mold
out of which it springs, or a bar of Beethoven into the sounds of the
forum, or the sparkle of stars into the warmth of a coal fire.

The best poetry has a far background; it comes out of deeps within the
poet, unfathomed by himself, unfathomable. He feels more than he can
express. Hence the imaginative poet always suggests, revealing enough
to inspirit the reader's higher faculties to strive for more;
not because, with artistic design, he leaves much untold, which he
often does, but because through imaginative susceptibility he at times
grasps at and partly apprehends much that cannot be embodied. He feels
his subject more largely and deeply than he can see or represent it.
To you his work is suggestive because to him the subject suggested
more than he could give utterance to. Every subject, especially every
subject of poetic capability, having infinite relations, he who most
apprehends this boundlessness--and indeed because he does apprehend
it--can do or say what will open it to you or me; and the degree of
his genius is measured by the extent to which he can present or expose
it. The unimaginative gives surface-work, and, suggesting nothing, is
at once exhausted.

The poetic imagination shows itself in the epithets the poet has at
his command, creative insight drawing an epithet out of the heart of
an object; whence, there is beneath such an epithet a depth that keeps
feeding it with significance, bringing out its aptness the longer we
look. Sometimes epithets are brighter than their object; the
unimaginative thus futilely striving to impart power instead of
deriving it. To be lasting, the light of the epithet must be struck by
the imagination out of its object. The inspired poet finds a word so
sympathetic with the thought that it caresses and hugs it.

Depth and breadth of nature are implied in the full poetic
imagination. The love of the beautiful, wielding a keen intellect,
needs furthermore rich material to mold, and only out of the poet's
individual resources can this be drawn. To make a high artist, you
must have very much of a man. Behind "Paradise Lost" and "Samson
Agonistes" is a big Miltonic man. The poet has to put a great deal of
himself, and the best of him, into his work; thence, for high poetry,
there must be a great deal of high self to put in. He must coin his
soul, and have a large soul to coin; the best work cannot be made out
of materials gathered by memory and fancy. His stream of thought must
flow from springs, not from reservoirs. Hence the universal
biographical interest in such men; they have necessarily a rich
personality.

The passages I have cited are all pictures of outward nature, natural
scenes mirrored on the mind, or rather refracted through it, and in
the act transfigured, spiritualized; for such scenes, having
the fortune to fall on the minds of poets, are reproduced with joyful
revelation of their inmost being, as sunbeams are through a crystal
prism. Exhibiting material nature spiritualized, well do these
passages show the uplifting character of poetic imagination. But this
displays a higher, and its highest power when, striking like a
thunderbolt into the core of things, it lays bare mysteries of God and
of the heart which mere prosaic reason cannot solve or approach,
cannot indeed alone even dimly apprehend.

I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet are
opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in
single or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamond
are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of
fossil carbon.

When, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost," Milton narrates the
arrival on the battle-field of the Son,--

  "Attended by ten thousand thousand saints,"

and then adds:--

  "Far off his coming shone,"

in these five short words is a sudden glare of grandeur that dilates
the capable mind with light, and, as the sublime always does, with
awe.

When Ferdinand, in "The Tempest," leaps "with hair up-staring"
into the sea, crying,--

              "Hell is empty,
  And all the devils are here,"

the mind is suddenly filled with an image of the tumult and flaming
rage of a thunder-storm at sea, such as words have never elsewhere
carried. What a reach in the imaginative stroke! In the first scene of
"Faust," the earth-spirit, whom Faust has evoked, concludes the
whirling, dazzling, brief, but gigantic sketch of his function with
these words, the majesty of which translation cannot entirely
subdue:--

  "I ply the resounding great loom of old Time,
  And work at the Godhead's live vesture sublime."

How ennobling is the idea the mind harbors of humanity, after taking
in these lines from Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of
Immortality:"--

  "But trailing clouds of glory do we come
  From God, who is our home."

With a single epithet, coined for the occasion, Keats flashes upon our
imagination the dethroned Saturn and the immensity of his fall:

                  "Upon the sodden ground
  His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
  Unsceptered; and his _realmless_ eyes were closed."

The "Hyperion" of this transcendent genius, written in his
twenty-fourth year, the year before he died, is as great poetry as has
ever been treasured in words. In it he lavishes poetic wealth as
though gold were with him as plenty as silver; and so on the next page
he exceeds, if possible, the sublimity of the above lines, making Thea
write in the catalogue of Saturn's colossal deprivations,--

                  "And all the air
  Is emptied of thine hoary majesty."

These passages vividly exemplify poetic imagination, which is the
illumining of a capable material by a spiritual light, a light thrown
into it from the glow kindled in the poet's mind with richest
sensibilities, that are refined and sublimated by an exacting, subtle
inward demand for the best they can render. A single flash of new
thrilling light irradiates a continent of thought. This is the work of
genius, and genius is ever marked by a deeper sympathy with and
recognition of the creative spirit and the divine action, a sympathy
and recognition so sensitive that the spirit and action of the writer
are permeated by the divine effluence, he becoming thereby the
interpreter of divine law, the exhibitor of divine beauty.

In these passages the thought of the poet is thrust up through
the overlaying crust of the common, by a warming, expanding, inward
motion, which is sped by a vitality so urgent and irresistible that,
to make passage for the new thought, lightly is lifted a load which,
but for this spiritual efficacy, could not be stirred, just as heavy
stones are raised by delicate growing plants. To exert this power the
poet is always moved at the instance of feeling. Poetry having its
birth in feeling, no man can enjoy or value it but through feeling.
But what moves him to embody and shape his feeling is that ravishing
sentiment which will have the best there is in the feeling, the
sentiment which seeks satisfaction through contemplation or
entertainment of the most divine and most perfect, and ever rises to
the top of the refined joy which such contemplation educes.

The poetic imagination is the Ariel of the poet,--his spiritual
messenger and Mercury. A clear look into the above passages would show
that the source of their power is in the farther scope or exquisite
range the imagination opens to us, often by a word. For further
illustration I will take a few other examples, scrutinizing them more
minutely. Had Lorenzo opened the famous passage in "The
Merchant of Venice" thus,--

  "How _calm_ the moonlight _lies_ upon this bank,"

and continued to the end of the dozen lines in the same key, saying,--

  "There's not the _tiniest star_ that _can be seen_
  But in its _revolution_ it doth _hum_,
  Aye _chanting_ to the _heavenly_ cherubins,"

his words would not have become celebrated and quotable. But Lorenzo
has the privilege of being one of the mouth-pieces of Shakespeare, and
so he begins,--

  "How _sweet_ the moonlight _sleeps_ upon this bank."

Two words, _sweet_ and _sleep_, put in the place of _calm_ and _lies_,
lift the line out of prose into poetry. A log _lies_ on a bank; so
does a dead dog, and the more dead a thing is the more it lies; but
only what is alive _sleeps_, and thus the word, besides an image of
extreme stillness, brings with it what strengthens the image, the idea
of change from liveliness to quiet; for that which was awake now
sleeps; and the more full the picture of stillness, the more awake is
the mind of the reader, awakened by the fitness and felicity of the
image. The substitution of _sweet_ for _calm_ is, in a less degree,
similarly enlivening; for, used in such conjunction, _sweet_ is more
individual and subtle, and imports more life, and thus helps the
distinctness and vividness of the picture. How does the poetic Lorenzo
word the other three lines?

  "There's not the _smallest orb_ which _thou behold'st_,
  But in _his motion like an angel sings_,
  Still _quiring_ to the _young-eyed_ cherubins."

The words or phrases italicized carry a larger, or a deeper or a finer
meaning than the corresponding ones in the substituted lines. To
_behold_ is more than to _see_: it is to see contemplatively. The
figure _prosopopoeia_ is often but an impotent straining to impart
poetic life; but the personification in _in his motion_ is apt and
effective. _Quiring_ is an amplification of the immediately preceding
_sings_, and, signifying to sing in company with others, enlarges,
while making more specific, the thought. And what an image of the
freshness of heaven and of youthful immortality is conveyed by the
epithet _young-eyed_! At every step the thought is expanded and
beautiful, reaching at the end of the third line a climax on which the
poetically excited mind is left poised in delight.

But the passage transformed, and, as we might say, degraded, is still
poetical. There is so much poetry in the thought that the flattening
of the phraseology cannot smother it, the lines still remaining
poetically alive, their poetry shining through the plainer and less
figurative words. And the thought is poetical because it is the result
of a flight of intellect made by aid of imagination's wings, these
being moved by the soaring demands of the beautiful, and beating an
atmosphere exhaled from sensibility. As Joubert says,--herein uttering
a cardinal aesthetic principle,--"It is, above all, in the spirituality
of ideas that poetry consists." Thought that is poetic will glisten
through the plainest words; whereas, if the thought be prosaic or
trite, all the gilded epithets in the dictionary will not give it the
poetic sheen. Perdita wishes for

                            "Daffodils
  That come before the swallow dares, and take
  The winds of March with beauty."

Note the poetic potency in the simple word _dares_; how much it
carries: the cold which the swallow has not the courage to confront; a
mental action, I might almost call it, in the swallow, who, after
making a recognizance of the season, determines that it would be rash
to venture so far north: all this is in the single word. For _dares_
write _does_, and the effect would be like that of cutting a
gash in a rising balloon: you would let the line suddenly down,
because you take the life out of the thought.

                    "And take
  The winds of March with beauty."

Every one is taken at some time or other with the beauty of person or
thing, and the thought is common; but that the winds of March be taken
with the beauty of daffodils, this was a delicate secret which those
winds would confide only to one so sympathetic as Shakespeare. This is
poetic imagination, the intellect sent on far errands by a sensibility
which is at once generous and bold, and fastidious through the
promptings and the exactions of the beautiful.

In the opening of "Il Penseroso" Milton describes the shapes that in
sprightly moods possess the fancy,

                "As thick and numberless
  As the gay motes that _people_ the sunbeams."

Put _shine in_ the sunbeams, for _people_, and, notwithstanding the
luminousness of the word substituted, you take the sparkle out of the
line, which sparkle is imparted by mental activity, and the poetic
dash that has the delightful audacity to personify such atomies.

The poetical is the flush on the face of things in the
unconscious triumph of their purest life, cognizable by being beheld
at the moment when the higher faculties are at their fullest flood,
buoyed up on the joy of being and emotional sympathy. The most and the
highest of this joy is possessed by him whose imagination is most
capable of being poetically agitated; for by such agitation light is
engendered within him, whereby objects and sensations that before were
dim and opaque grow luminous and pellucid, like great statuary in
twilight or moonlight, standing vague and unvalued until a torch is
waved over it.

When we begin to speak of poetry, the higher qualities of the mind
come up for judgment. No genuine poet is without one or more of these,
and a great poet must have most of them. Thence the thought of the
poet is pitched on a high key, and even in poets of power the poetry
of a page is sometimes shown merely by the sustained tone of the
sentiment, giving out no jets of fire, having no passages salient with
golden embossings. Through sympathy and sense of beauty, the poet gets
nearer to the absolute nature of things; and thence, with little of
imagery, or coloring, or passion, through this holy influence
he becomes poetic, depicting by re-creating the object or feeling or
condition, and rising naturally into rhythmic lines and sentences, the
best substance asking for, and readily obtaining, the most suitable
form of words. Yet a poet of inward resources can seldom write a page
without there being heard a note or bar or passage of the finer
melody.

But men wanting this inward wealth, that is, wanting depth and breadth
of emotional capacity, have not, whatever their other gifts, the soil
needed for highly imaginative poetry. With broad emphasis this
aesthetic law is exemplified in the verse of Voltaire, especially in
his dramas, and in the verse of one who was deeper and higher than he
as thinker and critic, of Lessing. Skillful versifiers, by help of
fancy and a certain plastic aptitude and laborious culture, are
enabled to give to smooth verse a flavor of poetry and to achieve a
temporary reputation. But of such uninspired workmanship the gilding
after a while wears off, the externally imparted perfume surely
evaporates.

Often the most suitable form of words is made of plainest, commonest
parts of speech, and the fewest of them. The more intense and deep
the feeling, the greater is the need of briefest, simplest
utterance. When in one of those pauses of frantic wrath,--like the
sudden rifts that momentarily let the calm stars through a whirling
canopy of storm,--Lear utters imploringly that appeal to Heaven, the
words are the familiar words of hourly use; but what divine tenderness
and what sweep of power in three lines!

                                "O heavens,
  If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
  Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
  Make it your cause; send down and take my part!"

The thirty-third canto of the "Inferno" supremely exemplifies the
sustaining energy of poetic imagination, that by its sublimating light
it can forever hold before the mind, in tearful, irresistible beauty,
one of the most woful forms of human suffering, death by starvation.
In that terrific picture, in front of which all the generations of men
that come after Dante are to weep purifying tears, the most exquisite
stroke is given in five monosyllables; but in those five little words
what depth of pathos, what concentration of meaning! On the fourth day
one of Ugolino's dying sons throws himself at his father's feet,
crying,--

  "Father, why dost not help me?"

Here let me remark that it is not by witnessing, through
poetically imaginative representation, scenes of suffering and agony,
as in this case and the tragic drama, that the sensibilities are
"purged," according to the famous saying of Aristotle; but it is
because such scenes are witnessed by the light of the beautiful. The
beautiful always purifies and exalts.

In either of these two passages any piling up of words, any hyperbole
of phrase, or boldness or even grandeur of figurative speech, would
have proved a hindrance instead of a conductor to the feeling,
smothering and not facilitating expression. But when, turned out of
doors in "a wild night," by those "unnatural hags," his daughters,
Lear, baring his brow to the storm, invokes the thunder to

  "Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world,"

there is no tenderness, no folding of the sore heart upon itself;
there is the expansion of defiance, outburst of the mighty wrath of an
outraged father and wronged and crownless king: and so we have a gush
of the grandest diction, of the most tempestuous rhythm, the storm in
Lear's mind marrying itself with a ghastly joy to the storm of the
elements, the sublime tumult above echoed in the crashing splendor of
the verse:--

  "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
  You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
  Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
  You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
  Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving-thunderbolts,
  Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
  Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
  Crack nature's moulds, all germins spill at once,
  That make ingrateful man!"

I know of no other single passage that exhibits so clearly the
colossal dimensions of Shakespeare. Here is attained, with almost
unique effect, what according to Schiller is the aim of poetry, "no
other than to give to humanity its fullest possible expression, its
most complete utterance."

The best poetry, like the best music, soars towards the upper light.
The genuinely poetical always lifts up the thought on the swell of
emotion. The thought moves free and strong because there is a deep,
bubbling head of feeling behind it. Feeling, at its best, has an
ascending movement, reaching up towards that high sphere where,
through their conjunction, the earthly and the spiritual play in
freedom in the sunshine of the beautiful. The surest test of the
presence of poetry is buoyancy, springiness, which comes from the
union, the divine union, of the spiritual and the beautiful. However
weighty it may be with thought, the poetical passage floats,
thus giving certain sign of life, of a soul irrepressible.

But as in the forest there cannot be height of stem without strength
and breadth of root, the highest poetry is the most solid, the firmest
set in reality, in truth. The higher a poet is, the closer hold he has
of the roots of his subject. He looks at it with a peering, deeply
sympathetic insight. The roots, in fact, are in himself; they are in
the depths of his soul. Hence a cardinal question about a poem is, How
much of it does the poet draw out of himself? Is it his by projection
from his inward resources, by injection with his own juices; or is it
his only by adoption and adaptation, by dress and adjustment?

Flight of poetic imagination there cannot be unless the wings have
been feathered in the heart. Loftiness or grandeur of imagination
there cannot be, except there be first innate richness and breadth of
feeling. Imagination being simply the tensest action of intellect, is
ever, like intellect in all its phases, an instrument of feeling, a
mere tool. Height implies inward depth. The gift to touch the vitals
of a subject is the test-gift of literary faculty; it is the
soul-gift, the gift of fuller, livelier sympathy. Compare Wordsworth
with Southey to learn the difference between inward and outward gifts.

Poetry being in the mind, the man who has little poetry within him
will find little in nature or in the world or in Shakespeare. The man
who has no music in his soul will hear none at the Conservatoire in
Paris. Wordsworth sees with the inward eye, Southey too exclusively
with the outward. The true poet projects visions and rhythms out from
his brain, and gazes at and hearkens to them. The degree of the
truthfulness to nature and the vividness of these projections is the
measure of his poetic genius and capacity. Only through this intense
inwardness can he attain to great visions and rhythmic raptures, and
make you see and hear them. What illimitable inward sight must Keats
have dwelt in ere, to depict the effect on him of looking into
Chapman's Homer, he could write,--

  "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
  Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
  Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

Here is a brilliant example of poetic imagination, the
intellect urged to its finest action to satisfy the feeling which
delights in the grand, the select, the beautiful.

  "Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

What an outlook! What a solemn, mysterious, elevating inward moment it
creates in us! To ascend to that peak, to carry the reader thither
with him, that is the flight of a great poet, of one who has been--as
in that choice poem, "The Prelude," Wordsworth, with an electric
stroke of poetic imagination, says of Newton--

  "Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone."

This vigor of flight in the poet, bearing on his wing the reader, whom
he ushers to new, sudden vistas, is a test of poetic genius. Some
poets never carry you to heights, but rather make you feel while
reading them as if you were moving through shut-in valleys: their
verse wants sky. They are not poetically imaginative, are not strung
for those leaps which the great poet at times finds it impossible not
to make. They have more poetic fancy than poetic imagination. Poetic
fancy is a thin flame kindled deliberately with gathered materials;
poetic imagination is an intense flash born unexpectedly of
internal collisions. Fancy is superficial and comparatively
short-sighted; imagination is penetrative and far-sighted, bringing
together things widely sundered, apparently diverse and opposite.
Fancy divides, individualizes; imagination compounds, builds, globes.
Fancy is not so broad or so keen or so warm or so bounding as
imagination; is comparatively tame and cold and quiet. Imagination is
synthetical. Large exhibitions of poetic imagination are rare even in
the greatest poets. At its best it strikes deep into the nature of
things, has a celestial quality which invests it with awe. Spenser
shows great resources of fancy, but little imagination. The arc of
imagination is in him too near its center. Hence there is no reach in
his thoughts. He has no exhaustless depths within. He is not,
as Coleridge says Shakespeare is, an example of "endless
self-reproduction." Cowley, says the same great critic, "is a fanciful
writer, Milton an imaginative poet."

As I have already said, the power of imagining, of forming in the mind
images, conceptions, is a purely intellectual power, and imagination
becomes poetical only when this intellectual power is an agent
obeying that emotional power which ardently seeks, intensely longs
for, the better, the more perfect, the purer, in one word, the
beautiful in each province of multiform life. The willing agent,
intellect, is sent out on excursions of discovery, and unexpectedly
falls in with and captures all kinds of sparkling booty.

Writers weak in poetic imagination are not visited by those beaming
thoughts that come unsummoned out of the invisible, like new stars
which, out of the unfathomable deeps of the sky, dart suddenly upon
the vision of the heaven-watcher. Such writers deal with the known,
with the best commonplace, not the common merely; and under the glance
of genius the common grows strange and profound.

Some poets, not weak in poetic imagination, yet use it chiefly for
secondary purposes, that is, for beautifying the dress, the externals
of poetry. Minds with some breadth but with little depth are not
thoroughly original. Their sense of the beautiful busies itself
necessarily with that for which they have the readiest gifts; and
their readiest gifts being words more than ideas, versification more
than thought, form more than substance, they turn out verse,
chiefly narrative, which captivates through its easy flow, its smooth
sensuousness of diction, its gloss. Take a poet so celebrated, in some
respects so admirable, as Tennyson. Tennyson's verse is apt to be too
richly dressed, too perfumed. The clothing is costlier than the
thoughts can pay for. Hence at every re-reading of him he parts with
some of his strength, so that after three or four repetitions he has
little left for you. From a similar cause this is the case too with
Byron, through whose pen to common sentiment and opinion a glow is
imparted by the animal heat of the man, heightened by poetic tints
from a keen sense of the beautiful. But this is not the case with
Keats or Shelley or Coleridge or Wordsworth, and of course therefore
not with Milton or Shakespeare. All these keep fresh, at every contact
giving you strength and losing none. As freely and freshly as the
sun's beams through a transparent, upspringing Gothic spire, intellect
and feeling play, ever undimmed, through Shelley's "Sky-Lark." Not so
through Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women." After a time these
mellifluous stanzas droop, and cling to the paper: they have not
enough flame-like motion. The nicest word-choosing will not
supply the place of choice in thought, a choice prompted by fresh
feeling; nor, where there is no new impulse from the heart, will the
most gorgeous diction give to a line the poetic carnation. There can
be no freshness of expression without freshness of thought; the
sparkle on the skin comes from new blood in the heart.

