A strong common-sense, which it is not easy to unseat or disturb, marks
the English mind for a thousand years; a rude strength newly applied to
thought, as of sailors and soldiers who had lately learned to read.
They have no fancy, and never are surprised into a covert or witty word,
such as pleased the Athenians and Italians, and was convertible into a
fable not long after; but they delight in strong earthy expression, not
mistakable, coarsely true to the human body, and, though spoken among
princes, equally fit and welcome to the mob. This homeliness, veracity,
and plain style appear in the earliest extant works, and in the latest.
It imports into songs and ballads the smell of the earth, the breath of
cattle, and, like a Dutch painter, seeks a household charm, though by
pails and pans. They ask their constitutional utility in verse. The
kail and herrings are never out of sight. The poet nimbly recovers
himself from every sally of the imagination. The English muse loves the
farm-yard, the lane and market. She says, with De Stael, "I tramp in
the mire with wooden shoes, whenever they would force me into the
clouds." For, the Englishman has accurate perceptions; takes hold of
things by the right end, and there is no slipperiness in his grasp. He
loves the axe, the spade, the oar, the gun, the steam-pipe: he has built
the engine he uses. He is materialist, economical, mercantile. He must
be treated with sincerity and reality, with muffins and not the promise
of muffins; and prefers his hot chop, with perfect security and
convenience in the eating of it, to the chances of the amplest and
Frenchiest bill of fare, engraved on embossed paper. When he is
intellectual, and a poet or a philosopher, he carries the same hard
truth and the same keen machinery into the mental sphere. His mind must
stand on a fact. He will not be baffled, or catch at clouds, but the
mind must have a symbol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in
Dante, is the vice-like tenacity with which he holds a mental image
before the eyes, as if it were a scutcheon painted on a shield. Byron
"liked something craggy to break his mind upon." A taste for plain
strong speech, what is called a biblical style, marks the English. It is
in Alfred, and the Saxon Chronicle, and in the Sagas of the Northmen.
Latimer was homely. Hobbes was perfect in the "noble vulgar speech."
Donne, Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, Cotton, and the
translators, wrote it. How realistic or materialistic in treatment of
his subject is Swift. He describes his fictitious persons as if for the
police. Defoe has no insecurity or choice, Hudibras has the same hard
mentality,--keeping the truth at once to the senses, and to the
intellect.
It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer's hard painting of his
Canterbury pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shakspeare, Spenser, and
Milton, in their loftiest ascents, have this national grip and
exactitude of mind. This mental materialism makes the value of English
transcendental genius; in these writers, and in Herbert, Henry More,
Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxon materialism and narrowness,
exalted into the sphere of intellect, makes the very genius of
Shakspeare and Milton. When it reaches the pure element, it treads the
clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its elevations,
materialistic, its poetry is common-sense inspired; or iron raised to
white heat.
The marriage of the two qualities is in their speech. It is a tacit rule
of the language to make the frame or skeleton of Saxon words, and, when
elevation or ornament is sought, to interweave Roman; but sparingly; nor
is a sentence made of Roman words alone, without loss of strength. The
children and laborers use the Saxon unmixed. The Latin unmixed is
abandoned to the colleges and Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the
English island; and, in their dialect, the male principle is the Saxon;
the female, the Latin; and they are combined in every discourse. A good
writer, if he has indulged in a Roman roundness, makes haste to chasten
and nerve his period by English monosyllables.
When the Gothic nations came into Europe, they found it lighted with the
sun and moon of Hebrew and of Greek genius. The tablets of their brain,
long kept in the dark, were finely sensible to the double glory. To the
images from this twin source (of Christianity and art), the mind became
fruitful as by the incubation of the Holy Ghost. The English mind
flowered in every faculty. The common-sense was surprised and inspired.
