hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large
alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense
of the oneness of nature and the propriety of the same spirit applied
to human affairs ... these are called up of the float of the brain of
the world to be parts of the greatest poet from his birth out of his
mother's womb and from her birth out of her mother's. Caution seldom
goes far enough. It has been thought that the prudent citizen was the
citizen who applied himself to solid gains and did well for himself
and for his family and completed a lawful life without debt or crime.
The greatest poet sees and admits these economies as he sees the
economies of food and sleep, but has higher notions of prudence than
to think he gives much when he gives a few slight attentions at the
latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life are not
the hospitality of it or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond the
independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a
few clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil
owned, and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing
and meals, the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great
being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of money-making with
all their scorching days and icy nights and all their stifling deceits
and underhanded dodgings, or infinitesimals of parlors, or shameless
stuffing while others starve ... and all the loss of the bloom and
odor of the earth and of the flowers and atmosphere and of the sea,
and of the true taste of the women and men you pass or have to do with
in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt
at the close of a life without elevation or naivete, and the ghastly
chatter of a death without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud
upon modern civilization and forethought, blotching the surface and
system which civilization undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears
the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before
the reached kisses of the soul.... Still the right explanation
remains to be made about prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and
respectability of the most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye
to observe at all when little and large alike drop quietly aside at
the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality. What is wisdom
that fills the thinness of a year or seventy or eighty years to wisdom
spaced out by ages and coming back at a certain time with strong
reinforcements and rich presents and the clear faces of wedding-guests
as far as you can look in every direction, running gaily toward you?
Only the soul is of itself ... all else has reference to what ensues.
All that a person does or thinks is of consequence. Not a move can a
man or woman make that effects him or her in a day or a month or any
part of the direct lifetime or the hour of death but the same affects
him or her onward afterward through the indirect lifetime. The
indirect is always as great and real as the direct. The spirit
receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one
name of word or deed ... not of venereal sores or discolorations ...
not the privacy of the onanist ... not of the putrid veins of gluttons
or rumdrinkers ... not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder ...
no serpentine poison of those that seduce women ... not the foolish
yielding of women ... not prostitution ... not of any depravity of
young men ... not of the attainment of gain by discreditable means ...
not any nastiness of appetite ... not any harshness of officers to
men or judges to prisoners or fathers to sons or sons to fathers or
of husbands to wives or bosses to their boys ... not of greedy looks
or malignant wishes ... nor any of the wiles practised by people upon
themselves ... ever is or ever can be stamped on the programme but
it is duly realized and returned, and that returned in further
performances ... and they returned again. Nor can the push of charity
or personal force ever be anything else than the profoundest reason,
whether it bring argument to hand or no. No specification is necessary
... to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned
or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the
first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it,
all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and
clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of
the universe and through the whole scope of it for ever. If the savage
or felon is wise it is well ... if the greatest poet or savan is wise
it is simply the same ... if the President or chief justice is wise it
is the same ... if the young mechanic or farmer is wise it is no more
or less ... if the prostitute is wise it is no more nor less. The
interest will come round ... all will come round. All the best actions
of war and peace ... all help given to relatives and strangers and the
poor and old and sorrowful and young children and widows and the sick,
and to all shunned persons ... all furtherance of fugitives and of the
escape of slaves ... all the self-denial that stood steady and aloof
on wrecks and saw others take the seats of the boats ... all offering
of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a friend's sake
or opinion's sake ... all pains of enthusiasts scoffed at by their
neighbors ... all the vast sweet love and precious sufferings of
mothers ... all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded
... all the grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose
fragments of annals we inherit ... and all the good of the hundreds of
far mightier and more ancient nations unknown to us by name or date or
location ... all that was ever manfully begun, whether it succeeded or
no ... all that has at any time been well suggested out of the divine
heart of man or by the divinity of his mouth or by the shaping of his
great hands ... and all that is well thought or done this day on any
part of the surface of the globe ... or on any of the wandering stars
or fixed stars by those there as we are here ... or that is henceforth
to be well thought or done by you whoever you are, or by any
one--these singly and wholly inured at their time and inure now and
will inure always to the identities from which they sprung or shall
spring ... Did you guess any of them lived only its moment? The world
does not so exist ... no parts palpable or impalpable so exist ... no
result exists now without being from its long antecedent result,
and that from its antecedent, and so backward without the farthest
mentionable spot coming a bit nearer the beginning than any other
spot.... Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. The prudence of the
greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the soul, is
not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its ways,
puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has
no particular sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from
the dead or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the
present, matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no
possible forgiveness or deputed atonement ... knows that the young man
who composedly perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well
for himself, while the man who has not perilled his life and retains
to old age in riches and ease has perhaps achieved nothing for himself
worth mentioning ... and that only that person has no great prudence
to learn who has learnt to prefer real longlived things, and favors
body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect assuredly following
the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and waiting
to meet him again--and who in his spirit in any emergency whatever
neither hurries or avoids death.