Tennyson's poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches,
and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots.
There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion to
keep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant. Wordsworth's poetry has for
the most part roots deeply hidden.

Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to a
body. This is the method with even some writers of good gifts and
deserved name. Compared with Goethe, who, sensuous as he is, but
healthily sensuous, writes always from within outward, Schiller is
chargeable with this kind of externality. To try to make the fancy do
the work of feeling is a vain effort. And so much verse is of the
memory and fancy more than of the heart and imagination. Inward
impulse not being dominant, the words, however shiny, are touched with
coldness. Under the inward dominance (supposing always that the
intellectual tool be of due temper and sharpness) the poet mounts
springily on a ladder self-wrought out of the brain as he ascends; and
thus there is a prompt continuity and progressiveness, a forward and
upward movement towards the climax which ever awaits you in a subject
that has a poem in it. In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration and
not mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbing
over phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links of
association. This gives sure note of the presence of the matrix out of
which poetry molds itself, that is, sensibility warm and deep,
penetrating sympathy. Where evolution and upward movement are not, it
is a sign that the spring lacks depth and is too much fed by surface
streams from without.

Through a poem should run a thread of emotional thought, strong enough
to bind the parts together so vividly as to hold attention close to
the substance. Many a so-called poem is but a string of elaborate
stanzas, mostly of four lines each, too slightly connected to
cooperate as members of an organic whole. There is not heat enough in
the originating impulse to fuse the parts into unity. There is
too much manufacture and not enough growth. Coleridge says, "The
difference between manufactured poems and works of genius is not less
than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look
alike."

Men without depth of sensibility or breadth of nature, but with enough
sense of beauty to modulate their thoughts, using with skill the
floating capital of sentiment and the current diction and molds of
verse, for a generation are esteemed poets of more genius than they
have, their pages being elaborate verse flavored with poetry, rather
than poems. In much verse are found old thoughts re-dressed in the
scoured garments of an ambitious fancy. The remark being made to
Goethe in his latter days, that scarce one of the younger German poets
had given an example of good prose, he rejoined, "That is very
natural; he who would write prose must have something to say; but he
who has nothing to say can make verses and rhymes; for one word gives
the other, till at last you have before you what in fact is nothing,
yet looks as though it were something." There is much good-looking
verse which does not fulfill any one of Milton's primary conditions
for poetry, being artificial instead of "simple," and having
neither soul enough to be "passionate," nor body enough to be
"sensuous." By passionate Milton means imbued with feeling.

The poetical mood is always a visionary mood; so much so, that even
when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it
with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward.
Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold,
presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image
thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a
lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle
and its glistening counterpart. In the best poetry there is vivid
picture-making: reality is made more visible by being presented as a
beautiful show. It is the power to present the beautiful show which
constitutes the poet. To conceive a scene or person with such
liveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception to
paper with a distinctness and palpitation that shall make the reader
behold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual--this implies a
subtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test of poetic
faculty. To stand this test there must be an inward sea of thought and
sensibility, dipping into which the poet is enabled to hold up his
conception or invention all adrip with sparkling freshness. The poetic
mind, with a firm, and at the same time free, easy hold, holds a
subject at arm's length, where it can be turned round in the light;
the prosaic mind grasps and hugs what it handles so close that there
is no room for play of light or motion.

Contemplating synthetically the highest and choicest and purest, and
at the same time actively endeavoring to embody it, the genuine poet
has in his best work joy as exalted as the mind can here attain to;
and in the reader who can attune himself to the high pitch, he
enkindles the same kind of joyful exaltation. There is current a
detestable phrase or definition, which even Coleridge allows himself
to countenance, namely, that poetry is something which gives pleasure.
Pleasure! Do we speak of the pleasure of beholding the sun rise out of
the Atlantic or from the top of Mount Washington, or the pleasure of
standing beside Niagara, or of reading about the self-sacrifice of
Regulus or Winkelried? Pleasure is a word limited to the animal or to
the lighter feelings. "Let me have the pleasure of taking wine
with you." A good dinner gives great pleasure to a circle of gourmets.
Even enjoyment, a higher word than pleasure, should, when applied to
poetry, be conjoined with some elevating qualification; for all the
feelings impart enjoyment through their simple healthy function, and
there are people who enjoy a cock-pit, or a bull-fight, or an
execution. But poetry causes that refined, super-sensuous delight
which follows the apprehension of any thought, sentiment, act, or
scene, which rises towards the best and purest possible in the range
of that thought, sentiment, act, or scene. In the poetical there
always is exaltation, a reaching towards perfection, a subtle,
blooming spirituality. The end of poetry is not pleasure,--this were
to speak too grossly,--but refined enjoyment through emotion.

To him who has the finer sensibility to become aware of its presence,
the poetical is everywhere. The beautiful is a kiss which man gives to
Nature, who returns it; to get the kiss from her he must first give
it. Wordsworth says, "Poetry is the breath and fine spirit of all
knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all science." It might be called the aromatic
essence of all life.

A poem is the incarnation of this aroma, the condensation of it into
form. A drop of dew symbolizes a poem; for a true poem should be oval,
without angles, transparent, compact, complete in itself, graceful
from inward quality and fullness. It may be of a few lines, or of
hundreds or thousands; but there must be no superfluous line or word.
A poem drops out of the brain a fragrant distillation. A poem must be
a spiritual whole; that is, not only with the parts organized into
proportioned unity, but with the whole and the parts springing out of
the idea, the sentiment, form obedient to substance, body to soul, the
sensuous life to the inward. For enduring, ruddy incarnation, the
subject, whether it be incident, scene, sentiment, or action, must
have within its core this essential aroma. The poet (and the test of
his poetic capacity is his gift to draw the fragrance out of such a
core) keeps his conception distinctly and vividly before him. The
conception or ideal prefigurement of his theme precedes him, like the
pillar of fire in the night, drawing him onward surely and rapidly.
Otherwise he lags and flags and stumbles. The spring into poetry is on
a flash, which not only lights up the thought on which it springs, but
renews, recreates it.

A man's chief aim in life should be to better himself, to keep
bettering himself; and in this high duty the poet helps him. Poetry is
the great educator of the feelings. By seizing and holding up to view
the noblest and cleanest and best there is in human life, poetry
elevates and refines the feelings. It reveals and strengthens the
spirituality of our nature. Poetry tunes the mind. Faculty of
admiration is one of our super-animal privileges. Poetry purges and
guides admiration; and the sounder and higher our admirations, the
more admirable ourselves become.

The best poetry turns the mind inward upon itself, and sweetens its
imaginations. Our imaginations, that is, our inward thoughts, plans,
shaping our silent, interior doings, these are the chief part of us;
for out of these come most of our outward acts, and all of their
color. As is the preponderance of the man, will be this inward brood.
The timid man will imagine dangers, the anxious man troubles, the
hopeful man successes, the avaricious man accumulations, the ambitious
possession of power; and the poetic man will imagine all sorts
of perfections, be ever yearning for a better and higher, be ever
building beautiful air-castles, earthy or moral, material or ethereal,
according as the sensuous or the spiritual predominates in his nature.
Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vast
wealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzled
his contemporaries with Fonthill Abbey. Not only are Fonthill Abbeys
and all beautiful buildings achieved through the warm action of the
poetic faculty, but all improvements are brought about by its virtue.
Out of this deep, inward, creative power issue all theories and
practice for the bettering of human conditions. All original founders
and discoverers are poets: the most poetic French mind I know is that
of Fourier.

When a mind, having the texture and expansibility to become surcharged
with magnetic effluence, has moreover that aesthetic gift of rhythmic
expression which involves a sense of the beautiful, that is, of the
high and exquisite possibilities of created things,--when such a mind,
under the pressure of inward needs, betakes it to embodying in verse
its imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. _Poetry is
thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in
musical cadence._ And when we consider that thought is the gathering
of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative
sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its
tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is
heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some
sound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuine
poem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind,
and involves in its production a beatific visionariness.




III.

STYLE.


Thought, act, and speech are of one substance. Where the best things
have been done, the best things have been said. The history of Attica
is richer and more significant than that of her sister-states of old
Greece, and among them her literature is supreme. So of England in
modern Europe. And where good thoughts have been uttered the form of
those will be finest which carry the choicest life. The tree gets its
texture from the quality of its sap. Were I asked what author is the
most profitable to the student of English on account of style, I
should answer, study Shakespeare.

Have something to say, and say it in the best and fewest words, were a
good recipe for style. In this brief precept there are more
ingredients than at first view appear. To have something to say
implies that a man must write out of himself, and not chiefly out of
his memory; and so to write involves much more than many people
are aware of; in order that his style have freshness, which is a
primary need of a good style, the writer's thought must be fresh.
Then, to say his thought in the best and fewest words implies faculty
of choice in words, and faculty of getting rid of all verbal
superfluity; and these two faculties betoken proficiencies and some of
the finer aesthetic forces.

Style itself is a gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts),
not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to one
with inharmonious or defective natural powers, you might as well
attempt to teach a thrush to sing the songs of the nightingale. To be
sure, like the poetical, or the scientific, or any mental gift, it
requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most,
as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get from
others--whether through study of the best masters or through direct
rhetorical instruction--is in the mechanical portion of the art; that
is, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses,
how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and
awkwardness, and thus make most presentable and accessible what he has
to give out. Even in these superficial lessons success imports
something more than a superficial capacity. These lessons learnt, and
you have still to go behind them for style, whose cradle is within
you. _Le style c'est l'homme meme_ (a man's style is his very self),
is the oft-quoted profound sentence of Buffon. Style comes out of the
interior: beneath a genuinely good style are secret springs which give
to the surface its movement and sparkle. Mostly when people talk of
style 't is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath. In
popularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springs
beneath; in Tom Moore's, for example, or Southey's.

Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than others
in presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shaping
their utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plastic
faculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style. Tact
and craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some other
writers of more substance; still, they are only capable of so doing by
means of qualities which, however secondary, are interior and fervent,
and the skill imparted by which cannot be acquired except through the
presence of these qualities. This superiority of skill in form
is illustrated by the literature of France in comparison with the
literature of Germany, and even with that of England. The French
follow a precept thus embodied by Beranger: "Perfection of style
should be sought by all those who believe themselves called to diffuse
useful thoughts. Style, which is only the form appropriated to a
subject by art and reflection, is the passport of which every thought
has need in order to circulate, expand, and lodge itself in people's
brains. To neglect style is not to show sufficient love for the ideas
one wishes to make others adopt." And so effective is the following of
such a precept that, through careful devices and manipulating
cleverness, a brilliant success, though transitory is achieved by some
writers who range lightly over surfaces, their thoughts dipping no
deeper than a flat stone thrown to skim along the water, which it
keeps ruffling, making a momentary sprightly splash at each contact,
until, its force being soon spent, it disappears and is seen no more.

The possession of certain mental gifts constitutes a talent for
writing, gifts which, with reference to the great primary powers of
the mind, are secondary. Sainte-Beuve says of the Abbe Gerbet
that he "had naturally the flowers of speech, movement and rhythm of
phrase, measure and choice of expression, even figurative language,
what, in short, makes a talent for writing." The possessor of these
qualifications may, nevertheless, rise only a little above mediocrity.
Of the styles of many, even clever, accomplished writers, one gets a
clear notion from the remark made of a certain polished actress, that
she always played well, never better.

When Sainte-Beuve says _Rien ne vit que par le style_, he asserts in
fact the exclusive privilege of original thought to give permanence to
literary work; for nothing but an interior source can give life to
expression. The inward flow will shape itself adequately and
harmoniously in proportion as it has at full command the auxiliary,
what I have called the plastic literary qualities; but shape itself it
will, effectively and with living force, without the fullest command,
while the readiest mastery over these qualities can never give
vitality to style when are wanting primary resources. Literary
substance which does not shape itself successfully (it may not be with
the fullest success) is internally defective, is insufficient;
for if it throb with life, it will mold a form for its embodiment,
albeit that form, from lack of complete command of the secondary
agents, will not be so graceful or rich as with such command it would
have been. Wordsworth has made to English literature a permanent
addition which is of the highest worth, in spite of notable plastic
deficiencies. A conception that has a soul in it will find itself a
body, and if not a literary body, one furnished by some other of the
fine arts; or, wanting that, in practical enterprise or invention. And
the body or form will be stamped with the inward lineaments of the
man. Style issues from within, and if it does not, it is not style,
but manner. Words get all their force from the thoughts and feelings
behind them. They are necessary media, created, molded, and combined
by mental wants. Picking and polishing words and phrases is
ineffectual without the picking and polishing of the thoughts: below
the surface of words lies that which controls and vivifies style. And
then between the substance, the mental material, and the executive
faculties there must be lively harmony. The executive power is a
purely intellectual composite instrument; the force that
wields it is feeling. For the best style the wielding force must be
fine as well as rich and strong, and the shaping, harmonizing
instrument of superfine temper and smiling willingness.

Style, in writing, is the art of putting into words what you think or
feel, in such a way as to make the best of it--presupposed, that what
you think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are men
who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong
understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their
contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity,
will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in
most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a
style which for their purposes is effective. Of this class Jeffrey,
Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not winged
minds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into
an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent,
illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finer
insight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even when
most vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, by
imaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not by
freshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius,
creativeness. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers had
appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," Brougham, one of its founders and
controllers, protested that if that man were permitted to write any
more he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of the
Review were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitrary
proceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying the
instinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius.

Not less than men of talent men of genius need to cultivate style;
nay, from the copiousness and variousness of their material, and from
its very inwardness, the molds into which it is to be thrown need the
finest care. Coleridge, rich and incomparable as he is, would have
made many of his prose pages still more effective by a studious
supervision; and De Quincey tells us what labor his periods sometimes
cost him. The following advice, given in a letter from Maurice de
Guerin to his sister, may be addressed to all literary aspirants:
"Form for yourself a style which shall be the expression of
yourself. Study our French language by attentive reading, making it
your care to mark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies of
style, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In the
works of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use it
each in our own fashion."

One of the first constituents of a good style is what Coleridge calls
"progressive transition," which implies a dynamic force, a propulsive
movement, behind the pen. Hazlitt, for example, somewhat lacked this
force, and hence De Quincey is justified to speak of his solitary
flashes of thought, his "brilliancy, seen chiefly in separate
splinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreous
scintillation for a moment." One of the charms, in a high sense, of
Coleridge's page is that in him this dynamic force was present in
liveliest action. His intellect, ever enkindled by his emotions,
exacted logical sequence, and thus a rapid forward movement is
overspread by a glow of generous feeling, which, being refined by his
poetic sensibility made his style luminous and flowing.

De Quincey, treating of aphoristic writing, says, "Any man [he of
course means any man with good things in him] as he walks
through the streets may contrive to jot down an independent thought, a
short-hand memorandum of a great truth; but the labor of composition
begins when you have to put your separate threads of thought into a
loom; to weave them into a continuous whole; to connect, to introduce
them; to blow them out or expand them; to carry them to a close."
Buffon attached the greatest importance to sequence, to close
dependence, to continuous enchainment. He detested a chopped, jerky
style, that into which the French are prone to fall. Certain it is,
and from obvious causes, that much of the secret of style lies in
aptness of sequence, thought and word, through an irresistible
impulsion and pertinence, leaping forth nimbly, each taking its place
promptly, because naturally and necessarily. Through fusion and close
coherency and dependence, the flow is at once smooth and lively. The
grace as well as the strength of the living physical body depends
much, nay primarily, on the joints. So with the body of a good
writer's thoughts, that is, his mode of utterance. To the linking of
sentences and paragraphs (the links being self-wrought out of inward
sap) is due much of the buoyancy and force of style. The
springiness of the joints depends, in the body, on the quality of its
nervous life; in style, much on the marrow and validity of the
thoughts. By a sprightly stream of thought, fed from a full spring of
feeling, the current of words is kept lively and graceful. Words,
sentences, paragraphs, cannot be held closely, symmetrically,
attractively together, without the unction invisibly distilled from
brisk mental movement, movement starting from sentiment fresh and
true. Soul is the source of style. Not sensibility alone is a
prerequisite for style: the sensibility must be _active_, made active
by the fine aspiring urgency which ever demands the best. A good style
will have the sheen communicated by lubrication from within, not the
gloss of outward rubbing.

That style varies in pitch and tone according to the subject treated
ought to be self-evident. In every page of "The Merry Wives of
Windsor" we recognize Shakespeare not less palpably than in "King
Lear." In his "Recollections of Charles Lamb" De Quincey writes, "Far
be it from me to say one word in praise of those--people of how narrow
a sensibility--who imagine that a simple (that is, according to many
tastes, an unelevated and _unrhythmical_) style--take, for
instance, an Addisonian or a Swiftian style--is _unconditionally_
good. Not so: all depends upon the subject; and there is a style,
transcending these and all other modes of simplicity, by infinite
degrees, and, in the same proportion, impossible to most men, the
rhythmical, the continuous--what in French is called the
_soutenu_--which, to humbler styles stands in the relation of an organ
to a shepherd's pipe. This also finds its justification in its
subject; and the subject which _can_ justify it must be of a
corresponding quality--loftier--and therefore, rare."

I quote De Quincey because he has written more, and more profoundly as
well as more copiously, on style than any writer I know. To this
point,--the adaption of style to subject,--he returns, laying down
with clearness and truth the law which should here govern. In a paper
on Schlosser's "Literary History of the Eighteenth Century" he
reaffirms--what cannot be too strongly insisted on--the falsity of the
common opinion that Swift's style is, for all writers, a model of
excellence, showing how it is only fitted to the kind of subjects on
which Swift wrote, and concluding with this characteristic passage:
"That nearly all the blockheads with whom I have at any time had the
pleasure of conversing upon the subject of style (and pardon me for
saying that men of the most sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz.,
poetry and style, to talk _most_ like blockheads) have invariably
regarded Swift's style not as if _relatively_, (i.e., _given_ a proper
subject), but as if _absolutely_ good--good unconditionally, no matter
what the subject. Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the dean had
been required to write a pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh's immortal
apostrophe to Death, or to many passages in Sir Thomas Brown's
'Religio Medici' and his 'Urn-Burial,' or to Jeremy Taylor's inaugural
sections of his 'Holy Living and Dying,' do you know what would have
happened? Are you aware what sort of a ridiculous figure your poor
bald Jonathan would have cut? About the same that would be cut by a
forlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if
suddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival of
Belshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords."

That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of high
excellence ought to be a truism. Through a certain equilibrium among
his faculties, and assiduous literary culture, such a one may
excel colleagues who move on the same bounded plane; but that is all.
From the shallowest utterance, where, thoughts and feelings lying just
below the surface, there can be no strong lights and shadows, no
splendid play in the exposition, styles range, with the men who make
them, through all degrees of liveliness and significance and power, up
to that simple grandeur which conceals a vast volume of thought, and
implies a divine ruling of multiplicity.

In a good style, on whatever degree it stands, there must be a full
marriage between word and thought, so clean an adjustment of
expression to material as to leave no rough edges or nodes. The words
must not be too big or too shiny for the thought; they must not stand
out from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter. A style can
hardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, was
sometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting.

A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer be
one; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a free
sympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; his
subject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject. That he be
sincere is not enough; he must be cordial; then he will be magnetic,
attractive. You must love your work to do it well.

A good style is a stream, and a lively stream: it flows ever onward
actively. The worst vice a style can have is languor. With some
writers a full stop is a double full stop: the reader does not get
forward. Much writing consists of little more than sluggish eddies. In
many minds there is not leap enough for a style. Excellence in style
demands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve a
somewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy and
poetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolable
sequence.

Writers there are who get to be partially self-enslaved by a routine
of phrases and words under the repetition of which thought is hardened
by its molds. Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness,
even when there is a current of intellectual activity. Writers most
liable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves to
set opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow,--a sad
condition for man or writer.

