all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry
by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of
the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those
arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are
created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the
invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of
language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and
passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and
delicate combinations than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic
and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation.
For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has
relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and
conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and
interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror
which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of
which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors,
painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great
masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have
employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never
equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two
performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar
and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long
as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the
restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question whether, if we
deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the
vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them
in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.
We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the
faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still
narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and
unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and
towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of
those relations has always been found connected with a perception of
the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets
has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound,
without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less
indispensable to the communication of its influence than the words
themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity
of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as
seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a
poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the
language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music,
produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony
and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should
accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony,
which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient
and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as
includes much action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate
upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his
peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose writers
is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has
been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet--the truth and splendour
of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense
that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic,
dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in
thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any
regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms,
the varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence
of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.
[Footnote: See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death
particularly.] His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which
satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his
philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and
then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself
forth together with it into the universal element with which it has
perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not
only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words
unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in
the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical,
and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the
eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed
traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their
subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things,
than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton
(to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very
loftiest power.
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time,
place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of
actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing
in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other
minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of
time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur;
the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a
relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and
wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence
epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the
poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures
and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which
makes beautiful that which is distorted.
The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition
as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a
whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought.
And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were
poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of Livy,
restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest degree,
they made copious and ample amends for their subjection by filling all
the interstices of their subjects with living images.
Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed
to estimate its effects upon society.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls
open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight.
In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors
are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine
and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is
reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty
cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of their union.
Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of
his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as
he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be
impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its
own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by
the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and
softened, yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his
contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements
of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding
civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his
age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses
were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and
Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering
devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal
creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and
enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until
from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified
themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be objected
that these characters are remote from moral perfection, and that they
can by no means be considered as edifying patterns for general
imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified
its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a
semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown
evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet
considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in
which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing
the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage
is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient
armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to
conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal
nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture but that
the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise,
and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn.
A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through
the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest
class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its
naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of
costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary music
for mortal ears.
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon
a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry
has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and
domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate,
and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But
poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the
mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended
combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty
of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not
familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations
clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those
who have once contemplated them as memorials of that gentle and exalted
content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which
it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our
nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which
exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly
good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself
in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures
of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good
is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting
upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination
by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the
power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other
thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for
ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the
organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise
strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own
conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place
and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. By
this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in
which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he
would resign a glory in a participation in the cause. There was little
danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far
misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their
widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is
less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently
affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in
exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to
this purpose.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously
with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical
faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,
philosophy, and we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the
scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which
the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the
habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other period
has so much energy, beauty, and virtue been developed; never was blind
strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the
will of man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the
beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceded the death
of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we
records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity
in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language,
which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the
storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written poetry existed
at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle
inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all,
as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of
succeeding time. We know no more of cause and effect than a constant
conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist with whatever
other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. I appeal
to what has already been established to distinguish between the cause
and the effect.
It was at the period here adverted to that the drama had its birth;
and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those
few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved
to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or
practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For
the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance,
and religious institutions to produce a common effect in the
representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each
division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the
most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion
and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the
elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are
employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music
and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the
fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious
institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our system
of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many expressions
appropriate to his dramatic character might be moulded into one
permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial
and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where
all the attention may be directed to some great master of ideal mimicry.
The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to
great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the
dramatic circle; but the comedy should be, as in _King Lear_, universal,
ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the intervention of this principle
which determines the balance in favour of _King Lear_ against the
_OEdipus Tyrannus_ or the _Agamemnon_, or, if you will, the trilogies
with which they are connected; unless the intense power of the choral
poetry, especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring
the equilibrium. _King Lear_, if it can sustain this comparison, may
be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing
in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was
subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has
prevailed in modern Europe. Calderon, in his religious _Autos_, has
attempted to fulfill some of the high conditions of dramatic
representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a
relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating them
to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still
more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of
the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted
superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human
passion.
But I digress.--The connection of scenic exhibitions with the
improvement or corruption of the manners of men has been universally
recognized; in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its
most perfect and universal form has been found to be connected with
good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been imputed
to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry employed in its
constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the
periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not
corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness
of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which
the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance,
stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one
feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would
become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and
passions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity
of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are
strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted
calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence
of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
willfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure
or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither
the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which
it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry,
is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest
rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity
of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty,
and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of
propagating its like wherever it may fall.
But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with
that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment
of the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak
attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral
truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some
gross vice or weakness with which the author, in common with his
auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical and
domestic drama. Addison's _Cato_ is a specimen of the one; and would
it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such purposes
poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning,
ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are
unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion,
which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and
appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest degradation
of the drama is the reign of Charles II., when all forms in which
poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph
of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating
an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle
pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to
be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit
succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead
of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic
merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever
blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very
veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster
for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new food,
which it devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other,
the connection of poetry and social good is more observable in the
drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the
highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the
highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction
of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of
a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain
the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political
institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should
arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this
is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language,
institution and form, require not only to be produced, but to be
sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the
divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.