collection of fine narratives, especially when the narratives are all
of different colouring. This collection Chaucer gave us, and more. If
over-excited, he is always graceful, polished, full of light banter,
half-mockeries, somewhat gossipy. An elegant speaker, facile, every
ready to smile, he makes of love not a passion but a gay feast. But if
he was romantic and gay after the fashion of his age, he also had a
fashion of his own. He observes characters, notes their differences,
studies the coherence of their parts, brings forward living and
distinct persons--a thing unheard of in his time. It is the English
positive good sense and aptitude for seeing the inside of things
beginning to appear. Chaucer ceases to gossip, and thinks. Each tale is
suited to the teller. Instead of surrendering himself to the facility
of glowing improvisation, he plans. All his tales are bound together by
veritable incidents which spring from the characters of the personages,
and are such as we light upon in our travels. He advanced beyond the
threshold of his art, but he paused in the vestibule. He half-opens
the door of the temple, but does not take his seat there; at most he
sat down at intervals. His voice is like that of a boy breaking into
manhood. He sets out as if to quit the middle ages; but in the end he
is still there.
_The Renaissance_
For seventeen centuries a deep and sad thought had weighed upon
the spirit of man--the idea of his impotence and decadence. Greek
corruption, Roman oppression, and the dissolution of the old world had
given it birth; it, in its turn, had produced a stoical resignation,
an epicurean indifference, Alexandrian mysticism, and the Christian
hope in the Kingdom of God. At last invention makes another start. All
was renewed, America and the Indies were added to the map. The system
of the universe was propounded, the experimental sciences were set
on foot, art and literature shot forth like a harvest, and religion
was transformed. It seems as though men had suddenly opened their
eyes and seen. They attained a new and superior kind of intelligence
which produced extraordinary warmth of soul, a super-abundant and
splendid imagination, reveries, visions, artists, believers, founders,
creators. This was Europe's grand age, and the most notable epoch
of human growth. To this day we live from its sap. To vent the
feelings, to set free boldly on all the roads of existence the pack
of appetites and instincts, this was the craving which the manners of
the time betrayed. It was "merry England," as they called it then.
It was not yet stern and constrained. It extended widely, freely,
and rejoiced to find itself so expanded. A few sectarians, chiefly
in the towns, clung gloomily to the Bible; but the Court, and the
men of the world sought their teachers and their heroes from Pagan
Greece and Rome. Nearer still was another Paganism, that of Italy,
and civilisation was drawn thence as from a spring. Transplanted into
different races and climates, this paganism received from each a
distinct character--in England it becomes English. Here Surrey--the
English Petrarch--introduced a new style, a manly style, which marks
a great transformation of the mind. He looks forward to the last line
while writing the first, and keeps the strongest word for the last.
He collects his phrases in harmonious periods, and by his inversions
adds force to his ideas. Every epithet contains an idea, every metaphor
a sentiment. Those who have ideas now possess in the new-born art an
instrument capable of expressing them. In half a century English
writers had introduced every artifice of language, period, and style.
Luxuriance and irregularity were the two features of the new
literature. Sir Philip Sydney may be selected as exhibiting the
greatness and the folly of the prevailing taste. How can his pastoral
epic, "The Arcadia," be described? It is but a recreation, a poetical
romance written in the country for the amusement of a sister, a work
of fashion, a relic, but it shows the best of the general spirit,
the jargon of the world of culture, fantastic imagination, excessive
sentiment, a medley of events which suited men scarcely recovered from
barbarism. At his period men's heads were full of tragical images,
and Sydney's "Arcadia" contains enough of them to supply half a dozen
epics. And Sydney was only a soldier in an army; there is a multitude
about him, a multitude of poets. How happens it that when this
generation was exhausted true poetry ended in England as true painting
in Italy and Flanders? It was because an epoch of the mind came and
passed away. These men had new ideas and no theories in their heads.