For two centuries, England was philosophic, religious, poetic. The
mental furniture seemed of larger scale; the memory capacious like the
storehouse of the rains. The ardor and endurance of study; the boldness
and facility of their mental construction; their fancy, and imagination,
and easy spanning of vast distances of thought; the enterprise or
accosting of new subjects; and, generally, the easy exertion of power,
astonish, like the legendary feats of Guy of Warwick. The union of
Saxon precision and Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the perfect
example, is shared in less degree by the writers of two centuries. I
find not only the great masters out of all rivalry and reach, but the
whole writing of the time charged with a masculine force and freedom.
There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor, and closeness to the matter
in hand, even in the second and third class of writers; and, I think, in
the common style of the people, as one finds it in the citation of
wills, letters, and public documents, in proverbs, and forms of speech.
The more hearty and sturdy expression may indicate that the savageness
of the Norseman was not all gone. Their dynamic brains hurled off their
words, as the revolving stone hurls off scraps of grit. I could cite
from the seventeenth century sentences and phrases of edge not to be
matched in the nineteenth. Their poets by simple force of mind
equalized themselves with the accumulated science of ours. The country
gentlemen had a posset or drink they called October; and the poets, as
if by this hint, knew how to distil the whole season into their autumnal
verses: and, as nature, to pique the more, sometimes works up
deformities into beauty, in some rare Aspasia, or Cleopatra; and, as the
Greek art wrought many a vase or column, in which too long, or too
lithe, or nodes, or pits and flaws, are made a beauty of; so these were
so quick and vital, that they could charm and enrich by mean and vulgar
objects.
A man must think that age well taught and thoughtful, by which masques
and poems, like those of Ben Jonson, full of heroic sentiment in a manly
style, were received with favor. The unique fact in literary history,
the unsurprised reception of Shakspeare,--the reception proved by his
making his fortune; and the apathy proved by the absence of all
contemporary panegyric,--seems to demonstrate an elevation in the mind
of the people. Judge of the splendor of a nation, by the insignificance
of great individuals in it. The manner in which they learned Greek and
Latin, before our modern facilities were yet ready, without
dictionaries, grammars, or indexes, by lectures of a professor, followed
by their own searchings,--required a more robust memory, and cooperation
of all the faculties; and their scholars, Camden, Usher, Selden, Mede,
Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, Burton, Bentley, Brian Walton, acquired the
solidity and method of engineers.
The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. Their minds loved
analogy; were cognizant of resemblances, and climbers on the staircase
of unity. 'T is a very old strife between those who elect to see
identity, and those who elect to see discrepancies; and it renews itself
in Britain. The poets, of course, are of one part; the men of the
world, of the other. But Britain had many disciples of Plato,--More,
Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spenser,
Chapman, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berkeley, Jeremy Taylor.
Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries of observations, on
useful science, and his experiments, I suppose, were worth nothing. One
hint of Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a
talent for experiment, was worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles.
But he drinks of a diviner stream, and marks the influx of idealism into
England. Where that goes, is poetry, health, and progress. The rules
of its genesis or its diffusion are not known. That knowledge, if we
had it, would supersede all we call science of the mind. It seems an
affair of race, or of meta-chemistry;--the vital point being,--how far
the sense of unity, or instinct of seeking resemblances predominated.
For, wherever the mind takes a step, it is, to put itself at one with a
larger class, discerned beyond the lesser class with which it has been
conversant. Hence, all poetry, and all affirmative action comes.
Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the analogists, of the
idealists, or (as we popularly say, naming from the best example)
Platonists. Whoever discredits analogy, and requires heaps of facts,
before any theories can be attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing
original or beautiful will be produced by him. Locke is as surely the
influx of decomposition and of prose, as Bacon and the Platonists, of
growth. The Platonic is the poetic tendency; the so-called scientific
is the negative and poisonous. 'T is quite certain, that Spenser,
Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth will be Platonists; and that the dull men
will be Lockists. Then politics and commerce will absorb from the
educated class men of talents without genius, precisely because such
have no resistance.
Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, required in his map of the
mind, first of all, universality, or _prima philosophia_, the receptacle
for all such profitable observations and axioms as fall not within the
compass of any of the special parts of philosophy, but are more common,
and of a higher stage. He held this element essential: it is never out
of mind: he never spares rebukes for such as neglect it; believing that
no perfect discovery can be made in a flat or level, but you must ascend
to a higher science. "If any man thinketh philosophy and universality
to be idle studies, he does not consider that all professions are from
thence served and supplied; and this I take to be a great cause that has
hindered the progression of learning, because these fundamental
knowledges have been studied but in passage." He explained himself by
giving various quaint examples of the summary or common laws, of which
each science has its own illustration. He complains, that "he finds
this part of learning very deficient, the profounder sort of wits
drawing a bucket now and then for their own use, but the spring-head
unvisited. This was the _dry light_ which did scorch and offend most
men's watery natures." Plato had signified the same sense, when he
said: "All the great arts require a subtle and speculative research into
the law of nature, since loftiness of thought and perfect mastery over
every subject seem to be derived from some such source as this. This
Pericles had, in addition to a great natural genius. For, meeting with
Anaxagoras, who was a person of this kind, he attached himself to him,
and nourished himself with sublime speculations on the absolute
intelligence; and imported thence into the oratorical art whatever could
be useful to it."
A few generalizations always circulate in the world, whose authors we do
not rightly know, which astonish, and appear to be avenues to vast
kingdoms of thought, and these are in the world _constants_, like the
Copernican and Newtonian theories in physics. In England, these may be
traced usually to Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or Hooker, even to Van
Helmont and Behmen, and do all have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato
and the Greeks. Of this kind is Lord Bacon's sentence, that "Nature is
commanded by obeying her"; his doctrine of poetry, which "accommodates
the shows of things to the desires of the mind"; or the Zoroastrian
definition of poetry, mystical, yet exact, "apparent pictures of
unapparent natures"; Spenser's creed, that "soul is form, and doth the
body make"; the theory of Berkeley, that we have no certain assurance of
the existence of matter; Doctor Samuel Clarke's argument for theism from
the nature of space and time; Harrington's political rule, that power
must rest on land,--a rule which requires to be liberally interpreted;
the theory of Swedenborg, so cosmically applied by him, that the man
makes his heaven and hell; Hegel's study of civil history, as the
conflict of ideas and the victory of the deeper thought; the
identity-philosophy of Schelling, couched in the statement that "all
difference is quantitative." So the very announcement of the theory of
gravitation, of Kepler's three harmonic laws, and even of Dalton's
doctrine of definite proportions, finds a sudden response in the mind,
which remains a superior evidence to empirical demonstrations. I cite
these generalizations, some of which are more recent, merely to indicate
a class. Not these particulars, but the mental plane or the atmosphere
from which they emanate, was the home and element of the writers and
readers in what we loosely call the Elizabethan age (say in literary
history, the period from 1575 to 1625), yet a period almost short enough
to justify Ben Jonson's remark on Lord Bacon: "About his time, and
within his view, were born all the wits that could honor a nation, or
help study."
Such richness of genius had not existed more than once before. These
heights could not be maintained. As we find stumps of vast trees in our
exhausted soils, and have received traditions of their ancient fertility
to tillage, so history reckons epochs in which the intellect of famed
races became effete. So it fared with English genius. These heights
were followed by a meanness, and a descent of the mind into lower
levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the
meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and his
"understanding" the measure, in all nations, of the English intellect.
His countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on which they had
once walked with echoing steps, and disused the studies once so beloved;
the powers of thought fell into neglect. The later English want the
faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes by an
insight of general laws, so deep, that the rule is deduced with equal
precision from few subjects or from one, as from multitudes of lives.
Shakspeare is supreme in that, as in all the great mental energies. The
German's generalize: the English cannot interpret the German mind.