Hypocrites in writing, as in talking and doing, end badly. A
writer who through his style aims to seem better or other than himself
is soon found out. The desire so to seem argues a literary incapacity;
it looks as though the very self--which will shine through the
style--lacked confidence in its own substance. And after all, in
writing as in doing and talking, a man must be himself, will be
himself in spite of himself. One cannot put on his neighbor's style
any more than he can put on his neighbor's limbs.

Not only has prose its melody as well as verse, but there is no
_style_ unless sentences are pervaded, I might say animated, by
rhythm; lacking appropriate movement, they are inelastic, inert,
drowsy. Rhythm implies a soul behind it and in it. The best style will
have a certain rotundity imparted by the ceaseless rocking of thought
in the deep ocean of sentiment. Without some music in them sentences
were torpid, impracticable. To put thoughts and words so together that
there shall be a charm in the presentation of them, there needs a
lively harmony among certain faculties, a rhythm in the mind. Hence
Cicero said that to write prose well, one must be able to write verse.
The utterance of music in song or tune, in artful melody or choral
harmony, is but the consummation of a power which is ever a sweetener
in life's healthily active exhibitions, the power of sound. Nature is
alive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life.
On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes
in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a
broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray
clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of
bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from
unseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing,
unseen, and ever rhythmical.

The heartier and deeper the thought, the more melody will there be in
its fit expression, and thence the higher range of style is only
reached by poets, or by men who, though poetically minded, yet lack
"the accomplishment of verse." The sudden electric injection of light
into a thought or object or sentiment--in this consists the gift
poetical, a gift which implies a sensibility so keen and select as to
kindle the light, and an intellect fine and firm enough to hold and
transmit it. A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardly
rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will
understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is
utterly devoid of the faculty of style (_denue de la faculte du
style_). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great
Moliere. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in
prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and
audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too,
some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers,
have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities,
with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the
exclusive property of the poetic idiom."

A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to the
better, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy in
presence of the defective or the incomplete. This endowment implies a
mind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements of
thought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes the
writer exacting towards himself. Hence only he attains to a genuine
correctness; he was correct by instinct before he was so by
discipline. In the whole as well as the parts he requires finish and
proportion. Within him there is a momentum which fills out his thought
and its worded envelope to warm convexity. Only he has the fine tact
and discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses. The
best style is organic in its details as well as its structure; it
shows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy and
plastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor. Goethe says that
only poets and artists have method, because they require to see a
thing before them in a completed, rounded form. Writing is a fine art,
and one of the finest; and he who would be a master in this art must
unite genial gifts with conscientious culture.

Of style the highest examples, therefore, are to be found in the verse
of the great poets, of the deep rhythmic souls who make a sure, agile
intellect their willing Ariel; and no prose writer gets to be a master
in style but through kindred endowment. The compact, symmetrical
combination of gifts and acquirements, of genius with talent, demanded
for the putting forth of a fresh, priceless poem, this he need not
have; but his perceptions must be brightened by the light
whose fountain is the inward enjoyment of the more perfect in form,
deed, and sentiment, and his best thoughts suffused with that
fragrance whose only source is the ravishment of the beautiful.




IV.

DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS.[5]

    [5] Putnam's Magazine, 1868.


"Ghosts and witches are the best machinery for a modern epic." So said
Charles Fox, who fed his imagination on verse of this aspiring class.
Fox was no literary oracle, and his opinion is here cited only as
evidence that the superearthly is an acknowledged element in the
epopee. The term "machinery" implies ignorance of the import of the
super-earthly in epic poetry, an ignorance attendant on materialism
and a virtual unbelief. No poet who should accept the term could write
an epic, with or without the "machinery." Such acceptance would
betoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a want
of faith in the invisible supervisive energies.

A genuine epic, of the first class, is a world-poem, a poem of depth
and height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation of
a race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare the
method of the divine intervention in the momentous work. The epic
poet, worthy of the lofty task, has such large sympathies, together
with such consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpret
and incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some of
them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the
senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are
what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls--

  "Light half-believers in our casual creeds."

Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, active
presence on the earth of the god Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Had
they not, there would have been no "Iliad," no "Paradise Lost."

Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and
an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine
judgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision
through hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he
lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought
them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of
Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of
Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of
his time, fantastic, unfashioned--all this was his material. But all
this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame.
The true material of a poem is the poet's own nature and thoughts, his
sentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations,
his veriest self, the whole of him, especially the best of him.

Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, which
were so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day,--and
literature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious,--no more
broad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as all
poets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed,
moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes for
its play. The present teeming world to be transfigured into the world
to come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to a
manly, powerful nature, passionate, creative, descriptive, to a
stirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the Italian
scene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads of
Italian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict;
and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy,
while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to
tune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, passionate, and baffled,
the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directly
woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times,
contemporaneous history tyrannized over him.

Dante's high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noble
character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his
personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the
theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as
molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous
initiator, the august father of modern poetry--all this has combined
to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six
centuries. But even all this would not have made him one of the three
or four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath of
universal European translation. What gave his rare qualities their
most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar
superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that
he is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven--of the world to
come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured
more or less ever since--the word-painter of that visionary, awful
hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.

Those imaginations as to future being--to the Middle Ages so vivid as
to become soul-realities--Dante, with his transcendent pictorial
mastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine of
popular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperial
superscription. Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future,
the reverse of poetical. Hunger will give you tormenting imaginations
of breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with pictures
of gains that are to be. But imaginations of the life beyond the
grave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality. The having them
with any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritual
prepossessions: men must be self-possessed with their higher self,
with their spirit. The very attempt to figure your disembodied state
is an attempt poetical. To succeed with any distinctness denotes some
power of creative projection: without wings, this domain cannot be
entered. In Dante's time these attempts were common. Through his
preeminent qualifications, crowned with the poetic faculty, the
faculty of sympathy with ideal excellence, his attempt was a great, a
unique success.

To accompany Dante through his vast triple trans-terrestrial world,
would seem to demand in the reader a sustained effort of imagination.
But Dante is so graphic, and, we might add, corporeal in his pictures,
puts such a pulse into his figures, that the artistic illusion
wherewith we set out is exchanged for, or rather overborne by, an
illusion of the reality of what is represented. Yet from the opening
of the first canto he is ever in the super-earthly world, and every
line of the fourteen thousand has the benefit of a super-earthly, that
is, a poetic atmosphere, which lightens it, transfigures it, floats
it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every
scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is
presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness,
which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader
finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is
mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the spiritual
imagination.

Dante had it in him,--this hell, purgatory, and heaven--so full and
warm and large was his nature. Within his own breast he had felt, with
the keen intensity of the poetic temperament, the loves and hates, the
griefs and delights of life. Through his wealth of heart he had a
fellow-feeling for all the joys and sorrows of his brother-men, and,
added to this, an artist's will and want to reproduce them, and _to_
reproduce them a clear, outwelling, intellectual vivacity. He need
scarcely have told us that his poem, though treating of spirits,
relates to the passions and doings of men in the flesh. He chose a
theme that at once seized the attention of his readers, and gave to
himself a boundless scope. His field was all past history, around the
altitudes of which are clustered biographical traits and sketches of
famous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and,
along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, with
its tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, its
wraths and triumphs.

Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but,
besides that many of them were ready to his hand, this kind of
inventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is the
necessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility and
abundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; and
yet the "Vicar of Wakefield" (not to go so high as "Tristram Shandy"
and "Don Quixote") is worth all their hundred volumes of tales put
together. What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement,
and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception,
does the framework of incident support and display? That is the
aesthetic question. The novels of every day bristle with this material
inventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event and
sensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build.
The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditions
of the "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso," is not admirable for
their mere exuberance and diversity,--for that might have come from a
comparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds then
were, with the passionate mediaeval beliefs,--but for the heart there
is in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and
thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift
poetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as
regards the epic quality of Dante's poem, an important consequence, is
that there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the reader
are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and
reacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention.
Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, each
one awakening a new interest. Hereby the mind is distracted, the
attention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figure
or group. We pass through a gallery of pictures and portraits,
classed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, and
separated by the projection of as many different frames. We are on a
weird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, however
attractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet. We go from person to
person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey,
although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has
effaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every
limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally
reared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a great
unity, the "Divina Commedia," as an organic, artistic whole, is
inferior to the "Iliad" and "Paradise Lost," and to the Grecian and
Shakespearean tragedies.

The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and,
with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to his
page--fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination. Among
the many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, most
active is that of form. Goethe says of him, "The great intellectual
and moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shall
be furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view that
just in his life-time--Giotto being his contemporary--was the re-birth
of plastic art in all its natural strength. By this sensuous,
form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante,
too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized
objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline.
Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it
were, after nature." In recognition of the same characteristic,
Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets,
ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any
other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of
the 'Divina Commedia.'"

Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his
strongest side: he is preeminently a poet of form. In his mind and in
his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poet
of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but
more a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still his
intellect is more specific than generic. His subject--chosen by the
concurrence of his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual needs--admits
of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected
delineations. The personages of his poem are independent one of the
other, and are thence the more easily drawn. Nor does Dante abound in
transferable passages, sentences of universal application, from being
saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it with
diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance,
more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and
profound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider:
he rivets us through distant grand association, by great suggestion.
Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says,--

          "As when the sun new risen
  Looks through the horizontal misty air,
  Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon,
  In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
  On half the nations,"

Setting aside the epithets "horizontal" and "disastrous," which are
poetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen through
a mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids us
to see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate,--not
involving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merely
between physical, not between subtle, relations,--that Dante chiefly
deals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet,
but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination.
The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when the
intellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance with
aspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to the
utmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought or
image which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to the
reader a new delight. Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, there
is a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes the
passage--

      "and with fear of change
  Perplexes monarchs."

This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire;
this gives its greatness to the passage.

Dante, by the distinctness of his outline, addresses himself more to
the reader's senses and perception; Milton rouses his higher
imaginative capacity. In the whole "Inferno," is there a sentence so
aglow as this line and a half of "Paradise Lost"?

      "And the torrid clime
  Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire."

Or is there in Dante any sound so loud and terrible as that shout of
Milton's demon-host--

      "That tore Hell's concave, and beyond
  Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night"?

Here the unity of his theme stands Milton in stead for grandeur and
breadth.

Dante is copious in similes. Such copiousness by no means proves
poetic genius; and a superior poet may have less command of similes
than one inferior to him. Wordsworth has much less of this command
than Moore. But when a poet does use similes, he will be likely often
to put of his best into them, for they are captivating instruments and
facilities for poetic expansion. When a poet is in warm sympathy with
the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his
similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition.
In citing some of the most prominent in the "Divina Commedia," we at
once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest
translators, using the version of Dr. Parsons for extracts from the
"Inferno," that of Mr. Dayman for those from the "Purgatorio," and
that of Mr. Longfellow for those from the "Paradiso."

  "As well-filled sails, which in the tempest swell,
    Drop, with folds flapping, if the mast be rent;
  So to the earth that cruel monster fell,
    And straightway down to Hell's Fourth Pit he went."
                        _Inferno_: Canto VII.

  "Swept now amain those turbid waters o'er
    A tumult of a dread portentous kind,
  Which rocked with sudden spasms each trembling shore,
    Like the mad rushing of a rapid wind;
  As when, made furious by opposing heats,
    Wild through the wood the unbridled tempest scours,
  Dusty and proud, the cringing forest beats,
    And scatters far the broken limbs and flowers;
  Then fly the herds,--the swains to shelter scud.
    Freeing mine eyes, 'Thy sight,' he said, 'direct
  O'er the long-standing scum of yonder flood,
    Where, most condense, its acrid streams collect.'"
                        _Inferno_: Canto IX.

  "When, lo! there met us, close beside our track,
    A troop of spirits. Each amid the band
  Eyed us, as men at eve a passer-by
    'Neath a new moon; as closely us they scanned,
  As an old tailor doth a needle's eye."
                        _Inferno_: Canto XV.

  "And just as frogs that stand, with noses out
    On a pool's margin, but beneath it hide
  Their feet and all their bodies but the snout,
    So stood the sinners there on every side."
                        _Inferno_: Canto XXII.

  "A cooper's vessel, that by chance hath been
    Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft,
  Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin
    I noticed lengthwise through his carcass cleft."
                        _Inferno_: Canto XXVIII.

  "We tarried yet the ocean's brink upon,
    Like unto people musing of their way,
  Whose body lingers when the heart hath gone;
    And lo! as near the dawning of the day,
  Down in the west, upon the watery floor,
    The vapor-fogs do Mars in red array,
  Even such appeared to me a light that o'er
    The sea so quickly came, no wing could match
  Its moving. Be that vision mine once more."
                       _Purgatorio_: Canto II.

  "And thou, remembering well, with eye that sees
    The light, wilt know thee like the sickly one
  That on her bed of down can find no ease,
    But turns and turns again her ache to shun,"
                       _Purgatorio_: Canto VI.

  "'T was now the hour the longing heart that bends
     In voyagers, and meltingly doth sway,
   Who bade farewell at morn to gentle friends;
     And wounds the pilgrim newly bound his way
   With poignant love, to hear some distant bell
     That seems to mourn the dying of the day;
   When I began to slight the sounds that fell
     Upon my ear, one risen soul to view,
   Whose beckoning hand our audience would compel."
                        _Purgatorio_: Canto VIII.

  "There I the shades see hurrying up to kiss
     Each with his mate from every part, nor stay,
   Contenting them with momentary bliss.
     So one with other, all their swart array
   Along, do ants encounter snout with snout,
     So haply probe their fortune and their way."
                        _Purgatorio_: Canto XXVI.

  "Between two viands, equally removed
     And tempting, a free man would die of hunger
   Ere either he could bring unto his teeth.
     So would a lamb between the ravenings
   Of two fierce wolves stand fearing both alike;
     And so would stand a dog between two does.
   Hence, if I held my peace, myself I blame not,
     Impelled in equal measure by my doubts,
   Since it must be so, nor do I commend."
                          _Paradiso_: Canto IV.

  "And as a lute and harp, accordant strung
     With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make
   To him by whom the notes are not distinguished,
     So from the lights that there to me appeared
  Upgathered through the cross a melody,
    Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn."
                          _Paradiso_: Canto XIV.

  "As through the pure and tranquil evening air
    There shoots from time to time a sudden fire,
  Moving the eyes that steadfast were before,
    And seems to be a star that changeth place,
  Except that in the part where it is kindled
    Nothing is missed, and this endureth little;
  So from the horn that to the right extends
    Unto that cross's foot there ran a star
  Out of the constellation shining there."
                          _Paradiso_: Canto XV.

  "Even as remaineth splendid and serene
    The hemisphere of air, when Boreas
  Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest,
    Because is purified and resolved the rack
  That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs
    With all the beauties of its pageantry;
  Thus did I likewise, after that my lady
    Had me provided with a clear response,
  And like a star in Heaven the truth was seen."
                          _Paradiso_: Canto XXVIII.

The first question to ask in regard to a simile found in verse is, Is
it poetical? Is there, as effect of its introduction, any heightening
of the reader's mood, any cleansing of his vision, any clarification
of the medium through which he is looking? Is there a sudden play of
light that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates the
object before him? Few of those just quoted, put to such test, could
be called more than conventionally poetical--if this be not a
solecism. To illustrate one sensuous object by another does not
animate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions.
Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there is
through them no steeping of intellectual perception in emotion. They
may help to make the object ocularly more apparent, but they do not
make the feeling a party to the movement. When this is done,--as in
the examples from Canto XV. of the "Inferno," and Canto VIII. of the
"Purgatorio,"--what an instantaneous vivification of the picture!

But in the best of them the poetic gleam is not so unlooked-for bright
as in the best of Shakespeare's. As one instance out of many: towards
the end of the great soliloquy of Henry V., after enumerating the
emblems and accompaniments of royalty, the king continues,--

  "No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
  Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
  Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave;
  Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind,
  Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread;
  Never sees horrid night, the child of hell;
  But, like a lackey, from the rise to set,
  Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
  Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn,
  Doth rise _and help Hyperion to his horse_"

What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, so
fresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beauty
and healthfulness! Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination,
that, in a twinkle, transmutes into the squire of Hyperion a stolid
rustic, making him suddenly radiant with the glory of morning. It is
by this union of unexpectedness with fitness, of solidity with
brilliancy, of remoteness with instantaneous presence, in his figures,
denoting overflow of resources, a divine plenitude, so that we feel
after Shakespeare has said his best things, that he could go on saying
more and better,--it is especially by this lustrous, ever-teeming
fullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare throws a
farther and whiter and a broader light than Dante. Nor does Dante's
page glisten, as Shakespeare's so often does, with metaphor, or
compressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritual
sphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with the
web of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on the
surface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see a
circuit of shining ripple, caused by schools of fish that have come up
from the wealth in the depths below to help the sun to glisten,--a
sign of life, power, and abundance.

Like his great compeer, Milton, Dante fails of universality from want
of humor. Neither had any fun in him. This was the only fault
(liberally to interpret Can's conduct) that Dante's host, Can Grande
of Verona, had to find with him. The subjects of both poets
(unconsciously chosen perhaps from this very defect of humor) were
predominantly religious, and their theology, which was that of their
times, was crude and cruel. The deep, sympathetic earnestness, which
is the basis of the best humor, they had, but, to use an illustration
of Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down,--a great feat,
only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highest
manifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throws
such rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom,
and, with the fool in "Lear," forces you, like a child, to smile
through warmest tears of sympathy. Humor imparts breadth and buoyancy
to tolerance, enabling it to dandle lovingly the faults and
follies of men; through humor the spiritual is calm and clear enough
to sport with and toss the sensual; it is a compassionate, tearful
delight; in its finest mood, an angelic laughter.

Of pathos Dante has given examples unsurpassed in literature. By the
story of Ugolino the chords of the heart are so thrilled that pity and
awe possess us wholly; and by that of Francesca they are touched to
tenderest sympathy. But Ugolino is to Lear what a single
fire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes is
to a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape with a
hundred flashes.

All the personages of Dante's poem (unless we regard himself as one)
are spirits. Shakespeare, throughout his many works, gives only a few
glimpses into the world beyond the grave; but how grandly by these few
is the imagination expanded. Clarence's dream, "lengthened after
life," in which he passes "the melancholy flood," is almost
super-Dantesque, concentrating in a few ejaculative lines a fearful
foretaste of trans-earthly torment for a bad life on earth. And the
great ghost in "Hamlet," when you read of him, how shadowy real!
Dante's representation of disembodied humanity is too pagan, too
palpable, not ghostly enough, not spiritualized with hope and awe.

Profound, awakening, far-stretching, much enfolding, thought-breeding
thoughts, that can only grow in the soil of pure, large sensibilities,
and by them are cast up in the heave and glow of inward motion, to be
wrought by intellect and shaped in the light of the beautiful,--of
these, which are the test of poetic greatness, Dante, if we may
venture to say so, has not more or brighter examples than Milton, and
not so many as Goethe; while of such passages, compactly embodying as
they do the finer insights of a poetic mind, there are more in a
single one of the greater tragedies of Shakespeare, than in all the
three books of the "Divina Commedia."

Juxtaposition beside Shakespeare, even if it bring out the
superiorities of the English bard, is the highest honor paid to any
other great poet. Glory enough is it if admiration can lift Dante so
high as to take him into the same look that beholds Shakespeare; what
though the summit of the mighty Englishman shine alone in the sky, and
the taller giant carry up towards heaven a larger bulk and more varied
domains. The traveler, even if he come directly from wondering
at Mont Blanc in its sublime presence, will yet stand with earnest
delight before the majesty of the Yungfrau and the Eigher.

But it is time to speak of Dante in English.