Their emotions were not the same as ours. For them all things had a
soul, and though they had no more beauty then than now, men found them
more beautiful.
_Spenser_
Among all the poems of this time there is one truly divine--Spenser's
"Faërie Queene." Everything in his life was calculated to lead Spenser
to ideal poetry; but the heart within is the true poet. Before all,
his was a soul captivated by sublime and chaste beauty. Philosophy and
landscapes, ceremonies and ornaments, splendours of the country and
the court, on all which he painted or thought he impressed his inward
nobleness. Spenser remains calm in the fervour of invention. He is
epic, that is, a narrator. No modern is more like Homer. Like Homer,
he is always simple and clear; he makes no leap, he omits no argument,
he preserves the natural sequence of ideas while presenting noble
classical images. Like Homer, again, he is redundant, ingenuous: even
childish. He says everything, and repeats without limit his ornamental
epithets.
To expand in epic faculties in the region where his soul is naturally
borne, he requires an ideal stage, situated beyond the bounds of
reality, in a world which could never be. His most genuine sentiments
are fairy-like. Magic is the mould of his mind. He carries everything
that he looks upon into an enchanted land. Only the world of chivalry
could have furnished materials for so elevated a fancy. It is the
beauty in the poet's heart which his whole works try to express, a
noble yet laughing beauty, English in sentiment, Italian in externals,
chivalric in subject, representing a unique epoch, the appearance of
Paganism in a Christian race, and the worship of form by an imagination
of the North.
Among the prose writers of the Pagan renaissance, two may be singled
out as characteristic, namely, Robert Burton--an ecclesiastic and
university recluse who dabbled in all the sciences, was gifted with
enthusiasm and spasmodically gay, but as a rule sad and morose, and
according to circumstances a poet, an eccentric, a humorist, a madman,
or a Puritan--and Francis Bacon, the most comprehensive, sensible,
originative mind of the age; a great and luminous intellect. After more
than two centuries it is still to Bacon that we go to discover the
theory of what we are attempting and doing.
_The Theatre_
The theatre was a special product of the English Renaissance. If ever
there was a living and natural work, it is here. There were already
seven theatres in Shakespeare's time, so great and universal was the
taste for representations. The inborn instincts of the people had not
been tamed, nor muzzled, nor diminished. We hear from the stage as from
the history of the times, the fierce murmur of all the passions. Not
one of them was lacking. The poets who established the drama, carried
in themselves the sentiments which the drama represents. Greene,
Marlowe, and the rest, were ill-regulated, passionate, outrageously
vehement and audacious. The drama is found in Marlowe as the plant in
the seed, and Marlowe was a primitive man, the slave of his passions,
the sport of his dreams. Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson,
Webster, Massinger, Ford, appear close upon each other, a new and
favoured generation, flourishing in the soil fertilised by the efforts
of the generation which preceded them. The characters they produced
were such as either excite terror by their violence, or pity by their
grace. Passion ravages all around when their tragic figures are on the
stage; and contrasted with them is a troop of sweet and timid figures,
tender before everything, and the most loveworthy it has been given to
man to depict. The men are warlike, imperious, unpolished; the women
have sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection--a thing
unknown in distant lands, and in France especially. With these women
love becomes almost a holy thing. They aim not at pleasure but at
devotion. When a new civilisation brings a new art to light there are
about a dozen men of talent who express the general idea surrounding
one or two men of genius who express it thoroughly. The first
constitute the chorus, the others the leaders. The leaders in this
movement are Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
Ben Jonson was a genuine Englishman, big and coarsely framed,
combative, proud, often morose, prone to strain splenitic imaginations.
His knowledge was vast. In an age of great scholars he is one of
the best classics of his time. Other poets for the most part are
visionaries; Jonson is all but a logician. Whatever he undertakes,
whatever be his faults, haughtiness, rough-handling, predilection
for morality and the past, he is never little or commonplace. Nearly
all his work consists of comedies, not sentimental and fanciful as
Shakespeare's, but satirical, written to represent and correct follies
and vices. Even when he grew old his imagination remained abundant and
fresh. He is the brother of Shakespeare.