German science comprehends the English. The absence of the faculty in
England is shown by the timidity which accumulates mountains of facts,
as a bad general wants myriads of men and miles of redoubts, to
compensate the inspirations of courage and conduct.
The English shrink from a generalization. "They do not look abroad into
universality, or they draw only a bucketful at the fountain of the First
Philosophy for their occasion, and do not go to the spring-head."
Bacon, who said this, is almost unique among his countrymen in that
faculty, at least among the prose-writers. Milton, who was the stair or
high table-land to let down the English genius from the summits of
Shakspeare, used this privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely in
prose. For a long interval afterwards, it is not found. Burke was
addicted to generalizing, but his was a shorter line; as his thoughts
have less depth, they have less compass. Hume's abstractions are not
deep or wise. He owes his fame to one keen observation, that no copula
had been detected between any cause and effect, either in physics or in
thought; that the term cause and effect was loosely or gratuitously
applied to what we know only as consecutive, not at all as causal. Dr.
Johnson's written abstractions have little value: the tone of feeling in
them makes their chief worth.
Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has written the history of
European literature for three centuries,--a performance of great
ambition, inasmuch as a judgment was to be attempted on every book. But
his eye does not reach to the ideal standards; the verdicts are all
dated from London: all new thought must be cast into the old moulds.
The expansive element which creates literature is steadily denied.
Plato is resisted, and his school. Hallam is uniformly polite, but with
deficient sympathy; writes with resolute generosity, but is unconscious
of the deep worth which lies in the mystics, and which often outvalues
as a seed of power and a source of revolution all the correct writers
and shining reputations of their day. He passes in silence, or
dismisses with a kind of contempt, the profounder masters: a lover of
ideas is not only uncongenial, but unintelligible. Hallam inspires
respect by his knowledge and fidelity, by his manifest love of good
books, and he lifts himself to own better than almost any the greatness
of Shakspeare, and better than Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in
Hallam, or in the firmer intellectual nerve of Mackintosh, one still
finds the same type of English genius. It is wise and rich, but it
lives on its capital. It is retrospective. How can it discern and hail
the new forms that are looming up on the horizon,--new and gigantic
thoughts which cannot dress themselves out of any old wardrobe of the
past?
The essays, the fiction, and the poetry of the day have the like
municipal limits. Dickens, with preternatural apprehension of the
language of manners, and the varieties of street life, with pathos and
laughter, with patriotic and still enlarging generosity, writes London
tracts. He is a painter of English details, like Hogarth; local and
temporary in his tints and style, and local in his aims. Bulwer, an
industrious writer, with occasional ability, is distinguished for his
reverence of intellect as a temporality, and appeals to the worldly
ambition of the student. His romances tend to fan these low flames.
Their novelists despair of the heart. Thackeray finds that God has made
no allowance for the poor thing in his universe;--more 's the pity, he
thinks;--but 't is not for us to be wiser: we must renounce ideals, and
accept London.
The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing
classes of the day, explicitly teaches, that good means good to eat,
good to wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is
its direction on "fruit"; to yield economical inventions; and that its
merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive
merit of the Baconian philosophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic,
its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and
all-Good, and pinning it down to the making a better sick-chair and a
better wine-whey for an invalid;--this not ironically, but in good
faith;--that, "solid advantage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual
benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the
better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to bring home
their lemons and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious result, in
which the civility and religion of England for a thousand years ends in
denying morals, and reducing the intellect to a saucepan. The critic
hides his scepticism under the English cant of practical. To convince
the reason, to touch the conscience, is romantic pretension. The fine
arts fall to the ground. Beauty, except as luxurious commodity, does not
exist. It is very certain, I may say in passing, that if Lord Bacon had
been only the sensualist his critic pretends, he would never have
acquired the fame which now entitles him to this patronage. It is
because he had imagination, the leisures of the spirit, and basked in an
element of contemplation out of all modern English atmospheric gauges,
that he is impressive to the imaginations of men, and has become a
potentate not to be ignored. Sir David Brewster sees the high place of
Bacon, without finding Newton indebted to him, and thinks it a mistake.