"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible, that you might
discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as to seek to
transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet."
Thus writes a great poet, Shelley, in his beautiful "Defense of
Poetry." But have we not in modern tongues the creations of Homer, and
of Plato, who Shelley, on the same page, says is essentially a poet?
And can we estimate the loss the modern mind would suffer by
deprivation of them in translated form? Pope's Homer--still Homer
though so Popish--has been a not insignificant chapter in the culture
of thousands, who without it would have known no more of Hector and
Achilles and the golden glowing cloud of passion and action through
which they are seen superbly shining, than what a few of them would
incidently have learnt from Lempriere. Lord Derby's Iliad has gone
through many editions already. And Job and the Psalms: what should we
have done without them in English? Translations are the
telegraphic conductors that bring us great messages from those in
other lands and times, whose souls were so rich and deep that from
their words their fellow-men, in all parts of the globe, draw truth
and wisdom forever. The flash on which the message was first launched
has lost some of its vividness by the way; but the purport of the
message we have distinctly, and the joy or grief wherewith it is
freighted, and even much of its beauty. Shall we not eat oranges,
because on being translated from Cuba to our palates they have lost
somewhat of their flavor? In reading a translated poem we wish to have
as much of the essence of the original, that is, as much of the
poetry, as possible. A poem it is we sit down to read, not a relation
of facts, or an historical or critical or philosophical or theological
exposition,--a poem, only in another dress. Thence a work in verse,
that has poetic quality enough to be worth translating, must be made
to lose by the process as little as may be of its worth; and its worth
every poem owes entirely to its poetic quality and the degree of that.
A prose translation of a poem is an aesthetic impertinence,
Shakespeare was at first opened to the people of the Continent
in prose, because there was not then culture enough to reproduce him
in verse. And in Shakespeare there is so much practical sense, so much
telling comment on life, so much wit, such animal spirits, such
touching stories so well told, that the great gain of having him even
in prose concealed the loss sustained by the absence of rhythmic
sound, and by the discoloration (impallidation, we should say, were
the word already there) of hundreds of liveliest tinted flowers, the
deflowering of many delicate stems. Forty years ago, Mr. Hay ward
translated the "Faust" of Goethe into prose; but let any one compare
the Hymn of the Archangels and other of the more highly-wrought
passages, as rendered by him, with any of the better translations in
verse,--with that of Mr. Brooks for example,--to perceive at once the
insufficiency, the flatness and meagreness of even so verbally
faithful a prose version. The effect on "Faust," or on any high
passionate poem, of attempting to put it into prose, is akin to what
would be the effect on an exquisite _bas-relief_ of reducing its
projection one half by a persevering application of pumice. In all
genuine verse (that is, in all poetic verse) the substance is so
inwrought into the form and sound, that if in translating you entirely
disregard these, rejecting both rhyme and measure, you subject the
verse to a second depletion right upon that which it has to suffer by
the transplanting of it into another soil.

The translator of a poem has a much higher and subtler duty than just
to take the words and through them attempt passively to render the
page into his own language. He must brace himself into an active
state, a creative mood, the most creative he can command, then
transport himself into the mind and mental attitude of the poet he
would translate, feeling and seeing as the poet saw and felt. To get
into the mood out of which the words sprang, he should go behind the
words, embracing them from within, not merely seizing them from
without. Having imbued himself with the thought and sentiment of the
original, let him, if he can, utter them in a still higher key. Such
surpassing excellence would be the truest fidelity to the original,
and any cordial poet would especially rejoice in such elevation of his
verse; for the aspiring writer will often fall short of his ideal, and
to see it more nearly approached by a translator who has been kindled
by himself, to find some delicate new flower revealed in a nook which
he had opened, could not but give him a delight akin to that
of his own first inspirations.

A poem, a genuine poem, assumes its form by an inward necessity.
"Paradise Lost," conceived in Milton's brain, could not utter itself
in any other mode than the unrhymed harmonies that have given to our
language a new music. It could not have been written in the Spenserian
stanza. What would the "Fairy Queen" be in blank verse? For his theme
and mood Dante felt the need of the delicate bond of rhyme, which
enlivens musical cadence with sweet reiteration. Rhyme was then a new
element in verse, a modern aesthetic creation; and it is a help and an
added beauty, if it be not obtrusive and too self-conscious, and if it
be not a target at which the line aims; for then it becomes a clog to
freedom of movement, and the pivot of factitious pauses, that are
offensive both to sense and to ear. Like buds that lie half-hidden in
leaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the cover
of words, falling on the ear as though they were the irrepressible
strokes of a melodious pulse at the heart of the verse.

The _terza rima_--already in use--Dante adopted as suitable to
continuous narrative. With his feeling and aesthetic want
rhymed verse harmonized, the triple repetition offering no obstacle,
Italian being copious in endings of like sound. His measure is iambic,
free iambic, and every line consists, not of ten syllables, but of
eleven, his native tongue having none other than feminine rhymes. And
this weakness is so inherent in Italian speech, that every line even
of the blank verse in all the twenty-two tragedies of Alfieri ends
femininely, that is, with an unaccented eleventh syllable. In all
Italian rhyme there is thus always a double rhyme, the final syllable,
moreover, invariably ending with a vowel. This, besides being too much
rhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect,
the eleventh syllable being a superfluous syllable.

In these two prominent features English verse is different from
Italian: it has feminine rhymes, but the larger part of its rhymes are
masculine; and it has fewer than Italian. This second characteristic,
the comparative fewness of rhymes, is likewise one of its sources of
strength: it denotes musical richness and not poverty, as at first
aspect it seems to do, the paucity of like-sounding syllables implying
variety in its sounds. It has all the vocalic syllables and
endings it needs for softness, and incloses them mostly in consonants
for condensation, vigor, and emphasis.

Primarily the translator has to consider the resources and
individualities of his own tongue. In the case of Dante the rhythmical
basis is the same in both languages; for the iambic measure is our
chief poetic vehicle, wrought to perfection by Shakespeare and Milton.
There only remains, then, rhyme and the division into stanzas. Can the
_terza rima_, as used by Dante, be called a stanza? The lines are not
separated into trios, but run into one another, clinging very properly
to the rhymes, which, interlinking all the stanzas by carrying the
echo still onward, bind each canto into one whole, just as our
Spenserian form does each stanza into a whole of nine lines. Whether
stanzas, strictly speaking, or not, shall we say our mind frankly
about the _terza rima_? To us it seems not deserving of admiration
_for its own sake_; and we surmise that had it not been consecrated by
Dante, neither Byron nor Shelley would have used it for original
poems. We are not aware that Dante's example has been followed by any
poet of note in Italy. _Terza rima_ keeps the attention suspended too
long, keeps it ever on the stretch for something that is to
come, and never does come, until at the end of the canto, namely, the
last rhyme. The rhymes cannot be held down, but are ever escaping and
running ahead. It looks somewhat like an artificial contrivance of the
first rhymers of an uncultivated age. But Dante used it for his great
song; and there it stands forever, holding in its folds the "Divina
Commedia."

Now, in rendering into English the poem of Dante, is it essential,--in
order to fulfill the conditions of successful poetic translation,--to
preserve the triple rhyme? Not having in English a corresponding
number of rhymes, will not the translator have to resort to
transpositions, substitutions, forcings, indirections, in order to
compass the meaning and the poetry? Place the passages already cited
from Mr. Dayman beside the original, and the reader will be surprised
to see how direct and literal, how faithful at once to the Italian
thought and to English idiom in expressing it, Mr. Dayman is. His
harness of triplets seems hardly to constrain his movement, so
skillfully does he wear it. If we confront him with the spirited
version in quatrains of Dr. Parsons, in the passages cited
from the "Inferno," or with those from the "Paradiso," in Mr.
Longfellow's less free unrhymed version, the resources and flexibility
of Mr. Dayman in handling the difficult measure will be again
manifest. To enable our readers to compare the translations with the
original and with one another, we will give the Italian, and then the
three versions, of the latter part of the Francesca story, from Canto
V. of the "Inferno:"--

  "Poi mi rivolsi a loro, e parlai io,
    E cominciai: Francesca, i tuoi martiri
  A lagrimar mi fanno tristo, e pio.
    Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri,
  A che, e come concedette Amore
    Che conosceste i dubbiosi desiri?
  Ed ella a me: nessun maggior dolore,
    Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
  Nella miseria, e cio sa 'l tuo dottore.
    Ma se a conoscer la prima radice
  Del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
    Faro come colui che piange, e dice.
  Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto
    Di Lancilotto, come Amor lo strinse.
  Soli eravamo, e senza alcun sospetto.
    Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
  Quella lettura, e scolorocci 'l viso:
    Ma solo un punto fu quel, che ci vinse.
  Qando leggemmo il disiato riso
    Esser baciato da cotanto amante,
  Questi, che mai da me non sia diviso,
    La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante.
  Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse:
    Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.
  Mentre che l'uno spirito queste disse,
    L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade
  Io venni meno come s'io morisse,
    E caddi, come corpo morto cade."


Mr. Dayman:--

  "Then toward them turned again: 'Thy racking woe,'
    I said, 'Francesca, wrings from out mine eyes
  The pious drops that sadden as they flow.
    But tell me, in your hour of honeyed sighs,
  By whom and how love pitying broke the spell,
    And in your doubtful longings made too wise.'
  And she to me: 'No keener pang hath hell,
    Than to recall, amid some deep distress,
  Our happier time: thy teacher knows it well.
    Yet if desire so strong thy soul possess
  To trace the root from whence our love was bred,
    His part be mine, who tells and weeps no less.
  'T was on a day when we for pastime read
    Of Lancillot, how love snared him to ruin:
  We were alone, nor knew suspicious dread.
    Oft on that reading paused our eyes, renewing
  Their glance; and from our cheeks the color started;
    But one sole moment wrought for our undoing:
  When that we read of lover so kind-hearted
    Kissing the smile so coveted before,
  He that from me shall never more be parted
    Kissed me with lip to lip, trembling all o'er.
  The broker of our vows, it was the lay,
    And he who wrote--that day we read no more.'
  The other spirit, while the first did say
    These words, so moaned, that with soft remorse
  As death had stricken me, I swooned away,
    And down I fell, heavily as falls a corse."


Mr. Longfellow:--

  "Then unto them I turned me, and I spake,
  And I began: 'Thine agonies, Francesca,
  Sad and compassionate to weeping make me.
  But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs,
  By what and in what manner Love conceded
  That you should know your dubious desires?'
  And she to me: 'There is no greater sorrow
  Than to be mindful of the happy time
  In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.
  But if to recognize the earliest root
  Of love in us thou hast so great desire,
  I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.
  One day we reading were for our delight
  Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthrall.
  Alone we were, and without any fear.
  Full many a time our eyes together drew
  That reading, and drove the color from our faces;
  But one point was it that o'ercame us.
  Whenas we read of the much-longed-for smile
  Being by such a noble lover kissed,
  This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
  Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
  Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
  That day no farther did we read therein.'
  And all the while one spirit uttered this,
  The other one did weep so, that, for pity,
  I swooned away as if I had been dying,
  And fell even as a dead body falls."


Dr. Parsons:--

  "Then, turning round to them, I thus began:
    'Francesca! tears must overflow mine eyes:
  My pitying soul thy martyr-throes unman;
    But tell me,--in the time of happy sighs,
  Your vague desires how gave Love utterance first?"
    And she to me: "The mightiest of all woes
  Is, in the midst of misery, to be cursed
    With bliss remembered,--this thy teacher knows.
  Yet, wouldst thou learn our passion's root and head,
    As one may speak whose eyes with tears are dim,
  So will I speak. Together once we read
    The tale of Lancelot,--how Love bound him.
  Alone we were without suspecting aught:
    Oft in perusal paled our cheeks their hue,
  And oft our eyes each other's glances caught;
    But one sole passage 't was which both o'erthrew.
  At reading of the longed-for smile,--to be
    By such a lover's kissing so much blest,
  This dearest--never shalt thou part from me!
    His lips to mine, to mine, all trembling, pressed.
  The writer was our Galeot with his book:--
    That day we read no further on." She stopped:
  Meanwhile he moaned so that compassion took
    My sense away, and like a corse I dropped.

Observe that Dr. Parsons has put Dante's twenty-eight lines of eleven
syllables into twenty-four lines of ten syllables; and this without
losing a drop of the precious stream he undertakes to pour. But why
does he make Francesca address her companion personally, instead of
saying, "who shall never part from me?" And why does Mr. Dayman say,
"pious drops," instead of piteous? Mr. Dayman and Mr. Longfellow fill
up the twenty-eight lines. In neither of the three is there
any strain or wresting of the sense. But all three, and before them
Lord Byron and Carey, mistranslate this passage,--

  "Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
    Quella lettura."

All these translators interpret it to mean, that while they read,
their eyes often met; whereas Dante says, they read that passage over
more than once; or, literally rendered, several times that reading or
passage drew to it their eyes. To restore the meaning of the original
adds to the refinement of the scene.

Why does Mr. Longfellow use such long words as _compassionate_ instead
of _pitiful_ or _piteous_, _recognize_ for _know_, _palpitating_ for
_trembling_, _conceded that you should know_ for _gave you to know_?
By the resolution to translate line for line, Mr. Longfellow ties his
poetic hands. The first effect of this self-binding is, to oblige him
to use often long Latin-English instead of short Saxon-English words,
that is, words that in most cases lend themselves less readily to
poetic expression. Mr. Dayman, not translating line for line, is free
from this prosaic incumbrance; but as he makes it a rule to himself
that every English canto shall contain the same number of lines as its
original, he is obliged, much more often than Mr. Longfellow,
to throw in epithets or words not in the Italian. And Dr. Parsons,
who, happily freeing himself from either verbal or numerical bond, in
several instances compresses a canto into two or three lines less than
the Italian, and the XXXI. into nine lines less, might with advantage
have curtailed each canto ten or twelve lines.

Do what we will, poetic translation is brought about more from without
than from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, a
lack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in good
original work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in so
far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the
translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full
swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr.
Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the
words; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetry
with a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a
billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice
passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity,
this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in
the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some
pages, have--contrary to all good usage--the superfluous eleventh
syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson
in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do
good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his
Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book
of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in
dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a
weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close
to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is
still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic
endings--and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven
syllables and on some pages more than a third--do a part in causing
Mr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the
chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would
sound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings are
relaxed.

Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volume
where opposite each English page is the corresponding page of
the original, as in Mr. Dayman's, one cannot fail to be struck with
the comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of the
comparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as the
strongest exemplification, the ever-recurring _and_, and the
often-repeated _is_, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter,
_e_. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In lines
of thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants to
fourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators have
about twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one. From this
comparative rejection of consonants, Italian cannot, as English can,
bind into one syllable words of seven or eight letters, like _friends_
and _straight_, nor even words of six letters, like _chimed_,
_shoots_, _thwart_, _spring_; nor does Italian abound as English does
in monosyllables, and the few it has are mostly of but two or three
letters. In combination its syllables sometimes get to four letters,
as in _fronte_ and _braccia_. As a consequence hereof, Dante's lines,
although always of eleven syllables, average about twenty-nine
letters, while those of the three translators about thirty-three.
Hence, the poem in their versions carries more weight than the
original; its soul is more cumbered with body.

In order to the faithful reproduction of Dante, to the giving the best
transcript, possible in English, of his thought and feeling, should
not regard be had to the essential difference between the syllabic
constitutions of the two languages, what may be called the physical
basis of the two mediums of utterance? Here is the Francesca story,
translated in the spirit of this suggestion:--

  I turned to them, and then I spake:
    "Francesca! tears o'erfill mine eyes,
  Such pity thy keen pangs awake.
    But say: in th' hour of sweetest sighs,
  By what and how found Love relief
    And broke thy doubtful longing's spell?"
  And she: "There is no greater grief
    Than joy in sorrow to retell.
  But if so urgently one seeks
    To know our Love's first root, I will
  Do as he does who weeps and speaks.
    One day of Lancelot we still
  Read o'er, how love held him enchained.
    Without mistrust we were alone.
  Our cheeks oft were of color drained:
    One passage vanquished us, but one.
  When we read of lips longed for pressed
    By such a lover with a kiss,
  This one whom naught from me shall wrest,
    All trembling kissed my mouth. To this
  That book and writer brought us. We
    No farther read that day." While she
  Thus spake, the other spirit wept
    So bitterly, with pity I
  Fell motionless, my senses swept
    By swoon, as one about to die.

In the very first line two Italian trisyllables, _rivolsi_ and
_parlai_, are given in English with literal fidelity by two
monosyllables, _turned_ and _spake_. In the fourth observe how, in a
word-for-word rendering, the eleven Italian syllables become, without
any forcing, eight English:

  "Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri:"
  "But tell me: in th' hour of sweet sighs."

For the sake of a more musical cadence, this line is slightly
modified. Again, in the line,--

  "Than joy in sorrow to retell,"

_joy_ represents, and represents faithfully, three words containing
six syllables, _del tempo felice_: _retell_ stands for _ricordarsi_,
and _in sorrow_ for _nella miseria_, or, three syllables for six; so
that, by means of eight syllables, is given a full and complete
translation of what in Italian takes up seventeen. English the most
simple, direct, idiomatic, is needed in order that a translation of
Dante be faithful to his simplicity and naturalness; and this is the
first fidelity his translator should feel himself bound to. Owing to
the fundamental difference between the syllabic structures of
the two languages, we are enabled to put into English lines of eight
syllables the whole meaning of Dante's lines of eleven. In the above
experiment even more has been done. The twenty-eight lines of Dante
are given in twenty-six lines of eight syllables each, and this
without any sacrifice of the thought or feeling; for the "this thy
teacher knows," which is omitted, besides that the commentators cannot
agree on its meaning, is parenthetical in sense, and with reverence be
it said, in so far a defect in such a relation. As to the form of
Dante, what is essential in that has been preserved, namely, the
iambic measure and the rhyme.

Let us try if this curtailment of syllables will be successful when
applied to the terrible words, written in blackest color, over the
gate of Hell, at the beginning of the third canto of the "Inferno":--

  Through me the path to place of wail:
    Through me the path to endless sigh:
  Through me the path to souls in bale.
    'Twas Justice moved my Maker high:
  Wisdom supreme, and Might divine,
    And primal Love established me.
  Created birth was none ere mine,
    And I endure eternally:
  Ye who pass in, all hope resign.


Has anything been lost in the transit from Italian words to English?
English speech being organically more concentrated than Italian, does
not the reduction of eleven syllables to eight especially subserve
what ought to be the twofold aim of all poetic translation, namely,
along with fidelity to the thought and spirit of the original,
fidelity to the idiom, and cast and play of the translator's own
tongue?

Here is another short passage in a different key,--the opening of the
last canto of the "Paradiso":--

  Maid-mother, daughter of thy Son,
    Meek, yet above all things create,
  Fair aim of the Eternal one,
    'Tis thou who so our human state
  Ennobledst, that its Maker deigned
    Himself his creature's son to be.
  This flower, in th' endless peace, was gained
    Through kindling of God's love in thee.

In this passage nine Italian lines of eleven syllables are converted
into eight lines of eight syllables each. We submit it to the candid
reader of Italian to say, whether aught of the original has been
sacrificed to brevity.

The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity to
which the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate for
the partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabic
verse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante does
not feel the want.

One more short passage of four lines,--the famous figure of the lark
in the twentieth Canto of the "Paradiso":--

  Like lark that through the air careers,
    First singing, then, silent his heart,
  Feeds on the sweetness in his ears,
    Such joy to th' image did impart
  Th' eternal will.

This paper has exceeded the length we designed to give it; but,
nevertheless, we beg the reader's indulgence for a few moments longer,
while we conclude with an octosyllabic version of the last thirty
lines of the celebrated Ugolino story. It is unrhymed; for that
terrible tale can dispense, in English, with soft echoes at the end of
lines.

  When locked I heard the nether door
  Of the dread tower, I without speech
  Into my children's faces looked:
  Nor wept, so inly turned to stone.
  They wept: and my dear Anselm said,
  "Thou look'st so, father, what hast thou?"
  Still I nor wept nor answer made
  That whole day through, nor the next night,
  Till a new sun rose on the world.
  As in our doleful prison came
  A little glimmer, and I saw
  On faces four my own pale stare,
  Both of my hands for grief I bit;
  And they, thinking it was from wish
  To eat, rose suddenly and said:
  "Father, less shall we feel of pain
  If them wilt eat of us: from thee
  Came this poor flesh: take it again."
  I calmed me then, not to grieve them.
  The next two days we spake no word.
  Oh! obdurate earth, why didst not ope?
  When we had come to the fourth day
  Gaddo threw him stretched at my feet,
  Saying, "Father, why dost not help me?"
  There died he; and, as thou seest me,
  I saw the three fall one by one
  The fifth and sixth day; then I groped,
  Now blind, o'er each; and two whole days
  I called them after they were dead:
  Then hunger did what grief could not.




