to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the
produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought
is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in
morals, government, and political economy, or, at least, what is wiser
and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let "_I dare
not_ wait upon _I would_, like the poor cat in the adage". We want the
creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous
impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our
calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can
digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the
limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of
the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal
world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree
disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the
basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention
for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the
inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the
discoveries which should have lightened have added a weight to the
curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which
money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates
new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it
engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and
the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than
at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating
principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceeds
the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws
of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which
animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time
the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from
which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of
life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things;
it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the
elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty
to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love,
patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful universe
which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the
grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not
ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the
owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not
like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination
of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry". The greatest
poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal,
which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour
of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach
or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original
purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the
results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the
decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated
to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions
of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day whether
it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are
produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by
critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful
observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of
the spaces between their suggestions by the intermixture of conventional
expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical
faculty itself: for Milton conceived the _Paradise Lost_ as a whole
before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for
the muse having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song". And let
this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various
readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_. Compositions so
produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and
intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the
plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the
power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind
which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to
itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be
pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is,
as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own;
but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the
coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled
sands which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and
the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them
is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions;
and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe.
Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most
refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with
the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord,
and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the
sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes
immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests
the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and
veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind,
bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters
abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns
of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry
redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity
and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable
things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within
the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an
incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns
to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through
life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare
the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the
percipient. "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven
of hell, a hell of heaven." But poetry defeats the curse which binds
us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And
whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark
veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being
within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the
familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which
we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight
the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.
It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which
we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated
in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso _--Non merita nome di
creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta._
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure,
virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best,
the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time
be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of
human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the
happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally
incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless
virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into
the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the
exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in
a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confine
rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the
arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own
persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and
executioner, let us decide, without trial, testimony, or form, that
certain motives of those who are "there sitting where we dare not
soar", are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard,
that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was
a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine,
that Spenser was a poet-laureate. It is inconsistent with this division
of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample
justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been
weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins "were
as scarlet, they are now white as snow"; they have been washed in the
blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous
chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused
in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how
little is, as it appears--or appears, as it is; look to your own
motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it
is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and
that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the
consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these are
the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects
are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent
recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce
in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own
nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of
inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet
becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences
under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately
organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his
own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this difference.
And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny when he neglects to observe
the circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and
flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments.
But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty,
envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil have never formed
any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.
I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to
my mind by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of observing
the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which they contain
be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the arguers
against poetry, so far at least as regards the first division of the
subject. I can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of
some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel with certain
versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling to be stunned by
the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and Maevius
undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. But it belongs
to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound.
The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements
and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits
assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in a restricted
sense, has a common source with all other forms of order and of beauty,
according to which the materials of human life are susceptible of being
arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense.
The second part [Footnote: It was never written.] will have for its
object an application of these principles to the present state of the
cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the
modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a
subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the
literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever
preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national
will, has arisen, as it were, from a new birth. In spite of the low-
thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will
be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among
such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have
appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious
liberty. The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the
awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or
institution is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the
power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions
respecting men and nature. The persons in whom this power resides may
often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little
apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled
to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul.
It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers
of the present day without being startled with the electric life which
burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the
depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit,
and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its
manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the
age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the
mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present;
the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which
sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which
is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of
the world.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
(1795-1881.)
X. GOETHE.
The brief account here given of the work of Goethe was originally
published as part of the introduction to the volume of translations
called _German Romance_, which was published in 1827. It is now commonly
printed as an appendix to the first volume of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_.
Carlyle was probably never at his best when he gave himself to the
study of a particular author. His genius rather lay in the more general
aspects of his work, and in the force with which he gave an entirely
new turn to the currents of English criticism. Of his studies upon
particular authors, the essay on Burns is perhaps the most complete
and the most penetrating. But it is too long for the purposes of this
selection. Nor is it amiss that he should here be represented by a
work which may remind us that, among his services to English letters,
to have opened the stores of German poetry and thought was by no means
the least memorable.
Of a nature so rare and complex as Goethe's it is difficult to form
a true comprehension; difficult even to express what comprehension one
has formed. In Goethe's mind, the first aspect that strikes us is its
calmness, then its beauty; a deeper inspection reveals to us its
vastness and unmeasured strength. This man rules, and is not ruled.