_Shakespeare_
Only this great age could have cradled such a child as Shakespeare.
What soul! What extent of action, and what sovereignty of an unique
faculty! What diverse creations, and what persistence of the same
impress! Look now. Do you not see the poet behind the crowd of his
creations? They have all shown somewhat of him. Ready, impetuous,
impassioned, delicate, his genius is pure imagination, touched
more vividly and by slighter things than ours. Hence, his style,
blooming with exuberant images, loaded with exaggerated metaphors. An
extraordinary species of mind, all-powerful, excessive, equally master
of the sublime and the base, the most creative that ever engaged in the
exact copy of the details of actual existence, in the dazzling caprice
of fancy, in the profound complications of superhuman passions; a
nature inspired, superior to reason, extreme in joy and pain, abrupt of
gait, stormy and impetuous in its transports!
Shakespeare images with copiousness and excess; he spreads metaphors
profusely over all he writes; it is a series of painting which is
unfolded in his mind, picture on picture, image on image, he is forever
copying the strange and splendid visions which are heaped up within
him. Such an imagination must needs be vehement. Every metaphor is a
convulsion. Shakespeare's style is a compound of curious impressions.
He never sees things tranquilly. Like a fiery and powerful horse, he
bounds but cannot run. He flies, we creep. He is obscure and original
beyond all the poets of his or any other age--the most immoderate of
all violaters of language, the most marvellous of all creators of
souls. The critic is lost in Shakespeare as in an immense town. He can
only describe a few monuments and entreat the reader to imagine the
city.
_The Christian Renaissance_
Following the pagan came the Christian Renaissance born of the
Reformation, a new birth in harmony with the genius of the Germanic
peoples. It must be admitted that the Reformation entered England by a
side door. It was established when Henry VIII. permitted the English
Bible to be published. England had her book. Hence have sprung much
of the English language and half of the English manners; to this day
the country is Biblical. After the Bible the book most widely-read
in England is the Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. It is a manual
of devotion for the use of simple folk. In it we hear a man of the
people speaking to the people, who would render intelligible to all
the terrible doctrine of damnation and salvation. Allegory is natural
to Bunyan. He employs it from necessity. He only grasps truth when
it is made simple by images. His work is allegorical, that it may
be intelligible. Bunyan is a poet because he is a child. He has the
freedom, the tone, the ease, the clearness of Homer; he is as close
to Homer as an Anabaptist tinker could be to a heroic singer. He and
Milton survived as the two last poets of the Reformation, oppressed
and insulted, but their work continues without noise, for the ideal
they raised was, after all, that which the time suggested and the race
demanded.
_Milton_
John Milton was not one of those fevered souls whose rapture takes them
by fits, and whose inquietude condemns them to paint the contradictions
of passion. His mind was lucid, his imagination limited. He does not
create souls but constructs arguments. Emotions and arguments are
arranged beneath a unique sentiment, that of the sublime, and the broad
river of lyric poetry streams from him with even flow, splendid as a
cloth of gold.
Against external fluctuations he found a refuge in himself; and the
ideal city which he had built in his soul endured impregnable to all
assaults. He believed in the sublime with the whole force of his
nature, and the whole authority of his logic. When after a generous
education he returned from his travels he threw himself into the strife
of the times heartily, armed with logic, indignation and learning,
and protected by conviction and conscience. I have before me the
formidable volume in which his prose works were collected. What a book!
The chairs creak when you place it upon them. How we cannot fix our
attention on the same point for a page at a time. We require manageable
ideas; we have disused the big two-handed sword of our forefathers.
