the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of
the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The
bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of
Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious
reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the
tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness;
whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of June,
which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds
a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense
with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic
delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in
statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and
institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor
is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to
which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to
the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the
writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed
sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their
superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of
those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not
in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It
is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which
their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets,
but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility
to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them
as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved.
For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to
pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination
and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a
paralysing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until
all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. At the approach
of such a period, poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which
are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps
of Astraa, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates all the
pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light
of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can
have place in an evil time. It will readily be confessed that those
among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were
delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and
sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly
have destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever
cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely
disjointed, which descending through the minds of many men is attached
to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence
is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life
of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at
once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not circumscribe
the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the
sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived
the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and
isolated portions: those who are more finely organized, or, born in
a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which
all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built
up since the beginning of the world.
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have
been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear
to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the
selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture
anything which might bear a particular relation to their own condition,
whilst it should bear a general one to the universal constitution of
the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps
partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have
been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high
sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are
as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding
truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet
Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the
Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The
institutions also, and the religion of Rome, were less poetical than
those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence
poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection
of political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in
its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic they
contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the
order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus;
the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the
victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with
Hannibal after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a
refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from
such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at
once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination,
beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according
to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward ever-living
fame. These things are not the less poetry, _quia carent vate sacro_.
They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the
memories of men. The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the
theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony.
At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the
circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter
anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors
of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion, who
created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which,
copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the
bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to the present
purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems: except that
we protest, on the ground of the principles already established, that
no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
of this extraordinary person are all instinct with the most vivid
poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a
certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded
upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and
became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is
to be confessed that "Light seems to thicken", and
"The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouse".
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing
itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its
yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music,
unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,
nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
institutions of the Celtic [Footnote: The confusion between Celtic and
Teutonic is constant in the writers of the eighteenth century and the
early part of this.] conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the
darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory,
and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is
an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian
doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil
their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the
poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and
superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had
become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and
yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others:
lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud characterized a race amongst
whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, language, or
institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not
justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected
with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which
could dissolve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who
cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies
have been incorporated into our popular religion.
It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry
of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves.
The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in
his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the materials
of pleasure and of power produced by the common skill and labour of
human beings ought to be distributed among them. The limitations of
this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility
of each, or the utility to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines
of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system
of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the
future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal
truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its
abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric
doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of
the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed
upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and
institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all
the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no
nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into
itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal
and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part
of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences
of these events.
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political
hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom
of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion,
the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues
of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had
walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled by
the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and
proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was
created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is
poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument
of their art: _Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse_. The Provencal
Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells,
which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is
in the grief of love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming
a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to
explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with
these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and
wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of
self. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than
Petrarch. His _Vita Nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of
sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period,
and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His
apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love
and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have
ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious
imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed
the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the
_Divine Drama_, in the measure of the admiration which they accord to
the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of
everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of
all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest
writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns
of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age,
have celebrated the dominion of love, planting, as it were, trophies
in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force.
The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human
kind is distributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error
which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two
sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institutions
of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which
chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the
stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The distorted
notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have
idealized are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets
walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult
question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction
which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and
that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full
extent of it by placing Rhipaus, whom Virgil calls _justissimus unus_,
in Paradise, [Footnote: _Paradiso, xx_. 68.] and observing a most
heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And
Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of
that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has
been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and
magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in _Paradise Lost_.
It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for
the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning,
and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish
on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave,
are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that
ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours
his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far
superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has
conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one
who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible
revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him
to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of
exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated
the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to
have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil.
And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive
proof of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He mingled, as it were, the
elements of human nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged
them in the composition of his great picture according to the laws of
epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by which
a series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and
ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding
generations of mankind. The _Divina Commedia_ and _Paradise Lost_ have
conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and
time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which
have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly
employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not
utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity
of genius.
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second
poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible
relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in
which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself
in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the
wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and
Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the
fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied;
and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet,
Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or
Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth.
Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic in its highest
sense be refused to the _Aneid_ still less can it be conceded to the
_Orlando Furioso_, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the _Lusiad, or the
_Fairy Queen_.
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion
of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably
in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship
of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other followed the
Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious
reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony
than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation. Dante was
the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, in
itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms.
He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the
resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in
the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a
heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are
instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of
inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of
their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no
conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which
contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and
the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is
a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight;
and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence
which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet
another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of
an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio
was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the superstructure of English
literature is based upon the materials of Italian invention.
But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of
poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed out
the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon
their own and all succeeding times.
But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
and mechanists on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of
the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of
reason is more useful. Let us examine, as the grounds of this
distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a
general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces. There
are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal, and permanent; the
other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the means
of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense, whatever
strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and
adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower meaning may be assigned
to the word utility, confining it to express that which banishes the
importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men
with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of
superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance
among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage.
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their
appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets, and
copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life.
They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest
value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns
of the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the
superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions,
let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced,
the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst
the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour,
let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence
with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not
tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes
of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, "To him that
hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that
he hath shall be taken away". The rich have become richer, and the
poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between
the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects
which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating
faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition
involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable
defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the
inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior
portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are
often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.
Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy
delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from
the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than
the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the saying, "It is better
to go to the house of mourning than to the house of mirth". Not that
this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. The
delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature,
the joy of the perception, and still more of the creation of poetry,
is often wholly unalloyed.
The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
poetical philosophers.
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau [Footnote:
Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet.
The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.], and their disciples,
in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the
gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral
and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited had
they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for
a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt
as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each
other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all
imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of
the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and
Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never
been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had
never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed
down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had
been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never,
except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened
to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of
analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now
attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and
creative faculty itself.