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ESSAYS ÆSTHETICAL

by

GEORGE H. CALVERT

1875

CONTENTS.

I. THE BEAUTIFUL

II. WHAT IS POETRY?

III. STYLE

IV. DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS

V. SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC

VI. THOMAS CARLYLE

VII. ERRATA

VIII. NATIONAL DRAMA

IX. USEFULNESS OF ART

ESSAYS ÆSTHETICAL.

I.

THE BEAUTIFUL.

The Beautiful is one of the immortal themes. It cannot die; it grows

not old. On the same day with the sun was beauty born, and its life

runs parallel with the path of that great beautifier. As a subject for

exposition, it is at once easy and difficult: easy, from the affluence

of its resources; difficult, from the exactions which its own spirit

makes in the use of them.

Beauty--what is it? To answer this question were to solve more than

one problem. Shall we attempt what has been so often attempted and

never fully achieved? Such attempts are profitable. What though we

reach not the very heart of the mystery, we may get near enough to

hearken to the throb of its power, and our minds will be nerved by the

approximation.

To him who has the gift to feel its presence, nature teems with

beauty. Whithersoever the senses reach, whenever emotion kindles,

wherever the mind seeks food for its finer appetites, there is beauty.

It expects us at the dawn; it is about us, "an hourly neighbor,"

through the day; at night it looks down on us from star-peopled

immensities. Glittering on green lawns, glowing in sunsets, flashing

through storm-clouds, gilding our wakeful hours, irradiating sleep, it

is ever around, within us, eager to sweeten our labors, to purify our

thoughts. Nature is a vast treasure-house of beauty, whereof the key

is in the human heart.

But many are the hearts that have never opened far enough to disclose

the precious key enfolded in their depths. Whole peoples are at this

moment ignorant that they live amid such wealth. As with them now, so

in the remote primitive times of our own race, before history was,

nature was almost speechless to man. The earth was a waste, or but a

wide hunting ground or pasturage; and human life a round of petty

animal circles, scarcely sweeping beyond the field of the senses;

until there gradually grew up the big-eyed Greek and the deep-souled

Hebrew. Then, through creative thought,--that is, thought quickened

and exalted by an inward thirst for the beautiful,--one little corner

of Europe became radiant, and the valley of Tempe and the wooded glens

of Parnassus shone for the first time on the vision of men; for their

eyes--opened from long sleep by inward stirring--were become as

mirrors, and gave back the light of nature:

"Auxiliar light

Came from their minds, which on the setting sun

Bestowed new splendor."[1]

[1] Wordsworth.

And man, heated by the throbs of his swelling heart, made gods after

his own image,--forms of such life and power and harmony that the

fragments of them, spared by time, are still guarded as faultless

models of manhood. And the vales and groves and streams were peopled

with beauteous shapes. And the high places were crowned with temples

which, in their majestic purity, look as though they had been posited

there from above by heavenly hands. And by the teemful might of

sculptors and painters and poets the dim past was made resurgent and

present in glorious transfiguration. And the moral law was grasped at

by far-reaching philosophies. In this affluence of genial activity so

much truth was embodied in so much beauty, that by the products of the

Greek mind even the newer, the deeper, the wiser Christian spirit is

still instructed, still exalted.

In Asia, too, a chosen people early made a revelation of the

beautiful. The Hebrews were introspective. At once ardent and

thoughtful, passionate and spiritual, their vigorous natures were

charged with fiery materials for inward conflicts. Out of the secret

chambers of troubled souls their poets and prophets sent forth cries

of despair and of exultation, of expostulation and self-reproach, that

ever find an echo in the conscience-smitten, sorrow-laden bosom of

man. The power and wisdom of God they saw as no other ancient people

had seen them. In the grandeurs and wonders of creation they could

behold the being and the might and the goodness of the Creator. The

strong, rich hearts of their seers yearned for a diviner life, in the

deep, true consciousness they felt that there can be peace and joy to

man only through reconcilement with God. And feeling their own

unworthiness and impurity, as well as that of their people, they

uttered their spiritual desires, and their aspirations and

disappointments and indignations and humiliations, in strains that

make their great writings sound like one long, impassioned, rhythmic

wail through the bars of a dungeon. Gloomy, wrathful, and intense,

their utterances are grand and pathetic and sublime; but the beautiful

plays through them, and gilds their highest points as the white crests

do the billows of a black, tempestuous sea.