If Michael Angelo's prophets could speak, it would be in Milton's
style. Overloaded with ornaments, infinitely prolonged, these periods
are triumphant choruses of angelic Alleluias sung by deep voices to
the accompaniment of ten thousand harps of gold. But is he truly a
prose-writer? Entangled dialectics, a heavy and awkward mind, fanatical
and ferocious provincialism, the blast and temerities of implacable
passion, the sublimity of religious and lyric exaltation--we do not
recognize in these features a man born to explain, persuade, and prove.
As a poet Milton wrote not by impulse but like a man of letters with
the assistance of books, seeing objects as much through previous
writings as in themselves, adding to his images the images of others,
borrowing and recasting their inventions. He made thus for himself
a composite and brilliant style, less natural than that of his
precursors, less fit for effusions, less akin to the lively first
glow of sensation, but more solid, more regular, more capable of
concentrating in one large patch of light all their sparklings and
splendours. He compacted and ennobled the poets' domain.
When, however, after seventeen years of fighting and misfortune had
steeped his soul in religious ideas, mythology yielded to theology,
the habit of discussion subdued the lyric light. The poet no longer
sings sublime verse, he harangues in grave verse, he gives us correct
solemn discourses. Adam and Eve the first pair! I listen and hear two
reasoners of the period--Colonel Hutchinson and his wife. Heavens!
dress them at once. Folks so cultivated should have invented before all
a pair of trousers and modesty. This Adam enters Paradise via England.
There he learnt respectability and moral speechifying. Adam was your
true _pater familias_ with a vote, an old Oxford man, consulted at
need by his wife, and dealing out to her with prudent measure the
scientific explanations which she requires. The flow of dissertations
never pauses. From Paradise it gets into Heaven. Milton's Jehovah is a
grave king who maintains a suitable state something like Charles I. The
finest thing in connection with Paradise is Hell; and in this history
of God, the chief part is taken by the devil. No poetic creation equals
in horror and grandeur the spectacle that greeted Satan on leaving his
dungeon.
But what a heaven! One would rather enter Charles I's troops of
lackeys, or Cromwell's Ironsides. What a gap between this monarchical
frippery and the visions of Dante! To the poet of the Apocalypse the
voice of the deity was "as the sound of many waters; and he had in
his right hand seven stars; and his countenance was as the sun shining
in his strength; and when I saw him I fell at his feet as dead." When
Milton arranged his celestial show, he did not fall at his feet as dead.
When we take in, in one view, the vast literary region of England,
extending from the restoration of the Stuarts to the French Revolution,
we perceive that all the productions bear a classical impress, such as
is met with neither in the preceding nor in the succeeding time. This
classical art finds its centre in the labours of Pope, and above all in
Pope, whose favourite author is Dryden, of all English poets the least
inspired and the most classical. Pope gave himself up to versification.
He did not write because he thought, but he thought in order to write.
I wish I could admire his works of imagination, but I cannot. I know
the machinery. There is, however, a poet in Pope, and to discover
him we have only to read him in fragments. Each verse in Pope is a
masterpiece if taken alone. There is a classical architecture of ideas,
and of all the masters who have practised it in England Pope is the
most skilled.
_The Modern Spirit_
The spirit of the modern revolution broke out first in a Scotch
peasant, Robert Burns. Scarcely ever was seen together more of misery
and talent. Burns cries out in favour of instinct and joy. Love was his
main business. In him for the first time a poet spoke as men speak, or,
rather, as they think, without premeditation, with a mixture of all
styles. Burns was much in advance of his age, and the life of men in
advance of their age is not wholesome. He died worn out at 37. In him
old narrow moralities give place to the wide sympathy of the modern man.
Now appeared the English romantic school. Among the multitude of its
writers we may distinguish Southey, a clever man, a producer of
decorative poems to suit the fashion; Coleridge, a poor fellow who had
steeped himself in mystical theories; Thomas More, a witty railer; and
Walter Scott, the favourite of his age, who was read over the whole
of Europe, was almost equal to Shakespeare, had more popularity than
Voltaire, earned about £200,000, and taught us all history. Scott gave
to Scotland a citizenship of literature. Scott loves men from the
bottom of his heart. By his fundamental honesty and wide humanity he
was the Homer of modern life.