V.

SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC.


A literary critic, a genuine one, should carry in his brain an arsenal
of opposites. He should combine common sense with tact, integrity with
indulgence, breadth with keenness, vigor with delicacy, largeness with
subtlety, knowledge with geniality, inflexibility with sinuousness,
severity with suavity; and, that all these counter qualities be
effective, he will need constant culture and vigilance, besides the
union of reason with warmth, of enthusiasm with self-control, of wit
with philosophy,--but hold: at this rate, in order to fit out the
critic, human nature will have to set apart its highest and best. Dr.
Johnson declared, the poet ought to know everything and to have seen
everything, and the ancients required the like of an orator. Truly,
the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued as
generously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped by
the light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of the
Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the
critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his
birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and
sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be
susceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of the
critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to
measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual
and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing
aggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue lines
that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who
is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be
able swiftly to follow these lines.

Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip a
veritable sure critic, we have yet to add two cardinal qualifications,
which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberal
allotment. The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M.
Sainte-Beuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but a
mellow, radiant geniality. The other, which is of still deeper
account, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue--for so it deserves
to be called--born directly of the nobler sensibilities, those
in whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and the
profound, the beautiful and the true. He who is not well endowed with
these higher senses is not a bad critic; he is no critic at all. Not
only can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he can
as little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implying
failures to reach a certain fullness, implying a falling short of the
complete, to say where and what are deficiencies, involves the having
in the mind an idea of the full and complete. The man so meagrely
furnished as to hold no such idea is but a carper, not a critic. To
know the bad denotes knowledge of the good; in criticism as in morals,
a righteous indignation can only flash from a shock to pure feelings.

In a notice of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve,
after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the
campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters
smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these
famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with
a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a
campaign of a great captain equally a work of genius? Napoleon is here
the high sovereign critic, the Goethe in this department, as the
Feuquieres, the Jominis, the St. Cyrs are the La Harpes or the
Fontanes, the Lessings or the Schlegels, all good and expert critics;
but he is the first of all, nor, if you reflect on it, could it have
been otherwise. And who then would say better things of Homer than
Milton?"--Goethe supreme in literary criticism, Milton on Homer; this
touches the root of the matter; sympathy with the writer and his work
the critic must have,--sympathy as one of the sources of good
judgment, and even of knowledge. You cannot know, and therefore not
judge of a man or book or thing, unless you have some fellow-feeling
with him or it; and to judge well you must have much fellow-feeling.
The critic must, moreover, be a thinker; reason is the critic's sun.
Scott and Byron could say just and fresh things about poets and
poetry; but neither could command the whole field, nor dig deep into
the soil. Witness Byron's deliberate exaltation of Pope. Whereas
Wordsworth and Coleridge were among the soundest of critics, because,
besides being poets, they were both profound thinkers.

For the perfecting of the literary critic the especial
sympathy needed is that with excellence; for high literature is the
outcome of the best there is in humanity, the finished expression of
healthiest aspirations, of choicest thoughts, the ripened fruit of
noble, of refined growths, the perfected fruit, with all the perfume
and beauty of the flower upon it. Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve,
throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in addition
to that primary proof of having himself written good poems. Besides
the love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct draws
him to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love is
the more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined.
Through variety of knowledge, with intellectual keenness, he enjoys
excellence in the diversified forms that literature assumes. His pages
abound in illustrations of his versatility, which is nowhere more
strikingly exhibited than in the contrast between two successive
papers (both equally admirable) in the very first volume of the
"Causeries du Lundi," the one on Madame Recamier, the other on
Napoleon. Read especially the series of paragraphs beginning, "Some
natures are born pure, and have received _quand meme_ the gift
of innocence," to see how gracefully, subtly, delicately, with what a
feminine tenderness, he draws the portrait of this most fascinating of
women, this beautiful creature, for whom grace and sweetness did even
still more than beauty, this fairy-queen of France, this refined
coquette, who drew to her hundreds of hearts, this kindly magician,
who turned all her lovers into friends. Then pass directly to the next
paper, on the terrible Corsican, "who weakened his greatness by the
gigantic--who loved to astonish--who delighted too much in what was
his forte, war,--who was too much a bold adventurer." And further on,
the account of Napoleon's conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in which
account M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness and
truthfulness and penetration of the great German. The impression thus
made on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve's power is
deepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot and
his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly
against those historians "who strain humanity, who make the lesson that
history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place
of Providence," which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p.
150), "is often but a deification of our own thought."

In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve--who had then, for more
than thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the function
of critic--describes what is a fundamental feature of his method in
arriving at a judgment on books and authors. "Literature, literary
production, is in my eyes not distinct, or at least not separable,
from the rest of the man and his organization. I can enjoy a work, but
it is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of the
man himself; and I readily say, _as is the tree so is the fruit_.
Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study." This, of
course, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with the
moderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know the
man who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interior
beginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best means
is, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, his
predecessors. "You are sure to recognize the superior man, in part at
least, in his parents, especially in his mother, the most direct and
certain of his parents; also in his sisters and his brothers,
even in his children. In these one discovers important features which,
from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminent
individual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the _fond_, is found in
others of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state."

Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional
conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic.
Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part the
cause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact in
delineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence all
living parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes is
more captivating than his "Portraits de Femmes," a translation of
which we are glad to see announced.

Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of
the "Nouveaux Lundis," an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deep
is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For
the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament
was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes the
occasion to write a paper on "Les saints Evangiles," especially the
Sermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beatitudes,
he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world such
accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and
thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of
men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial
recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness
but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who
persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar
address to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anything
like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the
precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of
human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated
from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that
predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we
not a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectly
heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before
all coming generations?

"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or less
instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting
itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly
existed. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating,
bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of
what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind
such words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth
of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the
Mount?"

Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of
Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus
Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity toward
the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all
that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not
Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What
characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the other
sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to
equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright
spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to
simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed
from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger
to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on
Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on
the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:--

    But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
    shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
    also.

    And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy
    coat, let him have thy cloak also....

    Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow
    of thee turn not thou away....

    No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
    and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
    despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

    Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what
    ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body,
    what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the
    body than raiment?...


"Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists,
not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece any more than in Confucius.
It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any more
than in the modern Franklin. The principle of inspiration is
different, if indeed it be not opposite: the paths may come together
for a moment, but they cross one another. And it is this delicate
ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement
and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person
and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as
the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source."

Of M. Sainte-Beuve's delight in what is the most excellent product of
literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over
the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page.
"Poetry," says he, "is the essence of things, and we should be careful
not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods of
color. The task of poetry is not to say everything, but to make us
dream everything." And he cites a similar judgment of Fenelon: "The
poet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch but
what can be beautified." In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaks
of the youthful poems of Milton: "'Il Penseroso' is the masterpiece of
meditative and contemplative poetry; it is like a magnificent oratorio
in which prayer ascends slowly toward the Eternal. I make no
comparison; let us never take august names from their sphere. All that
is beautiful in Milton stands by itself; one feels the tranquil habit
of the upper regions, and continuity in power." In a paper on
the letters of Ducis, he proves that he apprehends the proportions of
Shakespeare. He asks: "Have we then got him at last? Is our stomach up
to him? Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (_cette
moelle de lion_)?" And again, in an article on the men of the
eighteenth century, he writes: "One may be born a sailor, but there is
nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a
battle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that,
and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare."

Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed
himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest
class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of
his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures
in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, how
catholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takes
pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency.
Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Moliere, his words
flame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust in
his own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the
feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His native
favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not
overrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls "the
Frenchman par excellence," and of whom he is proud as the literary
sovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devoted
to Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, he
lauds this spiritually-minded thinker as one of the best of critics.
And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: "Voltaire is
sometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even
are impudent.--There are defects difficult to perceive, that have not
been classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them."

In a paper on Louise Labe, a poetess of the sixteenth century, he
reproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and then
adds: "These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that,
at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry." No German
or English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature,
and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not an
exaltation of French prose, it is a depression of French
poetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of which
possibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts to
an acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are not
capable of producing and embodying the highest poetry.

Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always mentions with deference. On Eckerman's
"Conversations with Goethe" he has a series of three papers, wherein
he deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honest
pride Goethe's admiration of some of the chief French writers, and his
acknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to the
French translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the following
note, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a high
tribute to our distinguished countrywoman: "The English translation is
by Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished so
unhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes this
translation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of the
subject and for justness of appreciation it leaves our preface far
behind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was a
person of true merit and of great intellectual vigor." A sympathetic
student of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him;
and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature of
Goethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that she
would have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe "literature," had
she lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friends
had nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of this
gifted, generous, noble-hearted woman.

One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the
multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a
hand that can shake hard,--and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteen
years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of
"Causeries du Lundi," a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not
short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight
pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thus
ever in the thick of the literary _melee_. Attractions and repulsions,
sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate;
the aesthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences
and friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris,
if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous
mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray
some of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the critical
pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is
wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality
is seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader will no doubt often
perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a
subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well
trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. His
perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious
dead who are embalmed in their own excellence. Besides devoting many
papers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates of
literature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them,--a
sign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness.

Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly taken
by the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition of
virtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes. In the general tone
there is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness. Of the
humane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take the
following as one of many instances. In the correspondence of Lamennais
there is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and his
later sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thus
feelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure: "Let us cast
a look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, from
youth to our latter years, there are none of these boundless
distances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which,
for being hidden, are none the less real and profound."

Writing weekly for the _feuilleton_ of a Paris daily journal, M.
Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is
always animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished,
he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When the
occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a
principle or of a comprehensive thought. "Admiration is a much finer
test of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than all
the art of satire." By the side of this may be placed a sentence he
cites from Grimm: "People who so easily admire bad things are
not in a state to enjoy good." How true and cheering is this: "There
is in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought with
her finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up,
smothers, or corrupts." Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says:
"What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and
perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful." When, to
give a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammatic
point, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where to
borrow just what is wanted. Speaking of embellished oratorical
diction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that was
discussed in his presence: "It is not enough to have fine sentences:
you must have something to put into them." Commenting on the
hyper-spirituality of M. Laprade, he says: "M. Laprade starts from the
_absolute notion of being_. For him the following is the principle of
Art,--'to manifest what we feel of the Absolute Being, of the
Infinite, of God, to make him known and felt by other men, such in its
generality is the end of Art.' Is this true, is it false? I know not:
at this elevation one always gets into the clouds. Like the most of
those who pride themselves on metaphysics, he contents himself
with words (_il se paye de mots_)." Here is a grand thought, that
flashes out of the upper air of poetry: "Humanity, that eternal child
that has never done growing."

M. Sainte-Beuve's irony, keen and delicate, is a sprightly medium of
truth: witness this passage on a new volume of M. Michelet:
"Narrative, properly so called, which never was his forte, is almost
entirely sacrificed. Seek here no historical highway, well laid,
solid, and continuous; the method adopted is absolute points of view;
you run with him on summits, peaks, on needles of granite, which he
selects at his pleasure to gets views from. The reader leaps from
steeple to steeple. M. Michelet seems to have proposed to himself an
impossible wager, which, however, he has won,--to write history with a
series of flashes." Could there be a more subtle, covert way of saying
of a man that he is hardened by self-esteem than the following on M.
Guizot: "The consciousness that he has of himself, and a natural
principle of pride, place him easily above the little susceptibilities
of self-love." M. Sainte-Beuve is not an admirer of Louis Philippe,
and among other sly hits gives him the following: "Louis
Philippe was too much like a _bourgeois_ himself to be long respected
by the _bourgeoisie_. Just as in former times the King of France was
only the first gentleman of the kingdom, he was nothing but the first
_bourgeois_ of the country." What witty satire on Lamartine he
introduces, with a recognition of popularity that, with one who takes
so much joy in applause as Lamartine does, is enough to take the
poison out of the sting: "Those who knew his verses by heart (and the
number who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not without
regret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, in
his prose. This prose is, in 'Les Confidences,' too often but the
paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the
last, paraphrases of his feelings." Amends are made to Lamartine on
another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says:
"Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and the
eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings.
That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of
wing." This is better as modesty than as criticism. Shakespeare,
Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as of
more gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyed
getting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of their
strongest as well as sweetest notes.

A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, just
as a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image of
herself. His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy in
things French. Through means of it he knows them through and through:
they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, his
intellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other side
the shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more or
less the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows.
Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Beranger, is
spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and
broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his
individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy,
that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M.
Michelet, to Madame de Stael and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe,
to Fenelon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau.

Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will be
impatient to ask, nothing but praise? Not much else. Commencing his
literary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from that
date to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits,
fill several thousand pages. Between his forty-fifth to his sixtieth
year he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousand
pages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects. This is
the period of his critical maturity, the period of the "Causeries du
Lundi," followed by the "Nouveaux Lundis." Many men write
voluminously, but most of these only write _about_ a subject, not
_into_ it. Only the few who can write into their subject add something
to literature. One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve. In his mind there
is vitality to animate his large acquirement, to make his many
chapters buoyant and stimulant. All through his writings is the
sparkle of original life.

But let us now cheer the reader who is impatient of much praise, and
at the same time perform the negative part of our task.

Well, then, to be bold, as befits a critic of the critic, we beard the
lion in his very den. We challenge a definition he gives of the
critic. In the seventh volume of the "Causeries," article
"Grimm," he says: "When Nature has endowed some one with this vivacity
of feeling, with this susceptibility to impression, and that the
creative imagination be wanting, this some one is a born critic, that
is to say, a lover and judge of the creations of others." Why did M.
Sainte-Beuve make Goethe sovereign in criticism? Why did he think
Milton peculiarly qualified to interpret Homer? From the deep
principle of like unto like; only spirit can know spirit. What were
the worth of a comment of John Locke on "Paradise Lost," except to
reveal the mental composition of John Locke? The critic should be what
Locke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form of
literature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, some
share of that whereby poetry is fledged, "creative imagination." He
may "want the accomplishment of verse," or the constructive faculty,
but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful he
must have. But do not the presence of "vivacity of feeling with
susceptibility to impression" imply the imaginative temperament? If
not, then we confidently assure M. Sainte-Beuve that had his
definition fitted himself, his "Causeries du Lundi" would never have
been rescued from the quick oblivion of the _feuilleton._

Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness,
which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue,--the love of
glory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon's passion for glory saved him in
his latter years from ennui, from "that languor of the soul which
follows the age of the passions." Where are to be found men more the
victims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not more
distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than
for insatiable greed of glory,--Byron and Chateaubriand? No form of
self-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving,
which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyond
its sway, on praise and admiration. These stimulants--withdrawn more
or less even from the most successful in latter years--leave a void
which becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust.
Instead of glory being "the potent motive-power in all great souls,"
as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moral
instinct, called by Milton,--

  "That last infirmity of noble mind."

In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it as
hardly to be traceable in their careers. Love of glory was not the
spring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more than
Shakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington.

The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the French
nation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animal
vigor of the conqueror's mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that he
does not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon's moral nature, and
the consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor the
unmanning effects of his despotism. The words used to describe the
moral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be the
strokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset. In the
paper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the "rare good
sense" of Napoleon, of "his instinct of justice." But was it not a
compact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct of
justice, backed by a Titan's will, wielding a mighty intellect, that
enabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despot
and the merciless devastator? Again, can it be said of Napoleon that
he possessed good sense in a rare degree? Good sense is an instinctive
insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive
discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a
soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and
equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. The
moral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon's moral endowment was
but fractional. Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basis
of all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical,
or in its action one-sided; and even in such its presence must be
felt. In whatever reaches general human interests, whether as
practical act or imaginative creation, good sense must be, for their
prosperity, a primary ingredient. "The Tempest" and "Don Quixote"
shoot up into shining, imperishable beauty because their roots draw
their first nourishment from this hearty, inexhaustible substratum.
And let us say, that in M. Sainte-Beuve himself good sense is the
foundation of his eminent critical ability. He has been led, we
conceive, to attribute more of it to Napoleon than is his due by the
blinding splendor of Napoleon's military genius, through which, with
such swiftness and cumulative effect, he adapted means to ends on the
purely material plane.

When Murray applied to Lord Byron to write a book about the
life and manners of the upper class in Italy, Byron declined the
proposal from personal regards, and then added, that were he to write
such a book it would be misjudged in England; for, said he, "their
moral is not your moral." Such international misinterpretations and
exaggerations are instinctive and involuntary. A nation from its being
a nation, has a certain one-sidedness. To the Italian (even to one who
carries a stiletto) the English practice of boxing is a sheer
brutality; while to an Englishman (himself perhaps not a Joseph) the
_cavaliere servente_ is looked upon with reprobation tempered by
scorn. To this misjudgment from the foreign side and over-estimation
on the domestic, books, too, are liable; but to books as being more
abstract than usages, more ideal than manners, an absolute moral
standard can with less difficulty be applied. Applying it to Gil Blas,
is not M. Sainte-Beuve subject to arraignment when he speaks of this
and the other writings of Le Sage as being "the mirror of the world?"
Moliere, too, is a satirist, and from his breadth a great one; and
surely the world he holds a mirror before is a much purer world than
that of Le Sage; and what of the Shakespearean world? The world of Le
Sage is a nether world. "Of Gil Blas it has been well said that the
book is moral like experience." The experience one may get in brothels
and "hells," in consorting with pimps and knaves, has in it lessons of
virtue and morality,--for those who can extract them; but even for
these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot
read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the
experience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the
paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high
as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment
of Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to
have been written in a _cafe_, by a player of dominoes, on coming out
of the comic theatre."

Without being over-diffident, we may feel our footing not perfectly
secure on French ground when we differ from a Frenchman; we are
therefore not sorry to catch M. Sainte-Beuve tripping on English
ground. In a review of the translation of the celebrated Letters of
Lord Chesterfield--whom he calls the La Rochefoucauld of England--he
refers to, and in part quotes, the passages in which Chesterfield
gives his son advice as to his _liaisons_; and he adds: "All
Chesterfield's morality, on this head, is resumed in a line of
Voltaire,--

  "Il n'est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie."

It is these passages that make the grave Dr. Johnson blush: we only
smile at them." For ourselves, we blush with Johnson, not that the man
of the world should give to his youthful son, living at a corrupt
Continental court, counsel as to relations which were regarded as
inevitable in such a circle; but that the heart of the father should
not have poured (were it but parenthetically) through the pen of the
worldling some single sentence like this: "Writing to you, my son, as
an experienced man of the world to one inexperienced, I recommend the
good taste in such matters and the delicacy which become a gentleman;
but to his dear boy, your father says, avoid, if possible, such
_liaisons_; preserve your purity; nothing will give you such a return
throughout the whole of the future." But, a single sentence like this
would _vitiate_ the entire Chesterfieldian correspondence.

How fully and warmly M. Sainte-Beuve prizes moral worth may be learnt
from many passages. Not the least animated and cordial of his
papers is one on the Abbe Gerbet, in the sixth volume, a paper which
shows, as Gustave Planche said of him, that "he studies with his
heart, as women do;" and one in the second volume on Malesherbes, whom
he describes as being "separated, on the moral side, from the
Mirabeaus and the Condorcets not by a shade, but by an abyss," and
whom he sums up as "great magistrate, minister too sensitive and too
easily discouraged, heroic advocate, and sublime victim." Of this
noble, deeply dutiful, self-sacrificing Frenchman, this exemplar of
moral greatness, Lord Lansdowne wrote many years before the French
Revolution: "I have seen for the first time in my life what I did not
believe could exist, that is, a man _who is exempt from fear and from
hope_, and who nevertheless is full of life and warmth. Nothing can
disturb his peace; nothing is necessary to him, and he takes a lively
interest in all that is good."