Save these two, no other nations of antiquity, except the Hindoos,

seem to have had more than a superficial susceptibility to the

beautiful. The Romans learnt the arts from the Greeks, whom they

imitated, at a wide distance, in poetry as well as in sculpture and

architecture. The remnants of art found in the valley of the Nile

prove the Egyptians to have had the germ without the vitality to

unfold it. In the literature of the Hindoos there are currents of pure

poetry and of biblical depth. In passing down from ancient to modern

times the Persians and the Arabians light the long way with

scintillations from the beautiful.

The ugly semi-barbarian darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe was

first broken by the light that shone from the spires of Gothic

cathedrals in the eleventh century. About the twelfth century the

German mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary,

titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later

appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers

(love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then

Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century,

poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,--and who can have

no other parentage,--had established themselves in the modern European

mind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselves

among Christian nations. To these they are now confined. In the most

advanced of Mahometan and heathen peoples sensibility to beauty is

hardly awakened, and among savages it seems scarcely to exist, so

deeply is it dormant.

Thus to indicate when and by whom the beautiful has been recognized

will further us in the endeavor to learn wherein consists that which,

enriching the world of man so widely and plenteously, is deeply

enjoyed by so few.

Were the beautiful, like size and shape and strength and nimbleness,

cognizable by intellectual perception, even the Hottentot would get to

know something of it in the forest, along with the grosser qualities

of trees and valleys. Were it liable to be seized by the discursive

and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or

general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the

Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not have

been so barren where the Athenian was so prolific. But beauty is

_felt_, not intellectually apprehended or logically deduced. Its

presence is acknowledged by a gush from the soul, by a joyous

sentimental recognition, not by a discernment of the understanding.

When we exclaim, How beautiful! there is always emotion, and

delightful, expansive, purifying emotion. Whence this mysterious

cleansing thrill? Thence, that the recognition of beauty ever denotes,

ever springs out of, sympathy with the creative spirit whence all

things have their being.

The beautiful, then, is not subject to the intellect. We cannot

demonstrate or coldly discover it; we cannot weigh or measure it.

Further to illustrate this position: we do not see with our outward

eye any more than we do with spectacles. The apparent ocular apparatus

is but the passive, unconscious instrument to transmit images thrown

through it upon a fine interior fibre, the optic nerve; and even this

does not take cognizance of the object, but is only another conductor,

carrying the image still farther inward, to the intellectual nerves of

the brain; and not until it reaches them do we see the object, not

until then is its individuality and are its various physical

qualities, size, shape, etc., apprehended. And now the intellect

itself becomes a conductor, transmitting still deeper inward to the

seat of emotion the image of the object; and not until it reaches that

depth is its beauty recognized.

In all her structures and arrangements Nature is definite, precise,

and economical. In subdivision of labor she is minute and absolute,

providing for every duty its special exclusive agent. In the mind

there is as severe a sundering of functions as in the body, and the

intellect can no more encroach upon or act for the mental

sensibilities than the stomach can at need perform the office of the

heart, or the liver that of the lungs. True, no ripe results in the

higher provinces of human life can be without intimate alliance

between the mental sensibilities and the intellect; nevertheless they

are in essence as distinct from one another as are the solar heat and

the moisture of the earth, without whose constant coöperation no grain

or fruit or flower can sprout or ripen.

We live not merely in a world of material facts, and of objects and

things cognizable through the senses, but also in a spiritual world.

We live not only in presence of visible creation, but in presence of

the invisible Creator. With the creation we are in contact through the

intellect. Knowledge of all objects and the qualities of objects that

are within reach of the senses; distance and other material relations;

the bonds of cause and effect and of analogy, that bind all created

things in countless multiplicity of subtle relations,--these the

intellect gathers in its grasp. But with the Creator we are in

communication only through feeling. The presence, the existence of God

cannot by pure intellect be demonstrated: it must be felt in order to

be proved. The mass of objects and relations presented to us in nature

the intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life that

incessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looks

out from every object and every fact,--of the range and pitch of whose

power we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake,--of

this divine essence we should not have even an intimation through the

intellect alone. Not chemists, astronomers, mechanicians have uttered

the deepest thoughts about God, but prophets and poets: not Davys, but

Coleridges; not Herschels, but Wordsworths. It is a common belief,

indeed, that men addicted to the exact sciences are rather wanting

than otherwise in power to appreciate the invisible, a belief

pungently embodied by Wordsworth in the lines,--

"Physician art thou? one all eyes,

Philosopher! a fingering slave,

One that would peep and botanize

Upon his mother's grave?"