Bacon occupies it by specific gravity or levity, not by any feat he did,
or by any tutoring more or less of Newton, etc., but an effect of the
same cause which showed itself more pronounced afterwards in Hooke,
Boyle, and Halley.
Coleridge, a catholic mind, with a hunger for ideas, with eyes looking
before and after to the highest bards and sages, and who wrote and spoke
the only high criticism in his time, is one of those who save England
from the reproach of no longer possessing the capacity to appreciate
what rarest wit the island has yielded. Yet the misfortune of his life,
his vast attempts but most inadequate performings, failing to accomplish
any one masterpiece, seems to mark the closing of an era. Even in him,
the traditional Englishman was too strong for the philosopher, and he
fell into _accommodations_: and, as Burke had striven to idealize the
English State, so Coleridge 'narrowed his mind' in the attempt to
reconcile the Gothic rule and dogma of the Anglican Church, with eternal
ideas. But for Coleridge, and a lurking taciturn minority, uttering
itself in occasional criticism, oftener in private discourse, one would
say, that in Germany and in America is the best mind in England rightly
respected. It is the surest sign of national decay, when the Bramins
can no longer read or understand the Braminical philosophy.
In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed all this materialism,
Carlyle was driven by his disgust at the pettiness and the cant, into
the preaching of Fate. In comparison with all this rottenness, any
check, any cleansing, though by fire, seemed desirable and beautiful. He
saw little difference in the gladiators, or the "causes" for which they
combated; the one comfort was, that they were all going speedily into
the abyss together. And his imagination, finding no nutriment in any
creation, avenged itself by celebrating the majestic beauty of the laws
of decay. The necessities of mental structure force all minds into a
few categories, and where impatience of the tricks of men makes Nemesis
amiable, and builds altars to the negative Deity, the inevitable recoil
is to heroism or the gallantry of the private heart, which decks its
immolation with glory, in the unequal combat of will against fate.
Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the
champion of Halmeman, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a
native vigor, with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the
highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible
knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll
not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to
accompany such powers, a manifest centrality. If his mind does not rest
in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit is larger, and the return is not
yet: but a master should inspire a confidence that he will adhere to his
convictions, and give his present studies always the same high place.
It would be easy to add exceptions to the limitary tone of English
thought, and much more easy to adduce examples of excellence in
particular veins; and if, going out of the region of dogma, we pass into
that of general culture, there is no end to the graces and amenities,
wit, sensibility, and erudition, of the learned class. But the
artificial succor which marks all English performance, appears in
letters also: much of their aesthetic production is antiquarian and
manufactured, and literary reputations have been achieved by forcible
men, whose relation to literature was purely accidental, but who were
driven by tastes and modes they found in vogue into their several
careers. So, at this moment, every ambitious young man studies geology;
so members of Parliament are made, and churchmen.
The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted on the national
mind. They are incapable of an inutility, and respect the five mechanic
powers even in their song. The voice of their modern muse has a slight
hint of the steam-whistle, and the poem is created as an ornament and
finish of their monarchy, and by no means as the bird of a new morning
which forgets the past world in the full enjoyment of that which is
forming. They are with difficulty ideal; they are the most conditioned
men, as if, having the best conditions, they could not bring themselves
to forfeit them. Every one of them is a thousand years old, and lives
by his memory; and when you say this, they accept it as praise.
Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, statistics,
tabulation, and engineering, and even what is called philosophy and
letters is mechanical in its structure, as if inspiration had ceased, as
if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy,
existed any more. The tone of colleges and of scholars and of literary
society has this mortal air. I seem to walk on a marble floor, where
nothing will grow. They exert every variety of talent on a lower
ground, and may be said to live and act in a sub-mind. They have lost
all commanding views in literature, philosophy, and science. A good
Englishman shuts himself out of three fourths of his mind, and confines
himself to one fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of labor, and
logic: but a faith in the laws of the mind like that of Archimedes; a
belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must follow and
not lead the laws of the mind; a devotion to the theory of politics,
like that of Hooker, and Milton, and Harrington, the modern English mind
repudiates.
I fear the same fault lies in their science, since they have known how
to make it repulsive, and bereave nature of its charm;--though perhaps
the complaint flies wider, and the vice attaches to many more than to
British physicists. The eye of the naturalist must have a scope like
nature itself, a susceptibility to all impressions, alive to the heart
as well as to the logic of creation. But English science puts humanity
to the door. It wants the connection which is the test of genius. The
science is false by not being poetic. It isolates the reptile or
mollusk it assumes to explain; whilst reptile or mollusk only exists in
system, in relation. The poet only sees it as an inevitable step in the
path of the Creator. But, in England, one hermit finds this fact, and
another finds that, and lives and dies ignorant of its value. There are
great exceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas; perhaps of Robert
Brown, the botanist; and of Richard Owen, who has imported into Britain
the German homologies, and enriched science with contributions of his
own, adding sometimes the divination of the old masters to the unbroken
power of labor in the English mind. But for the most part, the natural
science in England is out of its loyal alliance with morals, and is as
void of imagination and free play of thought, as conveyancing. It
stands in strong contrast with the genius of the Germans, those
semi-Greeks, who love analogy, and, by means of their height of view,
preserve their enthusiasm, and think for Europe.
No hope, no sublime augury, cheers the student, no secure striding from
experiment onward to a foreseen law, but only a casual dipping here and
there, like diggers in California "prospecting for a placer" that will
pay. A horizon of brass of the diameter of his umbrella shuts down
around his senses. Squalid contentment with conventions, satire at the
names of philosophy and religion, parochial and shop-till politics, and
idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of life and spirit. As they trample
on nationalities to reproduce London and Londoners in Europe and Asia,
so they fear the hostility of ideas, of poetry, of religion,--ghosts
which they cannot lay; and, having attempted to domesticate and dress
the Blessed Soul itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, they are
tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that will sweep their
system away. The artists say, "Nature puts us out"; the scholars have
become un-ideal. They parry earnest speech with banter and levity; they
laugh you down, or they change the subject. "The fact is," say they
over their wine, "all that about liberty, and so forth, is gone by; it
won't do any longer." The practical and comfortable oppress them with
inexorable claims, and the smallest fraction of power remains for
heroism and poetry. No poet dares murmur of beauty out of the precinct
of his rhymes. No priest dares hint at a Providence which does not
respect English utility. The island is a roaring volcano of fate, of
material values, of tariffs, and laws of repression, glutted markets and
low prices.
In the absence of the highest aims, of the pure love of knowledge, and
the surrender to nature, there is the suppression of the imagination,
the priapism of the senses and the understanding; we have the factitious
instead of the natural; tasteless expense, arts of comfort, and the
rewarding as an illustrious inventor whosoever will contrive one
impediment more to interpose between the man and his objects.
Thus poetry is degraded, and made ornamental. Pope and his school wrote
poetry fit to put round frosted cake. What did Walter Scott write
without stint? a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland. And the
libraries of verses they print have this Birmingham character. How many
volumes of well-bred metre we must jingle through, before we can be
filled, taught, renewed! We want the miraculous; the beauty which we
can manufacture at no mill,--can give no account of; the beauty of which
Chaucer and Chapman had the secret. The poetry of course is low and
prosaic; only now and then, as in Wordsworth, conscientious; or in
Byron, passional; or in Tennyson, factitious. But if I should count the
poets who have contributed to the Bible of existing England sentences of
guidance and consolation which are still glowing and effective,--how
few! Shall I find my heavenly bread in the reigning poets? Where is
great design in modern English poetry? The English have lost sight of
the fact that poetry exists to speak the spiritual law, and that no
wealth of description or of fancy is yet essentially new, and out of the
limits of prose, until this condition is reached. Therefore the grave
old poets, like the Greek artists, heeded their designs, and less
considered the finish. It was their office to lead to the divine
sources, out of which all this, and much more, readily springs; and, if
this religion is in the poetry, it raises us to some purpose, and we can
well afford some staidness; or hardness, or want of popular tune in the
verses.