In a paper on a volume of miscellaneous prose essays by M. Laprade, M.
Sainte-Beuve has this sentence: "What strikes me above all and
everywhere is, that the author, whether he reasons or whether he
addresses himself to literary history, only understands his own mode
of being and his own individuality. Hereby he reveals to us
that he is not a critic." The first paragraph of a keen critique on M.
de Pontmartin ends thus: "To say of even those writers who are opposed
to us nothing which their judicious friends do not already think and
are obliged to admit, this is my highest ambition." Discussing the
proper method of dealing with the past, he writes: "For myself I
respect tradition and I like novelty: I am never happier than when I
can succeed in reconciling them together." Of Hoffman he says, in a
paper on literary criticism: "He has many of the qualities of a true
critic, conscientiousness, independence, ideas, an opinion of his
own." These sentences, with others of like import, are keys to the
character of the volumes from which they are taken. The office of the
critic M. Sainte-Beuve administers, not for temporary or personal
ends, but with a disinterested sense of its elevation and its
responsibilities. Through healthy sympathies and knowledge ample and
ripe, through firm sense with artistic flexibility, through largeness
of view and subtlety of insight, he enters upon it more than
ordinarily empowered for its due discharge. He is at once what the
French call _fin_ and what the English call "sound." In
literary work, in biographical work, in work aesthetical and critical,
he delights, and he has a wide capacity of appropriation. The spirit
of a book, a man, an age, he seizes quickly. With a nice perception of
shades he catches the individual color of a mind or a production; and
by the same faculty he grasps the determining principles in a
character. Delicately, strongly, variously endowed, there is a steady
equilibrium among his fine powers. Considering the bulk and vast
variety and general excellence of his critical work, is it too much to
say of him, that he is not only, as he has been called, the foremost
of living critics, but that he deserves to hold the first place among
all critics? No other has done so much so well. Goethe and Coleridge
are something more; they are critics incidentally; but M.
Sainte-Beuve, with poetical and philosophical qualities that lift him
to a high vantage-ground, has made criticism his life-work, and
through conscientious and symmetrical use of these qualities has done
his work well. Besides much else in his many and many-sided volumes,
there is to be read in them a full, spirited history of French
literature.

Our attempt to make M. Sainte-Beuve better known on this side
the Atlantic we cannot more fitly conclude than with a sketch of
him--a literary sketch--by himself. This we find in the fifth volume
of the "Nouveaux Lundis," in a paper on Moliere, published in July,
1863. A man who, in the autumnal ripeness of his powers, thus frankly
tells us his likes and dislikes, tells us what he is. While by
reflected action the passage becomes a self-portraiture, it is a
sample of finest criticism.

"To make Moliere loved by more people is in my judgment to do a public
service.

"Indeed, to love Moliere--I mean to love him sincerely and with all
one's heart--it is, do you know? to have within one's self a guarantee
against many defects, much wrong-headedness. It is, in the first
place, to dislike what is incompatible with Moliere, all that was
counter to him in his day, and that would have been insupportable to
him in ours.

"To love Moliere is to be forever cured--do not say of base and
infamous hypocrisy, but of fanaticism, of intolerance, and of that
kind of hardness which makes one anathematize and curse; it is to
carry a corrective to admiration even of Bossuet, and for all who,
after his example, exult, were it only in words, over their
enemy dead or dying; who usurp I know not what holy speech, and
involuntarily believe themselves to be, with the thunderbolt in their
hand, in the region and place of the Most High. Men eloquent and
sublime, you are far too much so for me!

"To love Moliere, is to be sheltered against, and a thousand leagues
away from, that other fanaticism, the political, which is cold, dry,
cruel, which never laughs, which smells of the sectary, which, under
pretext of Puritanism, finds means to mix and knead all that is
bitter, and to combine in one sour doctrine the hates, the spites, and
the Jacobinism of all times. It is to be not less removed, on the
other hand, from those tame, dull souls who, in the very presence of
evil, cannot be roused to either indignation or hatred.

"To love Moliere, is to be secured against giving in to that pious and
boundless admiration for a humanity which worships itself, and which
forgets of what stuff it is made, and that, do what it will, it is
always poor human nature. It is, not to despise it too much, however,
this common humanity, at which one laughs, of which one is, and into
which we throw ourselves through a healthful hilarity whenever we are
with Moliere.

"To love and cherish Moliere, is to detest all mannerism in
language and expression; it is, not to take pleasure in, or to be
arrested by, petty graces, elaborate subtlety, superfine finish,
excessive refinement of any kind, a tricky or artificial style.

"To love Moliere, it is to be disposed to like neither false wit nor
pedantic science; it is to know how to recognize at first sight our
_Trissotins_[6] and our _Vadius_ even under their rejuvenated jaunty
airs; it is, not to let one's self be captivated at present any more
than formerly by the everlasting _Philaminte_, that affected pretender
of all times, whose form only changes and whose plumage is incessantly
renewed; it is, to like soundness and directness of mind in others as
well as in ourselves. I only give the first movement and the pitch; on
this key one may continue, with variations.

    [6] Trissotin, Vadius, and Philaminte, are personages in Moliere's
        comedy of _Les Femmes Savantes_ (The Blue-Stockings).


"To love and openly to prefer Corneille, as certain minds do, is no
doubt a fine thing, and, in one sense, a very legitimate thing; it is,
to dwell in, and to mark one's rank in, the world of great souls: but
is it not to run the risk of loving together with the grand
and sublime, false glory a little, to go so far as not to detest
inflation and magniloquence, an air of heroism on all occasions? He
who passionately loves Corneille cannot be an enemy to a little
boasting.

"On the other hand, to love and prefer Racine, ah! that is, no doubt,
to love above all things, elegance, grace, what is natural and true
(at least relatively), sensibility, touching and charming passion; but
at the same time is it not also, to allow your taste and your mind to
be too much taken with certain conventional and over-smooth beauties,
a certain tameness and petted languidness, with certain excessive and
exclusive refinements? In a word, to love Racine so much, it is to run
the risk of having too much of what in France is called taste, and
which brings so much distaste.

"To love Boileau--but no, one does not love Boileau, one esteems him,
one respects him; we admire his uprightness, his understanding, at
times his animation, and if we are tempted to love him, it is solely
for that sovereign equity which made him do such unshaken justice to
the great poets his contemporaries, and especially to him whom he
proclaims the first of all, Moliere.

"To love La Fontaine, is almost the same thing as to love
Moliere; it is, to love nature, the whole of nature, humanity
ingenuously depicted, a representation of the grand comedy "of a
hundred different acts," unrolling itself, cutting itself up before
our eyes into a thousand little scenes with the graces and freedoms
that are so becoming, with weaknesses also, and liberties which are
never found in the simple, manly genius of the master of masters. But
why separate them? La Fontaine and Moliere--we must not part them, we
love them united."

       *     *     *     *     *

The number of "Putnam's Magazine," containing this paper, was sent to
M. Sainte-Beuve accompanied by a note. In due time I received an
answer to the note, saying that the Magazine had not reached him.
Hereupon I sent the article by itself. On receiving it he wrote the
following acknowledgment.

In my note I referred to a rumor of his illness. His disease was, by
_post-mortem_ examination, discovered to be as the newspapers had
reported, the stone. But a consultation of physicians declared that it
was what he states it to be in his letter. Had they not made so gross
a mistake, his life might have been prolonged.


"PARIS, 6 _Decembre_, 1868, No. 11 Rue Mont Parnasse.

"CHER MONSIEUR:--

"Oh! Cette fois je recois bien decidement le tres aimable et si bien
etudie portrait du _critique_. Comment exprimer comme je le
sens ma gratitude pour tant de soin, d'attention penetrante, de desir
d'etre agreable tout en restant juste? Il y avait certes moyen
d'insister bien plus sur les variations, les disparates et les
defaillances momentanees de la pensee et du jugement a travers cette
suite de volumes. C'est toujours un sujet d'etonnement pour moi, et
cette fois autant que jamais, de voir comment un lecteur ami et un
juge de gout parvient a tirer une figure une et consistante de ce qui
ne me parait a moi meme dans mon souvenir que le cours d'un long
fleuve qui va s'epandant un pen au hazard des pentes et desertant
continuellement ses rives. De tels portraits comme celui que vous
voulez bien m'offrir me rendent un point d'appui et me feraient
veritablement croire a moi-meme. Et quand je songe a l'immense
quantite d'esprits auxquels vous me presentez sous un aspect si
favorable et si magistral dans ce nouveau monde de tant de jeunesse et
d'avenir, je me prends d'une sorte de fierte et de courageuse
confiance comme en presence deja de la posterite.

"Le mal auquel vous voulez bien vous interesser est tout simplement
une hypertrophie de la prostate. Les souffrances ne sont pas vives,
mais l'incommodite est grande, ne pouvant supporter a aucun degre le
mouvement de la voiture, ce qui restreint ma vie sociale a un bien
court rayon.

"Veuillez agreeer, cher Monsieur, l'assurance de ma cordiale
gratitude, et de mes sentiments les plus distingues.

SAINTE-BEUVE."




VI.

THOMAS CARLYLE.


A brain ever aglow with self-kindled fire--a cerebral battery
bristling with magnetic life--such is Thomas Carlyle. Exceptional
fervor of temperament, rare intellectual vivacity, manful
earnestness--these are the primary qualifications of the man. He has
an uncommon soul-power. Hence his attractiveness, hence his influence.
Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, throbs with his own
being. Themselves all authors put, of course, more or less, into what
they write: few, very few, can make their sentences quiver with
themselves. This Mr. Carlyle does by the intenseness of a warm
individuality, by the nimble vigor of his mental life, and, be it
added, by the rapture of his spirituality. The self, in his case, is a
large, deep self, and it sends an audible pulse through his pen into
his page.

To all sane men is allotted a complete endowment of mental faculties,
of capacities of intellect and feeling; the degree to which
these are energized, are injected with nervous flame, makes the
difference between a genius and a blockhead. There being high vital
pressure at a full, rich, interior source, and thence, strong mental
currents, through what channels the currents shall flow depends on
individual aptitudes, these aptitudes shaping, in the one case, a
Dante, in another, a Newton, in another, a Mirabeau. And Nature, with
all her generosity, being jealous of her rights, allows no interchange
of gifts. Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force of
will and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven. In
his dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than many
other intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity and
ambition have at times led him into paths where great deficiencies
disclose themselves by the side of great superiorities. His mind is
biographical, not historical; stronger in details than in
generalization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, not
constructive; literary, not philosophical. Mr. Carlyle is great at a
picture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction. Wealth
of thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire,
irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem with
passages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his "Cromwell" and his
"Frederick." Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr.
Carlyle, in writing their lives with duteous particularity, has
embraced the full story of the epoch in which each was the leader. To
him they are more than leaders. Herein he and Mr. Buckle stand at
opposite poles; Mr. Buckle underrating the protagonists of history,
them and their share of agency; Mr. Carlyle overrating them,--a
prejudicial one-sidedness in both cases. Leader and led are the
complements the one of the other.

History is a growth, and a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sow
the seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and still
more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient,
calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful,
nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. One
healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking
him to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntingly
throw into the face of contemporaries an Abbot Sampson of the twelfth
century as a model. A judicial expounder would not cite one
single example as a characteristic of that age in contrast with this.
A patient, impartial elucidator, would not deride "ballot-boxes,
reform bills, winnowing machines:" he would make the best of these and
other tools within reach; or, if his part be to write and not to act,
would animate, not dishearten, those who are earnestly doing, and who,
by boldly striking at abuses, by steadily striving for more justice,
by aiming to lift up the down-trodden, prepare, through such means as
are at hand, a better ground for the next generation. If to such
workers, instead of God-speed, a writer of force and influence gives
jeers and gibes, and ever-repeated shrieks about "semblance and
quackery, and cant and speciosity, and dilettantism," and deems
himself profound and original, as well as hopeful, when he exclaims:
"Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of
human worth and truth, we shall never by all the machinery in
Birmingham discover the true and worthy:" in that case, does he not
expose him to the taunt of being himself very like a mouthing quack,
and his words, which should be cordial, brotherly, do they not partake
of the hollow quality of what Mr. Carlyle holds in such abhorrence,
namely, of cant? The sick lion crouches growling in his lair;
he cannot eat, and he will not let others eat.

Many grateful and admiring readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with his
ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven's name, what are
all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,--worldly
bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow
sway-wielding dukes,--what are all these, and much else, but so many
exemplications of might that is not right? When might shall cease to
bully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia. Utopia may be
at infinite distance, not attainable by finite men; but as surely as
our hearts beat, we are gradually getting further from its opposite,
the coarse rule of force and brutality, such rule as in the twelfth
century was rife all around "Abbot Sampson."

Like unto this moral fallacy is an aesthetic fallacy which, through
bright pages of criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment.
"I confess," says Mr. Carlyle, "I have no notion of a truly great man
that could not be all sorts of men." Could Newton have written the
"Fairy Queen?" Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation?
Could Columbus have given birth to "Don Quixote?" One of Mr.
Carlyle's military heroes tried hard to be a poet. Over Frederick's
verses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned. "I cannot
understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the
fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could
not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in
that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward."
Thus Mr. Carlyle writes in "Heroes and Hero-Worship." If Mirabeau, why
not Savonarola, or Marcus Aurelius. In that case a "Twelfth Night," or
an "Othello," might have come from Luther. Nature does not work so
loosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is
profuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence her
ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency.
Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her
beauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are
endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest
men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once
grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. "Petrarch and Boccaccio
did diplomatic messages," says Mr. Carlyle. We hope they did,
or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that. We
Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may be
done.

On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages,
pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and
executed with the scholar's care and the critic's culture. His early
papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made
something like an epoch in English criticism. Seizing the value and
significance of genuine poetry, he exclaims in "Past and
Present,"--"Genius, Poet! do we know what these words mean? An
inspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own great
fire-heart, to see the truth, and speak it and do it." On the same
page he thus taunts his countrymen: "We English find a poet, as brave
a man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the
sun; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods? Not at all. We, taking
due counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of
Dumfries, and pique ourselves on our 'patronage of genius.'" "George
the Third is Defender of something we call 'the Faith' in
those years. George the Third is head charioteer of the destinies of
England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions,
American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale in
Dumfries." Poor George the Third! One needs not be a craniologist to
know that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreating
pyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men and
things before them. How could they see a Robert Burns? To be sure, had
Dundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of the
many sinecures of two or three hundred pounds a year that were wasted
on idle scions of titled families, an aureole of glory would now shine
through the darkness that environs the memory of George III. So much
for George Guelf. Now for Thomas Carlyle.

If, for not recognizing Burns, _poor_ George is to be blamed,
what terms of stricture will be too harsh for _rich_ Thomas, that
by him were not recognized poets greater than Burns, at a time when
for England's good, full, sympathetic recognition of them was just
what was literarily most wanted? Here was a man, for the fine function
of poetic criticism how rarely gifted is visible in those
thorough papers on Burns and Goethe, written so early as 1828,
wherein, besides a masterly setting forth of their great subjects, are
notable passages on other poets. On Byron is passed the following
sentence, which will, we think, be ever confirmed by sound criticism.
"Generally speaking, we should say that Byron's poetry is not true. He
refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar
strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in
dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask,
real men; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do not
these characters, does not the character of their author, which more
or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the
occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended
to look much grander than nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies,
this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation,
with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor,
is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is
to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of
life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds,
there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call
theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so
powerful pieces."

In the same paper, that on Burns, Mr. Carlyle thus opened the ears of
that generation,--partially opened, for the general aesthetic ear is
not fully opened yet,--to a hollowness which was musical to the many:
"Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if _in vacuo_;
the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much
for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result
of this, for certain generalizations which philosophy termed men." And
in the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray's poetry, "a laborious mosaic,
through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true grace
could be expected to look." Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle to
be, what is the critic's noblest office, an interpreter between new
poets and the public. Such an interpreter England grievously needed,
to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize the
treasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and
Shelley, and Keats. The interpreter was there, but he spoke not.
Better than any man in England Mr. Carlyle could, if he would,
have taught the generation that was growing up with him, whose ear he
had already gained, what truth and fresh beauty and deep humanity
there was in the strains of this composite chorus of superlative
singers. Of such teaching, that generation stood in especial need, to
disabuse its ear of the hollowness which had been mistaken for
harmony; to refresh, with clear streams from "the divine fountain,"
hearts that were fevered by the stimulus of Byronic "strong waters;"
to wave before half-awakened eyes the torch which lights the way to
that higher plane where breathe great poets, whose incomparable
function it is, to impart to their fellow-men some of the enlargement
and the purification of consciousness in which themselves exult
through the influx of fresh ideas and the upspringing of prolific
sentiment. The gifted interpreter was dumb. Nay, he made diversions
into Scotland and Germany, to bring Burns and Scott more distinctly
before Englishmen, and to make Schiller and Goethe and Richter better
known to them. And it pleased him to write about "Corn-law rhymes."
That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done,
by the side of them, the then more urgent task. In 1828, Mr.
Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of
"Goethe's Helena," which is a kind of episode in the second part of
"Faust," and was first published as a fragment. This takes up more
than sixty pages in the first volume of the "Miscellanies," about the
half being translations from "Helena," which by no means stands in the
front rank of Goethe's poetic creations, which is indeed rather a high
artistic composition than a creation. At that time there lay, almost
uncalled for, on the publisher's shelf, where it had lain for five
years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas,
flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any
in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of
Shakespeare,--a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender,
deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of
feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are
gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with
excess of light,--or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza
rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed
of Nature's most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and
a richer fragrance; I mean the "Adonais" of Shelley. For this
glittering masterpiece,--a congenial commentary on which would have
illuminated the literary atmosphere of England,--Mr. Carlyle had no
word; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word for
Wordsworth. For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here it
is: "Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole
consists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague,
random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty." A parenthesis,
short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has been
truly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is the
poetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and of
whom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology in
the youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power,
variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the first
class of the poetry of the world. Is not Thomas Carlyle justly
chargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor? Nay,
considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistent
ignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warm
solicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, his
offense may be termed a literary crime. He knew better.

Mr. Carlyle somewhere contrasts his age with that of Elizabeth, after
this fashion; "For Raleighs and Shakespeares we have Beau Brummell and
Sheridan Knowles." Only on the surmise that Mr. Carlyle owed poor
Knowles some desperate grudge, can such an outburst be accounted for.
Otherwise it is sheer fatuity, or an impotent explosion of literary
spite. For the breadth and brilliancy of the poetic day shed upon it,
no period in the history of any nation, not that of Pericles or of
Elizabeth, is more resplendent than that which had not yet faded for
England when Mr. Carlyle began his career; nor in the field of public
action can the most prolific era of Greece or of England hold up, for
the admiration of the world and the pride of fellow-countrymen, two
agents more deservedly crowned with honor and gratitude than Nelson
and Wellington. Here are two leaders, who, besides exhibiting rare
personal prowess and quick-eyed military genius on fields of vast
breadth, and in performances of unwonted magnitude and momentousness,
were, moreover, by their great, brave deeds, most palpably
saving England, saving Europe, from the grasp of an inexorable despot.
Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmost
the reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper. On the ten
thousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place. Not only
are their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarce
acknowledged.

Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousy
is not a noble form of

  "The last infirmity of noble mind."

Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill
him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or
even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of
Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and
Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen
which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things,
should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of
genius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one is
driven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive. In such a case it
is impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion an
imaginative man will not rise.

Writing of Thomas Carlyle, the last words must not be censorious
comments on a weakness; we all owe too much to his strength; he is too
large a benefactor. Despite over-fondness for Frederick and the like,
and what may be termed a pathological drift towards political
despotism, how many quickening chapters has he not added to the
"gospel of freedom"? Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses,
with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities step
forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon;
what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what
bursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped the
enfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirst
wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly "Frazer,"
to drink of the spiritual waters of "Sartor Resartus." Here was a new
spring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, purifying draughts, did
it bubble and sparkle! That picture, in the beginning, of the "doing
and driving (_Thun und Treiben_)" of a city as beheld by
Professor Teufelsdroeckh from his attic--would one have been surprised
to read that on a page of Shakespeare?

A marvelous faculty of speech has Mr. Carlyle; a gift of saying what
he has to say with a ring in the words that makes the thought tingle
through your ears. His diction surrounds itself with a magnetic
_aura_, which seems to float it, to part it from the paper, it
stands out in such transparent chiar-oscuro. Common phrases he
refreshes by making them the vehicle for new meanings, and in the
ordering of words he has command of a magical logic. The marrowy vigor
in his mind it is that lends such expressiveness, such nimbleness,
such accent to his sentences, to his style.