This is as much under the mark as is above it that saying of some one,

"An undevout astronomer is mad." A man's being endowed with rare

mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout.

His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; and

nature being seldom profuse upon one individual,--as she was upon

Pascal and Newton,--the presumption as to an astronomer, of whom we

know nothing, would be that what may be termed his emotive

appreciation of stars and stellar systems is probably not so full as

his intellectual. And no amount or quality of intellectual insight can

supply or compensate a want of sensibility. No matter how many

hundreds of millions of miles he may pierce into space, he has still

to do with the visible and calculable. But religion is the putting of

the human mind in relation with the invisible, the incalculable. A man

gets no nearer to God through a telescope than through a microscope,

and no nearer through either than through the naked eye. Who cannot

recognize the divine spirit in the hourly phenomena of nature and of

his own mind will not be helped by the differential calculus, or any

magnitude or arrangement of telescopic lenses.

That we ever live not only in a material, but also in a spiritual

world, can be easily apprehended without at all entangling ourselves

in the web-work of metaphysics. The least of our acts or motions, is

it not always preceded by a thought, a volition, a something

intangible, invisible? All that we voluntarily do is, must be, an

offspring of mind. The waving of the hand is never a simple, it is a

compound process: mind and body, spirit and matter, concur in it. The

visible, corporeal movement is but the outward expression of an

inward, incorporeal movement. And so in all our acts and motions, from

birth till death; they issue out of the invisible within us; they are

feelings actualized, thoughts embodied. The embodiment is perishable,

the source of it imperishable. It is not a recondite, super-subtle,

metaphysical or psychological postulate, it is a palpable, and may be

and ought to be a familiar fact, that each one of us is ruled by the

eternal and invisible within us.

Now, just as our words and deeds and movements stand to our mind, as

being the utterance and embodiment of that, so do we stand towards

Deity, being the utterance and embodiment of the divine thought and

will. As all our doings are but exhibitions of our minds, so ourselves

are manifestations of God. Through all things shines the eternal soul.

The more perfect the embodiment, the more translucent is the soul; and

when this is most transparent, making the body luminous with the

fullness of its presence, there is beauty, which may be said to be the

most intense and refined incarnation and exhibition of the divine

spirit.

Behind and within every form of being is immanent the creative power;

and thence, in proportion as this power discloses itself, is object,

act, or emotion beautiful. Thus is beauty always spiritual, a

revelation more or less clear of the creative spirit. Hence our

emotion in presence of the truly beautiful, which calms and exalts us.

Hence evil never is, cannot be, beautiful: the bad is, must be, ugly.

Evil consists in the deficiency of the divine creative spirit, whose

fullness gives, is, beauty. Evil is imperfection, unripeness,

shapelessness, weakness in, or opposition to, the creative spirit.

Evil is life that is unhealthy, short-coming. Wherever there is full,

unperverted life, there is, there must be, beauty. The beautiful

blossoms on every stem of unpoisoned power. The sap of sound life ever

molds itself into forms of beauty.

But however rich the exhibition of the divine soul, however glowing

with perfection the form, however noble the act and pure the feeling,

the richness, the perfection, the nobleness, the purity will be lost

on us, unless within us there be sympathy with the spirit whence they

flow. Only by spirit can spirit be greeted.

Thus beauty only becomes visible--I might say only becomes actual--by

the fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and an

inward appetite therefor. And it is the flaming of this fire, thus

kindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, the

inward and the outward. This fire unlighted, and on the face of nature

there is darkness, in our own minds there is darkness. For though all

nature teems with the essence and the outward mold of beauty, to the

unkindled mind beauty is no more present then was Banquo's ghost to

the guests of Macbeth. Macbeth's individual conscience made him see

the ghost; nay, by a creative potency summoned it: and so is beauty

created there where, without what I may call the æsthetic conscience,

it no more exists than do the glories of Titian and Claude to the

affectionate spaniel who follows his master into a picture-gallery. To

the quadruped, by the organic limitation of his nature, dead forever

is this painted life. By the organic boundlessness of _his_ nature,

man can grasp the life of creation in its highest, its finest, its

grandest manifestations; and from these beauty is indivisible.

Wherever the divine energy is most subtle and expressive, there glows

ever, in its celestial freshness, the beautiful.

Beauty is the happiest marriage between the invisible and the visible.

It may be termed the joyfullest look of God. Blessed is he who can

watch and reflect this radiant look. The faculties of such a one

become fortified by creative influx. Through the exquisite shock of

the beautiful he reaps an accession of mental magnetism. Thus through

the beautiful we commune the most directly with the divine; and, other

things being equal, to the degree that men respond to, are thrilled

by, this vivacity of divine presence, as announced by the beautiful,

to that degree are they elevated in the scale of being.