The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of Wordsworth. He had
no master but nature and solitude. "He wrote a poem," says Landor,
"without the aid of war." His verse is the voice of sanity in a worldly
and ambitious age. One regrets that his temperament was not more liquid
and musical. He has written longer than he was inspired. But for the
rest, he has no competitor.
Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Wordsworth wanted. There
is no finer ear than Tennyson's, nor more command of the keys of
language. Color, like the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pencil,
in waves so rich that we do not miss the central form. Through all his
refinements, too, he has reached the public,--a certificate of good
sense and general power, since he who aspires to be the English poet
must be as large as London, not in the same kind as London, but in his
own kind. But he wants a subject, and climbs no mount of vision to
bring its secrets to the people. He contents himself with describing
the Englishman as he is, and proposes no better. There are all degrees
in poetry, and we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But it
is only a first success, when the ear is gained. The best office of the
best poets has been to show how low and uninspired was their general
style, and that only once or twice they have struck the high chord.
That expansiveness which is the essence of the poetic element, they have
not. It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, who said: "Let us be crowned with
roses, let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven
into new forms." A stanza of the song of nature the Oxonian has no ear
for, and he does not value the salient and curative influence of
intellectual action, studious of truth, without a by-end.
By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistible taste for
Orientalism in Britain. For a self-conceited modish life, made up of
trifles, clinging to a corporeal civilization, hating ideas, there is no
remedy like the Oriental largeness. That astonishes and disconcerts
English decorum. For once there is thunder it never heard, light it
never saw, and power which trifles with time and space. I am not
surprised, then, to find an Englishman like Warren Hastings, who had
been struck with the grand style of thinking in the Indian writings,
deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen, while offering them a
translation of the Bhagvat. "Might I," he says, "an unlettered man,
venture to prescribe bounds to the latitude of criticism, I should
exclude, in estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn
from the ancient or modern literature of Europe, all references to such
sentiments or manners as are become the standards of propriety for
opinion and action in our own modes, and, equally, all appeals to our
revealed tenets, of religion and moral duty." [#] He goes on to bespeak
indulgence to "ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste, and passages
elevated to a tract of sublimity into which our habits of judgment will
find it difficult to pursue them."
[#] Preface to Wilkins's Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta.
Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies in the English race, which
seems to make any recoil possible; in other words, there is at all times
a minority of profound minds existing in the nation, capable of
appreciating every soaring of intellect and every hint of tendency.
While the constructive talent seems dwarfed and superficial, the
criticism is often in the noblest tone, and suggests the presence of the
invisible gods. I can well believe what I have often heard, that there
are two nations in England; but it is not the Poor and the Rich; nor is
it the Normans and Saxons; nor the Celt and the Goth. These are each
always becoming the other; for Robert Owen does not exaggerate the power
of circumstance. But the two complexions, or two styles of mind,--the
perceptive class, and the practical finality class,--are ever in
counterpoise, interacting mutually; one, in hopeless minorities; the
other, in huge masses; one studious, contemplative, experimenting; the
other, the ungrateful pupil, scornful of the source, whilst availing
itself of the knowledge for gain; these two nations, of genius and of
animal force, though the first consist of only a dozen souls, and the
second of twenty millions, forever by their discord and their accord
yield the power of the English State.