The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If
he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic
tides ... and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to
himself, and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his
Semitic muscle into its merits and demerits ... and if he be not
himself the age transfigured ... and if to him is not opened the
eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and
processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of
time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness
in the swimming shape of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors
of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what
shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an
hour and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave--let him
merge in the general run and wait his development.... Still the final
test of poems or any character or work remains. The prescient poet
projects himself centuries ahead and judges performer or performance
after the changes of time. Does it live through them? Does it still
hold on untired? Will the same style and the direction of genius to
similar points be satisfactory now? Has no new discovery in science or
arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and behavior fixed
him or his so that either can be looked down upon? Have the marches of
tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing detours to the
right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved long and long
after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him? and the
young woman think often of him? and do the middle aged and the old
think of him?
A great poem is for ages and ages in common, and for all degrees and
complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as
a man and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man
or woman but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at
last under some due authority and rest satisfied with explanations and
realize and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest
poet bring ... he brings neither cessation or sheltered fatness and
ease. The touch of him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes
with firm sure grasp into live regions previously unattained ...
thenceforward is no rest ... they see the space and ineffable sheen
that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums. The companion
of him beholds the birth and progress of stars and learns one of the
meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos ...
the elder encourages the younger and shows him how ... they too shall
launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for
itself and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars and
sweeps through the ceaseless rings and shall never be quiet again.
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait
awhile ... perhaps a generation or two ... dropping off by degrees.
A superior breed shall take their place ... the gangs of kosmos and
prophets _en masse_ shall take their place. A new order shall arise
and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own
priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches
of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos
and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all
events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects
to-day, symptoms of the past and future.... They shall not deign to
defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or
the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in
America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.
The English language befriends the grand American expression ... it is
brawny enough and limber and full enough ... on the tough stock of a
race who through all change of circumstance was never without the
idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has
attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant
tongues. It is the powerful language of resistance ... it is the
dialect of common sense. It is the speech of the proud and melancholy
races and of all who aspire. It is the chosen tongue to express growth
faith self-esteem freedom justice equality friendliness amplitude
prudence decision and courage. It is the medium that shall well nigh
express the inexpressible.
No great literature nor any like style of behavior or oratory or
social intercourse or household arrangements or public institutions
or the treatment of bosses of employed people, nor executive detail
or detail of the army and navy, nor spirit of legislation or courts
or police or tuition or architecture or songs or amusements or the
costumes of young men, can long elude the jealous and passionate
instinct of American standards. Whether or no the sign appears from
the mouths of the people, it throbs a live interrogation in every
freeman's and freewoman's heart after that which passes by or this
built to remain. Is it uniform with my country? Are its disposals
without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the ever growing communes
of brothers and lovers, large, well-united, proud beyond the old
models, generous beyond all models? Is it something grown fresh out of
the fields or drawn from the sea for use to me today here? I know
that what answers for me an American must answer for any individual or
nation that serves for a part of my materials. Does this answer? or is
it without reference to universal needs? or sprung of the needs of
the less developed society of special ranks? or old needs of pleasure
overlaid by modern science or forms? Does this acknowledge liberty
with audible and absolute acknowledgment, and set slavery at nought
for life and death? Will it help breed one goodshaped and wellhung
man, and a woman to be his perfect and independent mate? Does it
improve manners? Is it for the nursing of the young of the republic?