Nature being minute and absolute in subdivision of function, the law

of severalty and independence--than which there is no law more

important and instructive--pervades creation. Thence the intellectual,

the religious, the true, the good, cannot interchange functions. A man

may be sincerely religious and do little for others, as is seen in

anchorites, and in many one-sided people, of Christian as well as of

Mahometan parentage, who are not anchorites. A man may be immensely

intellectual and not value truth. But neither a man's intellect, nor

his preference for truth, nor his benevolent nor his religious

sentiment, can yield its best fruit without the sunshine of the

beautiful. Sensibility to the beautiful--itself, like the others, an

independent inward power--stands to each one of them in a relation

different from that which they hold one to the other. The above and

other faculties _indirectly_ aid one the other, and to the complete

man their united action is needed; but feeling for the beautiful

_directly_ aids each one, aids by stimulating it, by expanding, by

purifying.

To the action of every other faculty this one gives vividness and

grace. It indues each with privilege of insight into the _soul_ of the

object which it is its special office to master. By help of

sensibility to the beautiful we have inklings of the essence of

things, we sympathize with the inward life that molds the outward

form. Hence men highly gifted with this sensibility become creative,

in whatever province of work they strive; and no man in any province

is truly creative except through the subtle energy imparted to him by

this sensibility, this competence to feel the invisible in the

visible.

The idea is the invisible; the embodiment thereof is the visible.

Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces,

represents, with more or less success, the idea out of which springs

the object it illuminates: it brilliantly enrobes a germinal

essence. It is thus a sparkling emanation out of the Infinite, and it

leads us thither whence it has come.

Sensibility to the beautiful is thus the light of the whole mind,

illuminating its labors. Without it we work in the dark, and therefore

feebly, defectively. Infer thence the immensity of its function.

Hereby it becomes the chief educator of men and of man; and where its

teaching has not been conspicuous, there no elevation has been

reached. The Greeks and the Hebrews would not have been so deeply, so

greatly, so feelingly known to us, would not have been the pioneers

and inspirers of European civilization, would not have lived on

through thousands of years in the minds of the highest men, had they

not, along with their other rare endowments, possessed, in superior,

in unique quality, this priceless gift of sensibility to the

beautiful. Through this gift Shakespeare is the foremost man of

England, and through it has done more than any other man to educate

and elevate England. Because the Italians of the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries were so rich in this gift, therefore it is that

Italy is still a shrine to which the civilized world makes annual

pilgrimage.

The supreme function of this sensibility is to develop, to

educate, to chasten the highest faculties, our vast discourse of

reason, our unselfish aspiration, our deep instinct of truth, our

capacious love. To educate these is its cardinal duty, and lacking

this they remain uneducated. But its beneficent influence is felt

likewise in the less elevated of our efforts. The man who makes shoes,

as well as he who makes laws and he who makes poems; the builder of

houses, with the builder of theologies or cosmogonies; the engineer,

as well as the artist, all work under the rays of this illuminator;

and, other things being equal, he excels all others on whose work

those rays shine with the most sustained and penetrative force.

"'T is the eternal law,

That first in beauty shall be first in might."[2]

[2] Keats.

In short, whatever the mental gift, in order to get from that gift its

best fruit, the possessor must be incited, upborne, enlightened,

inspired by the ideal, which burns as a transfiguring flame in his

mind, and throws thence its joyful light with every blow of his hand.

All good work is more or less creative, that is, a co-working with the

eternal mind; and work is good and productive in proportion to

the intensity of this coöperation. Why is it that we so prize a

fragment of Phidias, a few lines traced by Raphael? Because the minds

of those workers were, more than the minds of most others, in sympathy

with the Infinite mind. While at work their hands were more distinctly

guided by the Almighty hand; they felt and embodied more of the spirit

which makes, which is, life.

Here is a frame of canvas, a block of marble, a pile of stones, a

vocabulary. Of the canvas you make a screen, you build a dwelling with

the pile of stones, chisel a door-sill out of the block, with the

vocabulary you write an essay. And in each case you work well and

creatively, if your work be in harmony with God's laws, if your screen

be light, sightly, and protective, your dwelling healthful and

commodious, your sill lie solid and square, your essay be judicious

and sound. But if on the canvas you have a Christ's head by Leonardo,

out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block of

marble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you

have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the

vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the

works of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so through

the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative

principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators,

that is, poets. And we sacredly guard their creations among our best

treasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive that

whenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, they

spiritualize our thoughts; and this they do because the minds whence

they issued were radiant centers of ideal power, that is, power to

conceive the beautiful.