The stern and fiery energies of a most passionate soul lie silent in
the centre of his being; a trembling sensibility has been inured to
stand, without flinching or murmur, the sharpest trials. Nothing
outward, nothing inward, shall agitate or control him. The brightest
and most capricious fancy, the most piercing and inquisitive intellect,
the wildest and deepest imagination; the highest thrills of joy, the
bitterest pangs of sorrow: all these are his, he is not theirs. While
he moves every heart from its steadfastness, his own is firm and still:
the words that search into the inmost recesses of our nature, he
pronounces with a tone of coldness and equanimity; in the deepest
pathos he weeps not, or his tears are like water trickling from a rock
of adamant. He is king of himself and of his world; nor does he rule
it like a vulgar great man, like a Napoleon or Charles Twelfth, by the
mere brute exertion of his will, grounded on no principle, or on a
false one: his faculties and feelings are not fettered or prostrated
under the iron sway of Passion, but led and guided in kindly union
under the mild sway of Reason; as the fierce primeval elements of
Nature were stilled at the coming of Light, and bound together, under
its soft vesture, into a glorious and beneficent Creation.
This is the true Rest of man; no stunted unbelieving callousness, no
reckless surrender to blind Force, no opiate delusion; but the
harmonious adjustment of Necessity and Accident, of what is changeable
and what is unchangeable in our destiny; the calm supremacy of the
spirit over its circumstances; the dim aim of every human soul, the
full attainment of only a chosen few. It comes not unsought to any;
but the wise are wise because they think no price too high for it.
Goethe's inward home has been reared by slow and laborious efforts;
but it stands on no hollow or deceitful basis: for his peace is not
from blindness, but from clear vision; not from uncertain hope of
alteration, but from sure insight into what cannot alter. His world
seems once to have been desolate and baleful as that of the darkest
sceptic: but he has covered it anew with beauty and solemnity, derived
from deeper sources, over which Doubt can have no sway. He has inquired
fearlessly, and fearlessly searched out and denied the False; but he
has not forgotten, what is equally essential and infinitely harder,
to search out and admit the True. His heart is still full of warmth,
though his head is clear and cold; the world for him is still full of
grandeur, though he clothes it with no false colours; his
fellow-creatures are still objects of reverence and love, though their
basenesses are plainer to no eye than to his. To reconcile these
contradictions is the task of all good men, each for himself, in his
own way and manner; a task which, in our age, is encompassed with
difficulties peculiar to the time; and which Goethe seems to have
accomplished with a success that few can rival. A mind so in unity
with itself, even though it were a poor and small one, would arrest
our attention, and win some kind regard from us; but when this mind
ranks among the strongest and most complicated of the species, it
becomes a sight full of interest, a study full of deep instruction.
Such a mind as Goethe's is the fruit not only of a royal endowment by
nature, but also of a culture proportionate to her bounty. In Goethe's
original form of spirit we discern the highest gifts of manhood, without
any deficiency of the lower: he has an eye and a heart equally for the
sublime, the common, and the ridiculous; the elements at once of a
poet, a thinker, and a wit. Of his culture we have often spoken already;
and it deserves again to be held up to praise and imitation. This, as
he himself unostentatiously confesses, has been the soul of all his
conduct, the great enterprise of his life; and few that understand him
will be apt to deny that he has prospered. As a writer, his resources
have been accumulated from nearly all the provinces of human intellect
and activity; and he has trained himself to use these complicated
instruments with a light expertness which we might have admired in the
professor of a solitary department. Freedom, and grace, and smiling
earnestness are the characteristics of his works: the matter of them
flows along in chaste abundance, in the softest combination; and their
style is referred to by native critics as the highest specimen of the
German tongue. On this latter point the vote of a stranger may well
be deemed unavailing; but the charms of Goethe's style lie deeper than
the mere words; for language, in the hands of a master, is the express
image of thought, or rather it is the body of which thought is the
soul; the former rises into being together with the latter, and the
graces of the one are shadowed forth in the movements of the other.
Goethe's language, even to a foreigner, is full of character and
secondary meanings; polished, yet vernacular and cordial, it sounds
like the dialect of wise, ancient, and true-hearted men: in poetry,
brief, sharp, simple, and expressive; in prose, perhaps still more
pleasing; for it is at once concise and full, rich, clear, unpretending
and melodious; and the sense, not presented in alternating flashes,
piece after piece revealed and withdrawn, rises before us as in
continuous dawning, and stands at last simultaneously complete, and
bathed in the mellowest and ruddiest sunshine. It brings to mind what
the prose of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Browne, would have been, had they
written under the good, without the bad influences, of that French
precision, which has polished and attenuated, trimmed and impoverished,
all modern languages; made our meaning clear, and too often shallow
as well as clear.