Mr. Carlyle's power comes mainly from his sensibilities. Through them
he is poetical; through them there is so much light in his pages. More
often from his than from any others, except those of the major poets,
breaks the sudden, joyful beam that flames around a thought when it
knows itself embraced by a feeling. Of humor and of wit, what an added
fund does our language now possess through his pen. The body of
criticism, inclosed in the five volumes of Miscellanies, were
enough to give their author a lasting name. When one of these papers
appeared in the Edinburgh, or other review, it shone, amid the
contributions of the Jeffreys and Broughams, like a guinea in a
handful of shillings.

The masterpiece of Mr. Carlyle, and the masterpiece of English prose
literature, is his "French Revolution," a rhythmic Epic without verse.
To write those three volumes a man needs have in him a big, glowing
heart, thus to flood with passionate life all the men and scenes of a
momentous volcanic epoch; a lively, strong, intellectual vision he
must have, to grasp in their full reality the multitudinous and
diverse facts and incidents so swiftly begotten under the pulsation of
millions of contentious brains; he needs a literary faculty finely
artistic, creatively imaginative, to enrank the figures of such vast
tumultuous scenes, to depict the actors in each, to present vividly in
clear relief the rapid succession of eventful convulsions. Outside of
the choice achievements of verse, is there a literary task of breadth
and difficulty that has been done so well? A theme of unusual grandeur
and significance is here greatly treated.

The foremost literary gift,--nay, the test whereby to try
whether there be any genuine literary gift,--is the power in a writer
to impart so much of himself, that his subject shall stand invested,
or rather, imbued, with a life which renews it; it becomes warmed with
a fire from the writer's soul. Of this, the most perfect exhibition is
in poetry, wherein, by the intensity and fullness of inflammation, of
passion, is born a something new, which, through the strong
creativeness of the poet, has henceforth a rounded being of its own.
With this power Mr. Carlyle is highly endowed. Not only, as already
said, does his page quiver with himself; through the warmth and
healthiness of his sympathies, and his intellectual mastery, he makes
each scene and person in his gorgeous representation of the French
Revolution to shine with its own life, the more brilliantly and truly
that this life has been lighted up by his. Where in history is there a
picture greater than that of the execution of Louis XVI.? With a few
strokes how many a vivid portrait does he paint, and each one vivid
chiefly from its faithfulness to personality and to history. And then
his full-length, more elaborated likenesses, of the king, of the
queen, of the Duke of Orleans, of Lafayette, of Camille
Desmoulins, of Danton, of Robespierre: it seems now that only on his
throbbing page do these personages live and move and have their true
being. The giant Mirabeau, 'twas thought at first he had drawn too
gigantic. But intimate documents, historical and biographical, that
have come to light since, confirm the insight of Mr. Carlyle, and
swell his hero out to the large proportions he has given him.

For a conclusion we will let Mr. Carlyle depict himself. Making
allowance for some humorous play in describing a fellow-man so
eccentric as his friend, Professor Teufelsdroeckh, this we think he
does consciously and designedly in the fourth chapter of "Sartor
Resartus," wherein, under the head of "Characteristics," he comments
on the professor's Work on Clothes, and its effect on himself. From
this chapter we extract some of the most pertinent sentences. It opens
thus:--

"It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes
entirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, like
the very sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work of
genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amid
its effulgence,--a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness'
double-vision, and even utter blindness.

"Without committing ourselves to those enthusiastic praises and
prophesyings of the "Weissnichtwo'sche Anzeiger," we admitted that the
book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the
best effect of any book; that it had even operated changes in our way
of thought; nay, that it promised to prove, as it were, the opening of
a new mine-shaft, wherein the whole world of _Speculation_ might
henceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially it may now be
declared that Professor Teufelsdroeckh's acquirements, patience of
research, philosophic, and even poetic vigor, are here made
indisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity and
tortuosity and manifold inaptitude....

"Many a deep glance, and often with unspeakable precision, has he cast
into mysterious Nature, and the still more mysterious Life of man.
Wonderful it is with what cutting words, now and then, he severs
asunder the confusion; sheers down, were it furlongs deep, into the
true center of the matter; and there not only hits the nail on the
head, but with crushing force smites it home and buries it....

"Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigor, a
true inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning
words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and
splendor from Jove's head; a rich idiomatic diction, picturesque
allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy twins; all the
graces and terrors of a wild imagination, wedded to the clearest
intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer
sleeping and soporific passages, circumlocutions, repetitions, touches
even of pure doting jargon so often intervene.... A wild tone pervades
the whole utterance of the man, like its key-note and regulator; now
screwing itself aloft as into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill
mockery of fiends; now sinking in cadences, not without melodious
heartiness, though sometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch,
when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true
character is extremely difficult to fix....

"Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse,
do we still lie with regard to the professor's moral feeling. Gleams
of an ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite
pity; he could clasp the whole universe into his bosom, and
keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a
very seraph. Then, again, he is so sly, and still so imperturbably
saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness, towards all that
men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter,
sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,--that you
look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate
Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round,
after all, were but some huge foolish whirligig, where kings and
beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were
chaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest."




VII.

ERRATA.[7]

    [7] From Lippincott's Magazine, 1870.


Words are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of the
soul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thence
it behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words a
watch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over his
pupils. A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lest
language fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements into
which all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence or
abuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness. Style
may be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkers
out of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind;
and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with its
beauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, the
transparency and directness of its threads, which are words.

A humble freeman of the guild of scholars would here use his
privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and
phrases,--abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and
written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the
pages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or lead
to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is
many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show
signs of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moral
and intellectual energies of a people, soon spots its speech.

Nevertheless, as inaccuracies, laxities, vulgarisms--transgressions
more or less superficial--such errors take from the correctness, from
the efficacy, from the force as well as the grace, of written or
spoken speech.

The high level of strength, suppleness and beauty occupied by our
English tongue has been reached, and can only be maintained, by
strenuous, varied, and continuous mental action. Offenses against the
laws and proprieties of language--like so many other of our
lapses--are in most cases effects of the tendency in human nature to
relax its tone. None save the most resolute and rigorous but have
their moods of unwatchfulness, of indolence. Moreover, men are
prone to resist mental refinement and intellectual subdivisions.
Discrimination requires close attention and sustained effort; and
without habitual discrimination there can be no linguistic precision
or excellence. In this, as in other provinces, people like to take
things easily. Now, every capable man of business knows that to take
things easily is an easy way to ruin. Language is in a certain sense
every one's business; but it is especially the business, as their
appellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of their
high vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddling
with, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous tools
wherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and are
ever a-building. Culture, demanding and creating diversity and
subtlety of mental processes, is at once a cause and an effect of
infinite multiplication in the relations the mind is capable of
establishing between itself and the objects of its action, and between
its own processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture,
has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands,
Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of
its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness,
any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex
tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by
the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating
influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr.
Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it is
also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere on
which thought lives--a medium essential to the activity of our
speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its
operation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, the
growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds."

Our enumeration of _errata_ being made alphabetically, the first to be
cited is one of the chief of sinners--the particle.

As. The misuse of _as_ for _so_ is, in certain cases, almost
universal. If authority could justify error and convert the faulty
into the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justification
of which can be cited most of the best names in recent English
literature.

  "_As_ far as doth concern my single self,"

is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude," p. 70) which, by a change
of the first _as_ into _so_, would gain not only in sound (which is
not our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar. The seventh line
of the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and most
beautiful of poems, Shelley's "Adonais," begins, "_As_ long as skies
are blue," where also there would be a double gain by writing "_So_
long as skies are blue." On page 242 of the first volume of De
Quincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by _as_
philosophic a politician _as_ Edmund Burke," in which the critical
blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse
for the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules,
from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, I
conceive, that the double _as_ should only be employed when there is
direct comparison. In the first part of the following sentence there
is no direct comparative relation--in the second, the negative
destroys it; "_So_ far as geographical measurement goes, Philadelphia
is not _so_ far from New York as from Baltimore." Five writers out of
six would commit the error of using _as_ in both members of the
sentence. The most prevalent misuse of _as_ is in connection with
_soon_; and this general misuse, having moreover the countenance of
good writers, is so inwoven into our speech that it will be hard to
unravel it. But principle is higher than the authority derived from
custom. Judges are bound to give sentence according to the statute;
and if the highest writers, whose influence is deservedly judicial,
violate the laws of language, their decisions ought to be, and will
be, reversed, or language will be undermined, and, slipping into
shallow, illogical habits, into anarchical conditions, will forfeit
much of its manliness, of its subtlety, of its truthfulness. Language
is a living organism, and to substitute authority, or even long usage,
for its innate genius and wisdom, and the requirements and practices
that result from these, were to strike at its life, and to expose it
to become subject to upstart usurpation, to deadening despotism.
Worcester quotes from the Psalms the phrase, "They go astray _as_ soon
as they be born." We ask, Were not the translators of the Bible as
liable to err in grammar as De Quincey, or Wordsworth, or Shelley? A
writer in the English "National Review" for January, 1862, in an
admirable paper on the "Italian Clergy and the Pope," begins a
sentence with the same phrase: "_As_ soon as the law was passed." And
we ourselves, sure though we be that the use of _as_ in this and every
similar position is an error, need to brace both pen and tongue
against running into it, so strong to overcome principle and
conviction is the habit of the senses, accustomed daily to see and to
hear the wrong.

AT THAT. We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the
pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into
bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be
italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a
phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, of
American mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods,
when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicks
up and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels.

ANOTHER. Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, we
will call up a minor criminal in A, viz. _another_, often incorrectly
used for _other_; as in "on one ground or another," "from one
cause or another." Now, _another_, the prefix _an_ making it
singular,--embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary
to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are
but two grounds or causes. Write "on one ground or other," and the
words are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word _other_
implying several or many grounds.

BOQUET. The sensibility that gives the desire to preserve a present
sparkling so long as is possible with all the qualities that made it
materially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so
precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people,
gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself,
should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath of
ignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices. We therefore protest
against a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, the
word _bouquet_, being maimed into _boquet_, a corruption as dissonant
to the ear as were to the eye plucking a rose from a variegated
nosegay, and leaving only its thorny stem. _Boquet_ is heard at times
in well-upholstered drawing-rooms, and may even be seen in print.
Offensive in its mutilated shape, it smells sweet again when restored
to its native orthography.

BY NO MANNER OF MEANS. The most vigorous writers are liable, in
unguarded moments, to lapse into verbal weakness, and so you
meet with this vulgar pleonasm in Ruskin.

BY REASON OF. An ill-assorted, ugly phrase, used by accomplished
reviewers and others, who ought to set a purer example.

COME OFF. Were a harp to give out the nasal whine of the bagpipe, or
the throat of a nightingale to emit the caw of a raven, the aesthetic
sense would not be more startled and offended than to hear from
feminine lips, rosily wreathed by beauty and youth, issue the words,
"The concert will _come off_ on Wednesday." This vulgarism should
never be heard beyond the "ring" and the cock-pit, and should be
banished from resorts so respectable as an oyster-cellar.

CONSIDER. Neither weight of authority nor universality of use can
purify or justify a linguistic corruption, and make the intrinsically
wrong in language right; and therefore such phrases as, "I consider
him an honest man," "Do you consider the dispute settled?" will ever
be bad English, however generally sanctioned. In his dedication of the
"Diversions of Purley" to the University of Cambridge, Horne Tooke
uses it wrongly when he says, "who always _considers_ acts of
voluntary justice toward himself as favors." The original
signification and only proper use of _consider_ are in phrases like
these: "If you consider the matter carefully;" "Consider the lilies of
the field."

CONDUCT. It seems to us that it were as allowable to say of a man, "He
carries well," as "He conducts well." We say of a gun that it carries
well, and we might say of a pipe that it conducts well. The gun and
pipe are passive instruments, not living organisms, and thence the
verbs are used properly in the neuter form. Perhaps, strictly
speaking, even here _its charge_ and _water_ are understood.

CONTEMPLATE. "Do you contemplate going to Washington to-morrow?" "No:
I contemplate moving into the country." This is more than exaggeration
and inflation: it is desecration of a noble word, born of man's higher
being; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties,
a calm collecting of them for silent meditation--an act, or rather a
mood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, and
involves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment. An able lawyer has
to reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it;
but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflicts
and wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on the
purposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects--he is
lifted into a contemplative mood. Archbishop Trench, in his valuable
volume on the "Study of Words," opens a paragraph with this sentence:
"Let us now proceed to _contemplate_ some of the attestations for
God's truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil's
falsehood, which may be found to lurk in words." Here we suggest that
the proper word were _consider_; for there is activity, and a
progressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters,
which disqualifies the verb _contemplate_.

Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lack
of discipline or lack of refinement. Our American magniloquence--the
tendency to which is getting more and more subdued--comes partly from
national youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty,
and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more the
prospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridge
somewhere says is to be "England in glorious magnification."

I AM FREE TO CONFESS. An irredeemable vulgarism.

IN THIS CONNECTION. Another.

INDEBTEDNESS. "The amount of my _engagedness_" sounds as well
and is as proper as "the amount of my _indebtedness_." We have already
_hard-heartedness_, _wickedness_, _composedness_, and others.
Nevertheless, this making of nouns out of adjectives with the
participial form is an irruption over the boundaries of the parts of
speech which should not be encouraged.

Archbishop Whately, in a passage of his shortcoming comments on
Bacon's "Essays," uses _preparedness_. Albeit that brevity is a
cardinal virtue in writing, a circumlocution would, we think, be
better than a gawky word like this, so unsteady on its long legs. In
favor of _indebtedness_ over others of like coinage, this is to be
said--that it imports that which in one form or other comes home to
the bosom of all humanity.

INTELLECTS. That man's intellectual power is not one and indivisible,
but consists of many separate, independent faculties, is a momentous
truth, revealed by the insight of Gall. One of the results of this
great discovery may at times underlie the plural use of the important
word _intellect_ when applied to one individual. If so, it were still
indefensible. It has, we suspect, a much less philosophic origin, and
proceeds from the unsafe practice of overcharging the verbal
gun in order to make more noise in the ear of the listener. The plural
is correctly used when we speak of two or more different men.

LEFT. "I left at ten o'clock." This use of _leave_ as a neuter verb,
however attractive from its brevity, is not defensible. _To leave off_
is the only proper neuter form. "We left off at six, and left (the
hall) at a quarter past six." The place should be inserted after the
second _left_. Even the first is essentially active, some form of
action being understood after _off_: we left off _work_ or _play_.

MIDST. "In our midst" is a common but incorrect phrase.

OUR AUTHOR. A vulgarism, which, by its seeming convenience, gets the
countenance of critical writers. We say _seeming_ convenience; for in
this seeming lies the vulgarity, the writer expressing, unconsciously
often, by the _our_, a feeling of patronage. With his _our_ he pats
the author on the back.

PERIODICAL is an adjective, and its use as a substantive is an
unwarrantable gain of brevity at the expense of grammar.

PROPOSE. Hardly any word that we have cited is so frequently
misused, and by so many good writers, as _propose_, when the meaning
is to design, to intend to propose. It should always be followed by a
personal accusative--I propose to you, to him, to myself. In the
preface to Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" occurs the following sentence;
"The author _proposed_ to himself merely to write a fanciful story,
evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not _purpose_ attempting a
portraiture of Italian manners and character"--a sentence than which a
fitter could not be written to illustrate the proper use of _propose_
and _purpose_.

PREDICATED UPON. This abomination is paraded by persons who lose no
chance of uttering "dictionary words," hit or miss; and is sometimes
heard from others from whom the educated world has a right to look for
more correctness.

RELIABLE. A counterfeit, which no stamping by good writers or
universality of circulation will ever be able to introduce into the
family circle of honest English as a substitute for the robust Saxon
word whose place it would usurp--_trustworthy_. _Reliable_ is,
however, good English when used to signify that one is liable again.
When you have lost a receipt, and cannot otherwise prove that
a bill rendered has been paid, you are _re-liable_ for the amount.

RELIGION. Even by scholars this word is often used with looseness. In
strictness it expresses exclusively our relation to the Infinite, the
_bond_ between man and God. You will sometimes read that he is the
truly religious man who most faithfully performs his duties of
neighbor, father, son, husband, citizen. However much a religious man
may find himself strengthened by his faith and inspirited for the
performance of all his duties, this strength is an indirect, and not a
uniform or necessary, effect of religious convictions. Some men who
are sincere in such convictions fail in these duties conspicuously;
while, on the other hand, they are performed, at times, with more than
common fidelity by men who do not carry within them any very lively
religious belief or impressions. "And now abideth faith, hope, and
charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Nor can
the greatest do the work of the others any more than faith that of
hope or charity. Each one of "these three" is different from and
independent of the other, however each one be aided by cooperation
from the others. The deep, unique feeling which lifts up and
binds the creature to the Creator is elementarily one in the human
mind, and the word used to denote it should be kept solely for this
high office, and not weakened or perverted by other uses. Worcester
quotes from Dr. Watts the following sound definition: "In a proper
sense, _virtue_ signifies duty toward men, and _religion_ duty to
God."

SALOON. That eminent pioneer of American sculpture, brilliant talker,
and accomplished gentleman, the lamented Horatio Greenough, was
indignantly eloquent against the American abuse of this graceful
importation from France, applied as it is in the United States to
public billiard-rooms, oyster-cellars and grog-shops.

SUBJECT-MATTER. A tautological humpback.

TO VENTILATE, applied to a subject or person. The scholar who should
use this vilest of vulgarisms deserves to have his right thumb taken
off.

We have here noted a score of the errors prevalent in written and
spoken speech--some of them perversions or corruptions, countenanced
even by eminent writers; some, misapplications that weaken and
disfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downright
vulgarisms--that is, phrases that come from below, and are
thrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. These
last are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against such
abuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience of
some of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech as not to be
readily distinguishable from their healthy neighbors, clinging for
generations to tongues and pens. Of this tenacity there is a notable
exemplification in a passage of Boswell, written nearly a hundred
years ago. Dr. Johnson found fault with Boswell for using the phrase
to _make_ money: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To _make_ money
is to _coin_ it: you should say _get_ money." Johnson, adds Boswell,
"was jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and
prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms; such as _pledging_ myself,
for _undertaking_; _line_ for _department_ or _branch_, as the _civil
line_, the _banking line_. He was particularly indignant against the
almost universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or
_opinion_, when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of
which an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an _idea_ or
_image_ of a mountain, a tree, a building, but we surely cannot have
an idea or image of an _argument_ or _proposition_. Yet we
hear the sages of the law 'delivering their _ideas_ upon the question
under consideration;' and the first speakers of Parliament 'entirely
coinciding in the _idea_ which has been ably stated by an honorable
member.'"

Whether or not the word _idea_ may be properly used in a deeper or
grander sense than that stated by Dr. Johnson, there is no doubt that
he justly condemned its use in the cases cited by him, and in similar
ones. All the four phrases _make money_, _pledge_, _line_, and _idea_,
whereupon sentence of guilty was passed by the great lexicographer,
are still at large, and, if it be not a bull to say so, more at large
to-day than in the last century, since the area of their currency has
been extended to America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.




VIII.

A NATIONAL DRAMA.[8]

    [8] From _Putnam's Monthly_, 1857.


We are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows,
processions, and organized spectacles; we are so much more imitative
than our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to the
mimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descent
for man might find support in the features of our general life. To
complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order
that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but
that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which
lifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask any
number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical
people. A loud, unanimous, derisive _no_ would be the answer. And
yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward
to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the
richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter
are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical.
From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures,
lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in
Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment.
Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth, are of our stock;
and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while
yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddling-clothes, is an earnest of a
creative future. We are to have a national literature and a national
drama. What is a national drama? Premising that as little in their
depth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with the
dimensions of this great theme, we would say a few words.

A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in the
heart of a people. Good books are the crystallization of thoughts and
feelings. To have a literature--that is, a body of enduring
books--implies vigor and depth. Such books are the measure of the
mental vitality in a people. Those peoples that have the best books
will be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those that
have none, at the bottom. Good books, once brought forth,
exhale ever after both fragrance and nourishment. They educate while
they delight many generations.