But what is ideal power? the reader may ask. He might likewise ask,

What is moral power? And unless he has in his own mind some faculty of

moral estimation, no answer will help him. That which comes to us

through feeling cannot be intellectually defined, can only be

appreciated through feeling. By describing its effects and

accompaniments we approach to a knowledge of what it is. By means of a

foot-rule you can make clear to every member of a crowd what is the

height of the Apollo Belvedere, and the exact length of the statue's

face; and each one can for himself verify the accuracy of your

statement. But not with a like distinctness and vivacity of assent can

you get the crowd to go along with you as to the Apollo's beauty.

Acknowledgment of the beautiful in art implies a degree of culture and

a native susceptibility not to be found in every accidental gathering.

Full and sincere assent to your declaration that the statue is very

beautiful presupposes a high ideal in the mind; that is, a lofty

pre-attained idea of what is manly beauty. But after all, the want of

unanimity of assent to a moral or an æsthetic position, does it not

come from the difficulty and subtlety of the idea to be pre-attained?

Assent even to an intellectual proposition, does not it too presuppose

an ideal in the mind of him who assents? When you show by visible

measurement that the statue is eight feet high, whoever understands

what you mean must have already in his head the idea of what one foot

is; that is, he must carry within him an ideal. No tittle of

information, not the slightest accession of knowledge, will you derive

from the measurement even of the area of a hall or of the cubic

contents of a block, unless you bring with you in your mind an idea,

an ideal, of what is a superficial or a cubic square foot.

Attempts to give a notion of what the beautiful is, by

enumerating some of the physical conditions that are found to be

present in artistic figures or persons distinguished for beauty, or

attempts to produce what shall be beautiful, by complying with these

conditions, come no nearer to the aim than do compounded mineral

waters to the briskness and flavor of a fresh draught from the

original spring. In the analysis there may be no flaw; the ingredients

are chemically identical in quality and proportion; but the nameless,

inimitable, inscrutable life is wanting: the mixing has been done by a

mechanical, not by a creative hand. Haydon says, "The curve of the

circle is excess, the straight line is deficiency, the ellipsis is the

degree between, and that curve, added to or united with proportion,

regulates the form and features of a perfect woman." Mr. D.R. Hay, in

a series of books, professes to have discovered the principles of

beauty in the law of harmonic ratio, without, however, "pretending,"

as he modestly and wisely declares, "to give rules for that kind of

beauty which genius alone can produce in high art." The discovery of

Mr. Hay is curious and fascinating, and, like the announcement of

Haydon, may give practical hints to artists and others. But no

intellectual process or ingenuity can make up for the absence of

emotional warmth and refined selection. "Beauty, the foe of excess and

vacuity, blooms, like genius, in the equilibrium of all the forces,"

says Jean Paul. "Beauty," says Hemsterhuis, "is the product of the

greatest number of ideas in the shortest time," which is like the

Italian definition, _il piu nel uno_, unity in multiplicity, believed

by Coleridge to contain the principle of beauty. On another page of

the "Table Talk" Coleridge is made to say, "You are wrong in resolving

beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed, it

is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence,

between which and the beholder _nihil est_. It is always one and

tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed."

Hegel, in his "Æsthetic," defines natural beauty to be "the idea as

immediate unity, in so far as this unity is visible in sensuous

reality." And a few pages earlier he is more brief and distinct,

calling the beautiful "the sensuous shining forth of the idea." And

Schelling, in his profound treatise on "The Relation of the Plastic

Arts to Nature," says, "The beautiful is beyond form; it is substance,

the universal; it is the look and expression of the spirit of

Nature." Were it not better and more precise to say that it is to us

the look and expression of the spiritual when this is peering through

choicest embodiments? But we will stop with definitions. After

endeavoring, by means of sentences and definitions to get a notion of

the beautiful, one is tempted to say, as Goethe did when "the idea of

the Divinity" was venturously mentioned to him by Eckermann, "Dear

child, what know we of the idea of the Divinity? and what can our

narrow ideas tell of the Highest Being? Should I, like a Turk, name it

with a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparison

with the infinite attributes, have said nothing."