Does it solve readily with the sweet milk of the nipples of the
breasts of the mother of many children? Has it too the old ever-fresh
forbearance and impartiality? Does it look for the same love on the
last born and on those hardening toward stature, and on the errant,
and on those who disdain all strength of assault outside their own?
The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away. The
coward will surely pass away. The expectation of the vital and great
can only be satisfied by the demeanor of the vital and great. The
swarms of the polished deprecating and reflectors and the polite float
off and leave no remembrance. America prepares with composure and
goodwill for the visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect
that is to be their warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist,
the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite ... they are not
unappreciated ... they fall in their place and do their work. The soul
of the nation also does its work. No disguise can pass on it ... no
disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none, it permits all. Only
towards as good as itself and toward the like of itself will it
advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has
the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and
wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of
its poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If
the one is true the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his
country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
[Footnote A: Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the most original of American
poets, was born in West Hills, Long Island, educated in the Brooklyn
Public Schools, and apprenticed to a printer. As a youth he taught
in a country school, and later went into journalism in New York,
Brooklyn, and New Orleans. The first edition of "Leaves of Grass"
appeared in 1855, with the remarkable preface here printed. During the
war he acted as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals, and, when it
closed, he became a clerk in the government service at Washington. He
continued to write almost till his death.]
INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. (1863)[A]
I
History, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years
in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of
literatures.
The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play
of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but
a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a
particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is
that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men
felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and
found successful.
We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have
accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they
were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and
that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give
them their place in history, and one of the highest. This place has
been assigned to them, and hence all is changed in history--the aim,
the method, the instrumentalities, and the conceptions of laws and of
causes. It is this change as now going on, and which must continue to
go on, that is here attempted to be set forth.
On turning over the large stiff pages of a folio volume, or the yellow
leaves of a manuscript, in short, a poem, a code of laws, a confession
of faith, what is your first comment? You say to yourself that the
work before you is not of its own creation. It is simply a mold like
a fossil shell, an imprint similar to one of those forms embedded in
a stone by an animal which once lived and perished. Beneath the shell
was an animal and behind the document there was a man. Why do you
study the shell unless to form some idea of the animal? In the same
way do you study the document in order to comprehend the man; both
shell and document are dead fragments and of value only as indications
of the complete living being. The aim is to reach this being; this is
what you strive to reconstruct. It is a mistake to study the document
as if it existed alone by itself. That is treating things merely as a
pedant, and you subject yourself to the illusions of a book-worm.
At bottom mythologies and languages are not existences; the only
realities are human beings who have employed words and imagery adapted
to their organs and to suit the original cast of their intellects. A
creed is nothing in itself. Who made it? Look at this or that
portrait of the sixteenth century, the stern, energetic features of an
archbishop or of an English martyr. Nothing exists except through the
individual; it is necessary to know the individual himself. Let the
parentage of creeds be established, or the classification of poems, or
the growth of constitutions, or the transformations of idioms, and we
have only cleared the ground. True history begins when the historian
has discerned beyond the mists of ages the living, active man, endowed
with passions, furnished with habits, special in voice, feature,
gesture and costume, distinctive and complete, like anybody that you
have just encountered in the street. Let us strive then, as far as
possible, to get rid of this great interval of time which prevents us
from observing the man with our eyes, _the eyes of our own head_. What
revelations do we find in the calendared leaves of a modern poem? A
modern poet, a man like De Musset, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, or Heine,
graduated from a college and traveled, wearing a dress-coat and
gloves, favored by ladies, bowing fifty times and uttering a dozen
witticisms in an evening, reading daily newspapers, generally
occupying an apartment on the second story, not over-cheerful on
account of his nerves, and especially because, in this dense democracy
in which we stifle each other, the discredit of official rank
exaggerates his pretensions by raising his importance, and, owing to
the delicacy of his personal sensations, leading him to regard himself
as a Deity. Such is what we detect behind modern _meditations_ and
_sonnets_.