When the philosophical spirit passed from Germany to England,
transformed itself and became Anglican, deformed itself and became
revolutionary, it produced a Wordsworth, a Byron, a Shelley.
Wordsworth, a new Cowper, with less talent and more ideas, was
essentially an interior man, engrossed by the concerns of the soul. To
such men life becomes a grave business on which we must incessantly and
scrupulously reflect. Wordsworth was a wise and happy man, a thinker
and dreamer, who read and walked and listened in deep calm to his own
thoughts. The peace was so great within him and around him that he
could perceive the imperceptible. He saw grandeur and beauty in the
trivial events which weave the woof of our most commonplace days.
His "Excursion" is like a Protestant temple--august though bare and
monstrous.
Shelley, one of the greatest poets of the age, beautiful as an angel,
of extraordinary precocity, sweet, generous, tender, overflowing
with gifts of heart, mind, birth, and fortune, marred his life by
introducing into his conduct the enthusiastic imagination he should
have kept for his verse. His world is beyond our own. We move in it
between heaven and earth, in abstraction, dreamland, symbolism. Shelley
loved desert and solitary places, where man enjoys the pleasure of
believing infinite what he sees--infinite as his soul. Verily there
is a soul in everything; in the universe is a soul; even beyond the
sensible form shines a secret essence and something divine which we
catch sight of by sublime illuminations, never reaching or penetrating
it. The poets hear the great heart of nature beat; they would reach it.
One alone, Byron, succeeds.
I have reserved for the last the greatest and most English artist, from
whom we may learn more truths of his country and of his age than from
all the rest. All styles appear dull, and all souls sluggish by the
side of Byron's. No such great poet has had so narrow an imagination.
They are his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own travels, which,
hardly transformed and modified, he introduces into his verses. He
never could make a poem save of his own heart. If Goethe was the poet
of the universe, Byron was the poet of the individual; and if the
German genius found its interpretation in the one, the English genius
found its interpretation in the other.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
"Walden"
Henry David Thoreau, America's poet-naturalist, as he might
be called, was born at Concord, Mass., on July 12, 1817. His
great-grandparents were natives of the Channel Islands, whence
his grandfather emigrated. Thoreau was educated at Hartford, and
began work as a teacher, but under the influence of Emerson, in
whose house he lived at intervals, made writing his hobby and a
study of the outdoor world his occupation. In 1845, as related
in "Walden," he built himself a shanty near Walden Pond, on land
belonging to Emerson. There he busied himself with writing his
"Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and in recording his
observations in the woods. After the Walden experiment he mingled
the pursuit of literature and the doing of odd jobs for a living.
His books, "The Maine Woods," "A Yankee in Canada," "Excursions
in Field and Wood," were mostly published after his death. He
died on May 6, 1862, from consumption. Emerson, Hawthorne, and
Alcott were his warm friends in life, and helped the world
to appreciate his genius. A poet in heart, Thoreau was only
successful in giving his poetry a prose setting, but that setting
is harmonised with the utmost delicacy. No one has produced more
beautiful effects in English prose with simpler words.
_The Simple Life_
When I wrote the following pages, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile
from any neighbour, in a house I had built for myself, on the shore of
Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the
labour of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At
present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
Men labour under a mistake. By a seeming fate, commonly called
necessity, they are employed laying up treasures which moth and rust
will corrupt. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to
the end of it if not before.
But it is never too late to give up our prejudices. What old people say
you cannot do, you try and find that you can. I have lived some thirty
years and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from
my seniors.
To many creatures, there is but one necessity of life--food. None of
the brute creation require more than food and shelter. The necessaries
of life for man in this climate may be distributed under the several
heads of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. I find by my own experience
a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and
for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books,
rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life,
are positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. None can be an
impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of
voluntary poverty.
_Ideals_