We have called the beautiful the light of the mind; but there must be

mind to be illuminated. If your torch be waved in a chamber set round

with bits of granite and slate and pudding-stone, you will get no

luminous reverberation. But brandish it before rubies and emeralds and

diamonds! The qualities in the mind must be precious, in order that

the mind become radiant through beauty. To take a broad example.

The Hindoos in their organization have a fine sense of the

beautiful, but they lack mental breadth and bottom; and hence their

life and literature are not strong and manifold, although in both

there are exhibitions of that refinement which only comes of

sensibility to the beautiful. The Chinese, on the other hand, are

wanting in this sensibility; hence their prosaic, finite civilization.

But most noteworthy is the contrast between them in religious

development. In that of the Hindoos there was expansion, vastness,

self-merging in infinitude; the Chinese are religiously contracted,

petty, idolatrous; a contrast which I venture to ascribe, in large

measure, to the presence in the one case, and the absence in the

other, of the inspiration of the beautiful.

To the same effect individual examples might be cited innumerable.

Look at Wordsworth and Byron, both preeminent for sensibility to the

beautiful; but, from deep diverseness in other leading mental gifts,

the one, through the light of this vivifying power, became a poet of

the propensities and the understanding, a poet of passion and wit; the

other, a poet of the reason, a poet of nature and meditative emotion.

To do their best the moral feelings, too, need the light and inward

stimulus of the beautiful; but if these feelings are by nature

weak, no strength or intensity of the sense of beauty will have power

to get from a mind thus deficient high moral thought or action. If

there be present the accomplishment of verse, we shall have a Byron;

or, the other poetic gifts in full measure, with lack of this

accomplishment, and we may get a Beckford, who builds Fonthill Abbeys,

and with purity and richness of diction describes palaces, actual or

feigned, and natural scenery with picturesqueness and genial glow; or,

the intellectual endowments being mediocre, we shall have merely a man

of superficial taste; or, the moral regents being ineffective, an

intellectual sybarite, or a refined voluptuary. Like the sun, the

beautiful shines on healthful field and poisonous fen; and her warmth

will even make flowers to bloom in the fen, but it is not in her to

make them bear refreshing odors or nourishing fruit.

As men have body, intellect, and moral natures, so is there physical,

intellectual, and spiritual beauty, and each distinct from the others.

Take first a few examples from the domain of art. The body and limbs

of the Gladiator in the Louvre may be cited as the exponent of

corporeal beauty; the face of the Apollo Belvedere as that of

intellectual and physical; and the Santo Sisto Madonna of Raphael, and

the Christ of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, for spiritual.

Through these radiant creations we look into the transcendent minds of

their artists with a chastened, exalting joy, not unmingled with pride

in our brotherhood with such beauty-lifted co-workers with God.

Among the higher races, life is affluent in examples of the three

kinds of beauty, two of them, and even all three, at times united in

one subject. Children and youth offer the most frequent instances of

physical beauty. Napoleon's face combined in high degree both physical

and intellectual, without a trace of moral beauty. Discoveries in

science, and the higher scientific processes, as likewise broad and

intense intellectual action, exemplify often intellectual beauty. Of

moral beauty history preserves examples which are the brightest

jewels, and the most precious, in the casket of mankind's memory;

among the most brilliant of which are the trust of Alexander, when he

drank the draught from the hand of his physician, though warned that

it was poisoned; the fidelity of the paroled Regulus, returning from

Rome to the enemy into the jaws of a certain and cruel death;

Sir Philip Sidney, wounded unto death, taking the cup of water

untasted from his parched lips, to give it to a dying soldier; Luther

at the Diet of Worms; the public life of Washington; the life and

death of Socrates, and especially that last act of washing his body to

save the women the trouble of washing it a few hours later, when it

would be a corpse; and, lastly, that most beautiful of lives and most

sublime of deaths, which live in the heart of Christendom as its

exemplar and ever fresh ideal.

There is no province of honorable human endeavor, no clean inlet

opened by the senses or the intellect or the feelings, into which from

that vast, deep, oceanic spring, the human soul, the beautiful does

not send its fructifying tides. There is no height in history but is

illuminated by its gleam. Only through the beautiful can truth attain

its full stature; only through the beautiful can the heart be

perfectly purified; only with vision purged by the beautiful can

anything be seen in its totality. All other faculties it makes

prolific; it is the mental generator. It helps to unveil, and then

welds, the link between the visible and the invisible. It inspires

feeling (which is ever the source of deepest insight) to discover

excellence; it quickens the mind to creative activity; it is

forever striving upward. Without the spiritual fervor of the

beautiful, your religion is narrow and superstitious, your science

cramped and mortal, your life unripened. In the mind it kindles a

flame that discloses the divinity there is in all things. Lightning

bares to the awed vision the night-shrouded earth; more vivid than

lightning, the flash of the beautiful reveals to the soul the presence

of God.