Again, behind a tragedy of the seventeenth century there is a poet,
one, for example, like Racine, refined, discreet, a courtier, a fine
talker, with majestic perruque and ribboned shoes, a monarchist and
zealous Christian, "God having given him the grace not to blush in any
society on account of zeal for his king or for the Gospel," clever in
interesting the monarch, translating into proper French "the _gaulois_
of Amyot," deferential to the great, always knowing how to keep
his place in their company, assiduous and respectful at Marly as at
Versailles, amid the formal creations of a decorative landscape and
the reverential bows, graces, intrigues, and fineness of the braided
seigniors Who get up early every morning to obtain the reversion of an
office, together with the charming ladies who count on their fingers
the pedigrees which entitle them to a seat on a footstool. On this
point consult Saint-Simon and the engravings of Perelle, the same as
you have just consulted Balzac and the water-color drawings of Eugene
Lami.
In like manner, on reading a Greek tragedy, our first care is
to figure to ourselves the Greeks, that is to say, men who lived
half-naked in the gymnasiums or on a public square under a brilliant
sky, in full view of the noblest and most delicate landscape, busy in
rendering their bodies strong and agile, in conversing together, in
arguing, in voting, in carrying out patriotic piracies, and yet idle
and temperate, the furniture of their houses consisting of three
earthen jars and their food of two pots of anchovies preserved in oil,
served by slaves who afford them the time to cultivate their minds and
to exercise their limbs, with no other concern that that of having
the most beautiful city, the most beautiful processions, the most
beautiful ideas, and the most beautiful men. In this respect, a statue
like the "Meleager" or the "Theseus" of the Parthenon, or again a
sight of the blue and lustrous Mediterranean, resembling a silken
tunic out of which islands arise like marble bodies, together with
a dozen choice phrases selected from the works of Plato and
Aristophanes, teach us more than any number of dissertations and
commentaries.
And so again, in order to understand an Indian Purana, one must begin
by imagining the father of a family who, "having seen a son on his
son's knees," follows the law and, with ax and pitcher, seeks solitude
under a banyan tree, talks no more, multiplies his fastings, lives
naked with four fires around him under the fifth fire, that terrible
sun which endlessly devours and resuscitates all living things; who
fixes his imagination in turn for weeks at a time on the foot of
Brahma, then on his knee, on his thigh, on his navel, and so on,
until, beneath the strain of this intense meditation, hallucinations
appear, when all the forms of being, mingling together and transformed
into each other, oscillate to and fro in this vertiginous brain until
the motionless man, with suspended breath and fixed eyeballs, beholds
the universe melting away like vapor over the vacant immensity of
the Being in which he hopes for absorption. In this case the best of
teachings would be a journey in India; but, for lack of a better
one, take the narratives of travelers along with works in geography,
botany, and ethnology. In any event, there must be the same research.
A language, a law, a creed, is never other than an abstraction; the
perfect thing is found in the active man, the visible corporeal figure
which eats, walks, fights, and labors. Set aside the theories of
constitutions and their results, of religions and their systems, and
try to observe men in their workshops or offices, in their fields
along with their own sky and soil, with their own homes, clothes,
occupations and repasts, just as you see them when, on landing in
England or in Italy, you remark their features and gestures, their
roads and their inns, the citizen on his promenades and the workman
taking a drink. Let us strive as much as possible to supply the
place of the actual, personal, sensible observation that is no longer
practicable, this being the only way in which we can really know the
man; let us make the past present; to judge of an object it must be
present; no experience can be had of what is absent. Undoubtedly, this
sort of reconstruction is always imperfect; only an imperfect
judgment can be based on it; but let us do the best we can; incomplete
knowledge is better than none at all, or than knowledge which
is erroneous, and there is no other way of obtaining knowledge
approximatively of bygone times than by _seeing_ approximatively the
men of former times.
Such is the first step in history. This step was taken in Europe at
the end of the last century when the imagination took fresh flight
under the auspices of Lessing and Walter Scott, and a little later in
France under Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and others. We
now come to the second step.
II