Good books are the best thoughts of the best men. They issue out of
deep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts and
strong heads such books are sure to come to life. The mind, like the
body, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative,
transmitting itself to a remote posterity.

The best books are the highest products of human effort. Themselves
the evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power.
Consider what a spring of life to European people have been the books
of the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?

To be good, books must be generic. They may be, in subject, in tone,
and in color, national; but in substance they must be so universally
human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them.
Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be
a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a
proof of their breadth and depth--of their high humanity.

The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which is
needed to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarily
sang and wrote merely of itself. Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks.
But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes a
Trojan for his hero. This appropriation of foreign material shows that
the aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas and
feelings that are independent of time and place. Thence, when, by
multiplication of Christian nations our mental world had become vastly
enlarged, embracing in one bond of culture, not only all modern
civilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, the
poets--especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presently
stated--looked abroad and afar for the frame-work and corporeal stuff
of their writings.

The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is most
generic in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendent
conceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare's
fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England; and that
one, "The Merry Wives of Windsor"--the only one not written chiefly or
largely in verse--is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies
(except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, "Lear" and
"Macbeth," stand on British ground. Is "Hamlet" on that score less
English than "Lear," or "Othello" than "Macbeth"? Does Italy count
Juliet among her trophies, or Desdemona?

Of Milton's two dramas---to confine myself here to the dramatic
domain--the tragedy ("Samson Agonistes,") like his epics, is Biblical;
the comedy ("Comus") has its home in a sphere

  "Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
  Which men call earth."

Of the numerous athletic corps of dramatists, contemporary with
Shakespeare and Milton, few have left works pithy enough and so
poetically complete as to withstand the wear of time and keep fresh to
each successive generation. But if you inspect the long list from
which Charles Lamb took his "Specimens," you will find few British
names.

Casting our eyes on the dramatic efforts of the recent English poetic
celebrities, we perceive that Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, all
abandoned, in every instance, native ground. The only dramatic work of
a great modern, the scene of which is laid within the British limits,
is "The Borderers," of Wordsworth, which, though having the
poetic advantage of remoteness in time--being thrown back to the reign
of Henry III.--is, in strictness, neither a drama nor a poem,
Wordsworth's deficiency in dramatic gifts being so signal as to cause,
by the impotent struggle in an uncongenial element, a partial
paralysis even of his high poetic genius.

Glance now across the Channel. French poetic tragedy is in its
subjects almost exclusively ancient--Greek, Roman, and Biblical. In
the works of the great comic genius of France, Moliere, we have a
salient exception to the practice of all other eminent dramatists. The
scene of his plays is Paris; the time is the year in which each was
written.

Let us look for the cause of this remarkable isolation.

Moliere was the manager of a theatrical company in the reign of Louis
XIV., and he wrote, as he himself declares, to please the king and
amuse the Parisians. But deeper than this; Moliere was by nature a
great satirist. I call him a _great_ satirist, because of the
affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite--namely, a
clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the
false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense,
shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the
comic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was
the best field, and for Moliere especially, gifted as he was with
histrionic genius. The vices and abuses, the follies and absurdities,
the hypocrisies and superficialities of civilized life, these were the
game for his faculties. The interior of Paris households he
transferred to the stage with biting wit, doubling the attractiveness
of his pictures by comic hyperbole. His portraits are caricatures, not
because they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloat
out a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him a
lop-sided deformity. Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a
personage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not a
miser; he is Avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; he
is Misanthropy personified.

This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature of
relations and juxtapositions. With laughable unscrupulousness Moliere
multiplies improbable blunders and conjunctions. All verisimilitude is
sacrificed to scenic vivacity. Hence, the very highest of his comedies
are farce-like; even "Tartuffe" is so.

In Moliere little dramatic growth goes on before the
spectator's eye. His personages are not gradually built up by
successive touches, broad or fine; they do not evolve themselves
chiefly by collision with others; in the first act they come on the
stage unfolded. The action and plot advance rapidly, but not through
the unrolling of the persons represented. Hence, his most important
personages are prosaic and finite. They interest you more as agents
for the purpose in hand than as men and women. They are subordinate
rather to the action than creative of action.

Moliere is a most thorough realist, and herein is his strength. In him
the comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency and
body to the comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet.
Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, was
a present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedy
ought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life.
Moliere's comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are,
philosophically speaking, low life. His are comedies not of character
and sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore cannot be
highly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remote
ground, clean of all local coloring and association, such as is
essential to the dramatist whose inspiration is poetical, and who
therefore must reconcile the ideal with the real, by which
reconciliation only can be produced the purest truth. That,
notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, his
comedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of the
breadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of his
rich mind, and his superlative comic genius.

Of Alfieri's twenty-two tragedies, three only are modern, and of these
three the scene of one is in Spain.

Of the nine or ten tragedies of the foremost German dramatic poet,
Schiller, three are German, "The Robbers," "Intrigue and Love," and
"Wallenstein."

Goethe's highest dramas, "Iphigenia," "Egmont," "Torquato Tasso," are
all foreign in clothing. "The Natural Daughter" has no local
habitation, no dependence on time or place. "Goetz von Berlichingen,"
written in Goethe's earliest days of authorship, is German and in
prose, "Faust"--the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivaling
the greatest poems of all time--"Faust" is not strictly a drama: its
wonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramatic
necessity.

The drama of Spain, like the comedies of Moliere, is an exception to
the rule we deduce from the practice of other dramatists; but it is an
exception which, like that of Moliere, confirms the rule. Unlike the
ancient Greek and the French tragic poets, unlike Schiller,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Alfieri, the Spanish dramatists do not aim at
ideal humanity. The best of them, Calderon, is so intensely Spanish
and Romish, as to be, in comparison with the breadth and universality
of his eminent compeers above named, almost provincial. His personages
are not large and deep enough to be representative. The manifold
recesses of great minds he does not unveil; he gets no deeper than the
semi-barbarous exaggerations of selfish, passionate love; of revenge,
honor, and jealousy. His characterization is weak. His highest
characters lack intellectual calibre, and are exhibited in lyrical
one-sidedness rather than dramatic many-sidedness. He is mostly
content with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled by
the conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which have
already passed away even in Spain. He is a marvelously fertile,
skillful, poetic playwright.

Thus we perceive that, with poetic dramatists, the prevailing
practice is, to look abroad for fables. Moreover, in the cases where
these were drawn from the bosom of the poet's own people, he shuns the
present, and hies as far back as he can into the dark abysms of time,
as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear. The Greek tragic poets,
having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era of
Greece. The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that of
place as well as that of time; and he must have one or the other.

The law lying behind this phenomenon is transparent. The higher poetry
is, the more generic it is. Its universality is a chief constituent of
its excellence. The drama is the most generically human, and,
therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry. The epic deals
with the material, the outward--humanity concreted into events; the
lyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as to
gush out in ode or song. The dramatic is the union of the epic and
lyric--the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outward
while co-working with it. In the dramatic, the action is more made by
the personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in the
strong, full stream of events. The lyric is the utterance of
one-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which must
be linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and his
actions. The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic. Out of
humanity and human action it extracts the essence. It presents men in
their completest form, in warm activity, impelled thereto by strongest
feelings. Hence, it must be condensed and compact, and must, for its
highest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, and
all prosaic circumscriptions. The poetic dramatist needs the highest
poetic freedom, and only through this can he attain to that breadth
and largeness whereof the superiority of his form admits, and which
are such in Shakespeare, that in his greatest plays the whole world
seems to be present as spectators and listeners.

Observe that the highest dramatic literatures belong to the two freest
peoples--the Greeks and the English. A people, possessing already a
large political freedom, must be capable of, and must be in the act
of, vigorous, rich development, through deep inward passion and
faculty, in order that its spirit shall issue in the perennial flowers
of the poetic drama. The dramatic especially implies and
demands variety and fullness and elevation of _personality_; and
this is only possible through freedom, the attainment of which freedom
implies on its side the innate fertility of nature which results in
fullness and elevation.

Now in the subjective elevation of the individual, and therewith the
unprecedented relative number of individuals thus elevated, herein do
we exceed all other peoples. By subjective elevation I mean,
liberation from the outward, downward pressure of dogmatic
prescription, of imperious custom, of blindfolded tradition, of
irresponsible authority. The despotic objectivity of Asia--where
religion is submissiveness, and manhood is crushed by obedience--has
been partially withstood in Europe. The emancipation therefrom of the
Indo-Germanic race is completed in Anglo-America. Through this
manifold emancipation we are to be, in all the high departments of
human achievement, preeminently creative, because, while equipped with
the best of the past, we are at the same time preeminently subjective;
and, therefore, high literature will, with us, necessarily take the
lyrical, and especially the dramatic, form.

More than our European ancestors, we mold, each one of us, our
own destiny; we have a stronger inward sense of power to unfold and
elevate ourselves; we are more ready and more capable to withstand the
assaults of circumstance. Here is more thoroughly embodied the true
Christian principle, that out of himself is to come every man's
redemption; that the favor and help of God are only to be obtained
through resolute self-help, and honest, earnest struggle. In
Christendom we stand alone as having above us neither the objectivity
of politics nor that of the church. The light of the past we have,
without its darkness. We carry little weight from the exacting past.
Hence, our unexampled freedom and ease of movement which, wanting the
old conventional ballast, to Europeans seems lawless and reckless.
Even among ourselves, many tremble for our future, because they have
little faith in humanity, and because they cannot grasp the new, grand
historic phenomenon of a people possessing all the principles,
practices, and trophies of civilization without its paralyzing
incumbrances.

But think not, because we are less passive to destiny, we are
rebellious against Deity; because we are boldly self-reliant, we are,
therefore, irreligiously defiant. The freer a people is, the
nearer it is to God. The more subjective it is, through acquired
self-rule, the more will it harmonize with the high objectivity of
absolute truth and justice. For having thrown off the capricious
secondary rule of man, we shall not be the less, but the more, under
the steadfast, primary rule of God; for having broken the force of
human, fallible prescription, we shall the more feel and acknowledge
the supremacy of flawless, divine law; for having rejected the tyranny
of man's willfulness, we shall submit the more fully to the beneficent
power of principle.

Our birth, growth, and continued weal, depending on large, deep
principles--principles deliberately elaborated and adopted by reason,
and generously embracing the whole--our life must be interpenetrated
by principle, and thence our literature must embrace the widest and
most human wants and aspirations of man. And thus, it will be our
privilege and our glory to be then the most national in our books when
we are the most universal.




IX.

USEFULNESS OF ART.

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE RHODE ISLAND ART
ASSOCIATION IN PROVIDENCE, SEPTEMBER 4, 1854.


_Gentlemen of the Rhode Island Art Association:_--

We are met to inaugurate an Association whose aim and end shall be the
encouragement and culture of Art. A most high end--among the highest
that men can attempt; an end that never can be entertained except by
men of the best breed. There is no art among savages, none among
barbarians. Barbarism and art are adversary terms. When men capable of
civilization ascend into it, art manifests itself an inevitable
accompaniment, an indispensable aid to human development. I will say
further, that in a people the capacity to be cultivated involves the
capacity, nay, the necessity of art. And still further, that those
nations that have been or are preeminent on the earth, are preeminent
in art. Nay, more, that a nation cannot attain to and maintain
eminence without being proficient in art; and that to abstract from a
people its artists were not merely to pluck the flowers from its
branches; it were to cut off its-deep roots.

Who is the artist?

He who embodies, in whatever mode,--so that they be visible or
audible, and thus find entrance to the mind,--conceptions of the
beautiful, is an artist. The test and characteristic of the artistic
nature are superior sensibility to the beautiful. Unite to this the
faculties and the will to give form to the impressions and emotions
that are the fruit of this susceptibility, and you have the artist.
Whether he shall embody his conception in written verse, in marble, in
stone, in sound, on the canvas, that will depend on each one's
individual aptitudes. Generic, common, indispensable to all is the
superior sensibility to the beautiful. In this lies the essence of the
artist.

The beautiful and the perfect being, if not identical, in closest
consanguinity, the artist's is an important, a great function. The
artist must receive into his mind, or engender in his mind's native
richness, conceptions of what is most high, most perfect, most
beautiful in shape or sound, in thought or feeling; and producing it
before his fellow-men, appeal to their sensibility to the beautiful,
to their deepest sympathies, to their capacity of being moved by the
grandest and the noblest there is in man and nature. Truly, a mighty
part is that of the artist.

Artists are the educators of humanity. Tutors and professors instruct
princes and kings, but poets (and all genuine artists are poets)
educate nations. Take from Greece Homer and Phidias, and Sophocles and
Scopas, and the planner of the Parthenon, and you efface Greece from
history. Wanting them, she would not have been the great Greece that
we know; she would not have had the vigor of sap, the nervous
vitality, to have continued to live in a remote posterity, immortal in
the culture, the memories, and the gratitude of men.

So great, so far-stretching, so undying is the power of this exalted
class of men, that it were hardly too much to say that had Homer and
Phidias never lived, we should not be here today. If this be deemed
extravagant, with confidence I affirm that but for the existence of
the greatest artist the world has ever known,--of him who may
be called the chief educator of England,--but for Shakespeare, we
assuredly should not be here to-day doing the good work we are doing.

There are probably some of this company who, like myself, having had
the good fortune to be in London at the time of the world's fair,
stood under that magnificent, transparent roof, trod that immense area
whereon fifty thousand people moved at ease. It was a privilege,--the
memory of which will last a life-time, to have been admitted into that
gigantic temple of industry, there to behold in unimaginable profusion
and variety the product of man's labor, intellect, and genius,
gathered from the four corners of the earth into one vast, gorgeous
pile,--a spectacle peerless from its mere material splendor, and from
its moral significance absolutely sublime.

On entering by the chief portal into the transept,--covering in the
huge oaks of Hyde Park,--the American, after wondering for a moment in
the glare of the first aspect, will, with the eagerness and perhaps
the vanity of his nation,--have hastened through the compartments of
France, Belgium, Germany, gorgeous with color, glistening with gold.
He will have hastened, hard as it was to hurry through such a
show, in order to reach at once the far eastern end of the palace
where a broad area had been allotted to the United States,--Jonathan,
as is his wont, having helped himself largely. Great was the
American's disappointment, cutting was the rebuke to his vanity; his
country made no _show_ at all. The samples of her industry were
not outwardly brilliant. Their excellence lay in their inward power,
in their wide usefulness. They were not ornaments and luxuries for the
dwellings of the few, they were inventions that diffuse comforts and
blessings among the many,--labor-saving machines and cheap newspapers.
By the thoughtful visitor the merit of these was appreciated, as it
was acknowledged in the final awards of the judges. And even in this
high department where we are so eminent, owing to distance and
misunderstandings, we were not adequately represented. But even if we
had been, the European would have said, "This has a high value and
interest; but still I find not here enough to justify the expectations
entertained by this people, and by many in Europe, of the future
greatness of the American Republic. These things, significant as they
are, are yet not an alphabet that can be so compounded as to
write the richest page of man's history. In this present display I
find not prefigured that splendid future the Americans are fond of
predicting for themselves." And the American, acknowledging the force
of the comment, would have turned away mortified, humbled. But he was
saved any such humiliation. In the midst of that area, under that
beautiful flag, day after day, week after week, month after month,
from morn till night, go when he would, he beheld there a circle ever
full, its vacancies supplied as soon as they were made, a circle
silent with admiration, hushed by emotion, gazing at a master-piece of
American art, the Greek Slave of Powers. And from that contemplation
hundreds of thousands of Europeans carried away an impression of
American capacity, a conviction that truly a great page is to be
written by the young republic in the book of history,--a sense of
American power which they could have gotten from no other source.

Our Association, gentlemen, owes its origin to the wants of industry.
The moving power which has been strongest in bringing so many of us
together to found an institution for the encouragement of art in Rhode
Island, is the desire hereby more thoroughly to inweave the
beautiful into cotton and woolen fabrics, into calicoes and delaines;
to melt the beautiful into iron and brass, and copper, as well as into
silver and gold; so that our manufacturers and artisans may hold their
own against the competition of England and France and Germany, whereof
in the two latter countries especially, schools of design have long
existed, and high artists find their account in furnishing the
beautiful to manufacturers.

"A low origin this for such a society, and the fruits will be without
flavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered," will say some travelled
dilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wonders
of the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teaches
a different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely,
but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studded
canopy of the earth, but also our near earth itself, has He made
beautiful. He surrounds us with beauty; He envelops us in beauty.
Beauty is spread out on the familiar grass, glows in the daily flower,
glistens in the dew, waves in the commonest leafy branch. All about
us, in infinite variety, beauty is lavished by God in sights
and sounds, and odors. Now, in using the countless and multifarious
substances that are put within our reach, to be by our ingenuity and
contrivance wrought into materials for our protection and comfort, and
pleasure, it becomes us to--it is part of his design that we
shall--follow the divine example, so that in all our handiwork, as in
his, there shall be beauty, so much as the nature of each product is
susceptible of. That it is the final purpose of Providence that our
whole life, inward and outward, shall be beautiful, and be steeped in
beauty, we have evidence, in the yearnings of the best natures for the
perfect, in the delight we take in the most resplendent objects of art
and nature, in the ennobling thrill we feel on witnessing a beautiful
deed.

By culture we can so create and multiply beauty, that all our
surroundings shall be beautiful.

Can you not imagine a city of the size of this, or vastly larger, the
structure of whose streets and buildings shall be made under the
control of the best architectural ideas, being of various stones and
marbles, and various in style and color, so that each and every one
shall be either light, or graceful, or simple, or ornate, or solid,
or grand, according to its purpose, and the conception of the
builder; and in the midst and on the borders of the city, squares, and
parks, planted with trees and flowers and freshened by streams and
fountains. And when you recall the agreeable, the elevating sensation
you have experienced in front of a perfect piece of architecture
(still so rare), will you not readily concede that where every edifice
should be beautiful, and you never walked or drove out but through
streets of palaces and artistic parks, the effect on the whole
population of this ever-present beauty and grandeur, would be to
refine, to expand, to elevate. When we look at the architectural
improvements made within a generation, in London, in Paris, in New
York, we may, without being Utopians, hope for this transformation.
But the full consummation of such a hope can only be brought about in
unison with improvements in all the conditions and relations of life,
and the diffusion of such improvements among the masses.

It is to further-such diffusion that this Association has been
founded. Our purpose is to meet the growing demand for beauty in all
things; to bring into closer cooperation the artisan and the artist;
to make universally visible and active the harmony,--I almost might
say the identity,--there is between the useful and the beautiful.

Gentlemen, ever in the heart of the practical, in the very core of the
useful, there is enclosed a seed of beauty; and upon the
fructification, growth, and expansion of that seed depends,--aye,
absolutely depends,--the development of the practical. But for the
expansion of that seed, we should have neither the plough nor the
printing-press, neither shoes nor the steam engine. To that we owe
silver forks as well as the electric telegraph. In no province of work
or human endeavor is improvement made, is improvement possible, but by
the action of that noble faculty through which we are uplifted when
standing before a masterpiece of Raphael. This ceaseless seeking for a
better, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought the
English race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, from
the narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to this
wide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence of
life; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to our
present as that is to the times of Alfred.

In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they are
radiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is often
the measure of its usefulness. How beautiful is a field of
golden wheat--whereby our bodies live--and the more beautiful the
closer it stands and the fuller are its heads. The oak and the pine
owe their majestic beauty to that which is the index of their
usefulness, the solid magnitude of their trunks. The proportions which
give the horse his highest symmetry of form, give him his fleetness
and endurance and strength. And thus, too, with man,--his works, when
best, sparkle most with this fire of the beautiful. We profit by
history in proportion as it registers beautiful sayings and beautiful
doings. We profit one another in everyday life in proportion as our
acts, the minor as well as the greater, are vitalized by this divine
essence of beauty. To the speeches of Webster, even to the most
technical, this essence gives their completeness and their grandeur of
proportion; while it is this which illuminates with undying splendor
the creations of Allston. Thus, gentlemen, the aim of our Association
is most noble and useful, drawing its nobleness from its high
usefulness. May it so prosper, that a generation hence, thousands and
tens of thousands shall look back to this the day of its inauguration
with praise and thankfulness.





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