II.

WHAT IS POETRY?

The better to meet the question, _What_ is poetry? we begin by putting

before it another, and ask, _Where_ is poetry? Poetry is in the mind.

Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the

stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no

appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining

intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught

but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal

life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in

the best and deepest part of that life.

The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world of

his inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another or

be started and modified by what is without them, all this--that is,

all human life, in its endless forms, varieties, degrees, all that can

come within the scope of man--is the domain of poetry; only, to

enjoy, to behold, to move about in, even to enter this domain, the

individual man must bear within him a light that shall transfigure

whatever it falls on, a light of such subtle quality, of such

spiritual virtue, that wherever it strikes it reveals something of the

very mystery of being.

In many men, in whole tribes, this light is so feebly nourished that

it gives no illumination. To them the two vast worlds, the inner and

the outer, are made up of opaque facts, cognizable, available, by the

understanding, and by it handled grossly and directly. Things,

conditions, impressions, feelings, are not taken lovingly into the

mind, to be made there prolific through higher contacts. They are not

dandled joyfully in the arms of the imagination. Imagination! Before

proceeding a step further,--nay, in order that we be able to proceed

safely,--we must make clear to ourselves what means this great word,

imagination.

The simplest intellectual work is to perceive physical objects. Having

perceived an object several times, the intellect lifts itself to a

higher process, and knows it when it sees it again, remembers it.

_Perception_ is the first, the simplest, the initiatory intellectual

process, _memory_ is the second. Higher than they, and rising

out of them, is a third process, the one whereby are modified and

transmuted the mental impressions of what is perceived or remembered.

A mother, just parted from her child, recalls his form and face,

summons before _her mind's eye_ an image of him; and this image is

modified by her feelings, she seeing him in attitudes and relations in

which she had never seen him before, cheerful or sad according to her

mood. This she could not do by aid of memory alone; she could not vary

the impress of her boy left on the brain; she could not vividly

reproduce it in shifting, rapidly successive conditions; she could not

modify and diversify that impress; in a word, she could not liberate

it. Memory could only re-give her, with single, passive fidelity, what

she had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture of

her boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase above

memory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes a

changeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights and

shadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plastic

power, varying the image in position and expression, obedient

to the demands of the feelings, of which it is ever the ready

instrument. This third process is _imagination_.

Through this mode of intellectual action the materials gathered in the

mind are endlessly combined and modified. In all intellectual

activity, beyond bare perception and memory, imagination in some

degree is and must be present. It is in fact the mind handling its

materials, and in no sphere, above the simplest, can the mind move

without this power of firmly holding and molding facts and relations,

phenomena and interior promptings and suggestions. To the forensic

reasoner, to the practical master-worker in whatever sphere, such a

power is essential not less than to the ideal artist or to the weaver

of fictions. Imagination is thus the abstract action, that is, the

most intense action, of the intellect.

When I run over in my mind, and in the order of their service, the

first seven presidents of the United States, Washington, Adams,

Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, I exert only memory. The

moment I begin to compare or contrast one with another, or to give the

character of any of them, I put into play the higher, the imaginative

action; for, to draw an historical character, the facts collected by

memory must be shaped and colored and organized, the details

gathered must be combined into a whole by the intellect, which being a

mere tool, the success of the result (the tool being of a temper to do

the work laid on it) will depend on the quality of the powers that

handle it, that is, on the writer's gifts of sympathy.

The degree and fullness wherewith the imaginative power shall be

called upon depending thus on faculties of feeling, thence it is that

the word _imagination_ has come to be appropriated to the highest

exercise of the power, that, namely, which is accomplished by those

few who, having more than usual emotive capacity in combination with

sensibility to the beautiful, are hereby stimulated to mold and shape

into fresh forms the stores gathered by perception and memory, or the

material originated within the mind through its creative fruitfulness.

In strictness, this exaltation of intellectual action should be called

_poetic_ imagination.

To imagine is, etymologically speaking, _with_ the mind to form _in_

the mind an image; that is, by inward power to produce an interior

form, a something substantial made out of what we term the

unsubstantial. To imagine is thus always, in a certain sense, to

create; and even men of dullest mentality have this power in

_kind_. The _degree_ in which men have it makes one of the chief

differences among them. The power is inherent, is implied in the very

existence of the human mind. When it is most lively the mind creates

out of all it feels and hears and sees, taking a simple sight or hint

or impression or incident, and working out images, making much out of

little, a world out of an atom. Akin herein to the supreme creative

might, the man of highest imagination, the poet, unrolls out of his

brain, through vivid energy, new worlds, peopled with thought,

throbbing with humanity.

When we imagine, therefore, we hold an image in the mind, grasping it

with spiritual fingers, just as by our corporeal fingers a physical

substance is grasped. Now the poetic mind in handling the image tosses

it with what might be called a sportive earnest delight, and through

this power and freedom of _play_ elicits by sympathetic fervor, from

its very core, electric rays, wherein the subject glows like the

sculpture on an inwardly illuminated urn; rare insights being thus

vouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision,--insights gained never but

through sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirations

after, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellect

being used as an obedient cheerful servant.

The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses,

revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole might

seeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearer

than others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is ever

plying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing,

according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholding

everywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting nature

and humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in those

richer, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetrating

insight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are than

minds less creatively endowed.

Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all

intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a

power without which the daily business of life even could not go on,

being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, its

materials. In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellect

stimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling;

and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged by

emotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation.

Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and the

intellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with the

effective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings or

conditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in the

production of poetry?

Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare's

plays. What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then run

over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how

rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you

shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic,

comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought,

accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide

provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion

so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most

precious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on the

morning when the paper was moist with the ink wherewith they were

first written? Because they have in them more fullness and fineness

and fidelity than any others. The poet has more life in him

than other men, and Shakespeare has in him more life than any other

poet, life manifested through power of intellect exalted through union

with power of sympathy, the embodiments whereof are rounded, enlarged,

refined, made translucent by that gift of _sensibility to the fair and

perfect_[3] whereby, according to its degree, we are put in more

loving relation to the work of God, and gain the clearest insights

into his doings and purposes; a gift without which in richest measure

Shakespeare might have been a notable historian or novelist or

philosopher, but never the supreme poet he is.

[3] See preceding Essay.

When Coriolanus, having led the Volscians to Rome, encamps under its

walls, and the Romans, in their peril and terror, send to him a

deputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies,--the

foremost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends of

Coriolanus,--having "declared their business in a very modest and

humble manner," he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere,

answering them with "much bitterness and high resentment of the

injuries done him." What was the temper as well as the power of

Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of

Plutarch. But the task of the poet is more than this. To our

imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy

to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to

fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that

momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us

to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and

warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur

of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so

mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. This vast history, to be

for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to

quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial

metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensions

must he be, this Roman! Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirer

of Coriolanus, depict him. Having described, in those compressed

sinewy phrases which Shakespeare has at command, the change in his

nature, he adds, "When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the

ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a

corselet with his eye; he talks like a knell, and his hum is a

battery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What he

bids be done is finished with his bidding: he wants nothing of a god

but eternity and a heaven to throne in."

Hear how a mother's heart, about to break, from the loss of her son,

utters its grief when it has the privilege of using a voice quivering

with poetic fervor. The French king bids Lady Constance be comforted:

she answers,--

"No, I defy all counsel, all redress,

But that which ends all counsel, true redress,

Death, death. O amiable lovely death!

Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness!

Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,

Thou hate and terror to prosperity,

And I will kiss thy detestable bones;

And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows;

And ring these fingers with thy household worms;

And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,

And be a carrion monster like thyself:

Come, grin on me; and I will think thou smil'st:

And buss thee as thy wife! Misery's love,

O, come to me!"

In these two passages from "Coriolanus" and "King John" what

magnificence of hyperbole! The imagination of the reader, swept on

from image to image, is strained to follow that of the poet.

And yet, to the capable, how the pile of amplification lifts out the

naked truth. Read these passages to a score of well-clad auditors,

taken by chance from the thoroughfare of a wealthy city, or from the

benches of a popular lecture-room. To the expanded mold wherein the

passages are wrought, a few--five or six, perhaps, of the

twenty--would be able to fit their minds, zestfully climbing the

poet's climax. To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensive

extravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by,

the poetically imaginative light. And to some they would be grossly

unintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming to

them unnatural or affected.

Now, the enjoyment of the few appreciators, what is its source? By

these passages certain feelings in them are made to vibrate and are

pitched to a high key. A very comprehensive word is feelings. What is

the nature of those feelings thus wrought upon?