capable of emitting spiritual light; and, when exalted to their purest
action, do and must emit such, the inward fire sending forth clear
flame unmixed with smoke. To perceive this light, and, still
more, to have your path illuminated thereby, implies the present
activity of some of the higher human sensibilities; and to be so
organized as to be able to embody in words, after having imagined,
personages, conditions, and conjunctions whence this light shall flash
on and ignite the sensibilities of others, implies, besides vivid
sympathies and delight in the beautiful, a susceptibility to the
manifestations of moral and intellectual life which is enjoyed only by
him in whom the nobler elements of being are present in such
intensity, proportions, and quality, and are so commingled, that he
can reproduce life itself with translucent truthfulness, he becoming,
through this exalting susceptibility, poet or maker.
What constitutes the wealth of human life? Is it not fullness and
richness of feeling? To refine this fullness, to purify this richness,
to distill the essence out of this wealth, to educate the feelings by
revealing their subtle possibilities, by bringing to light the
divinity there is within and behind them, this is the poet's part; and
this, his great part, he can only do by being blest with more than
common sympathy with the spirit of the Almighty Creator, and thence
clearer insight into his work and will. Merely to embody in
verse the feelings, thoughts, deeds, scenes of human life, is not the
poet's office; but to exhibit these as having attained, or as capable
of attaining, the power and beauty and spirituality possible to each.
The glorifier of humanity the poet is, not its mere reporter; that is
the historian's function. The poet's business is not with facts as
such, or with inferences, but with truth of feeling, and the very
spirit of truth. His function is ideal; that is, from the prosaic, the
individual, the limited, he is to lift us up to the universal, the
generic, the boundless. In compassing this noble end he may, if such
be his bent, use the facts and feelings and individualities of daily
life; and, by illuminating and ennobling them he will approve his
human insight, as well as his poetic gift.
The generic in sentiment, the universal, the infinite, can only be
reached and recognized through the higher feelings, through those
whose activity causes emotion. The simple impulses, the elementary
loves, are in themselves bounded in their action near and direct; but
growing round the very fountain of life, having their roots
in the core of being, they are liable to strike beyond their
individual limits, and this they do with power when under their sway
the whole being is roused and expanded. When by their movement the
better nature is urged to heroism and self-sacrifice, as in the story
of Damon and Pythias, the reader or beholder is lifted into the
atmosphere of finest emotion; for then the impulse has reached its
acme of function, and playing in the noonday of the beautiful, the
contemplation of it purges and dilates us. We are upraised to the
disinterested mood, the poetical, in which mood there is ever
imaginative activity refined by spiritual necessities. It is not
extravagant to affirm that when act or thought reaches the beautiful,
it resounds through the whole being, tuning it like a high strain of
sweetest music. Thus in the poetical (and there is no poetry until the
sphere of the beautiful is entered) there is always a reverberation
from the emotional nature. Reverberation implies space, an ample vault
of roof or of heaven. In a tight, small chamber there can be none. If
feeling is shut within itself, there is no reëcho. Its explosion must
rebound from the roomy dome of sentiment, in order that it become
musical.
The moment you enter the circle of the beautiful, into which
you can only be ushered by a light within yourself, a light kindled
through livelier recognition of the divine spirit,--the moment you
draw breath in this circle you find yourself enlarged, spiritualized,
buoyed above the self. No matter how surrounded, or implicated, or
enthralled, while you are there, be it but for a few moments, you are
liberated.
"No more--no more--oh! never more on me
The freshness of the heart can fall like dew,
Which out of all the lovely things we see
Extracts emotions beautiful and new,
Hived in our bosoms like the bag o' the bee.
Think'st thou the honey with those objects grew?
Alas! 't was not in them, but in thy power
To double even the sweetness of a flower."
"All who joy would win
Must share it; happiness was born a twin."
"He entered in the house,--his home no more,
For without hearts there is no home--and felt
The solitude of passing his own door
Without a welcome; _there_ he long had dwelt,
There his few peaceful days Time had swept o'er,
There his worn, bosom and keen eye would melt
Over the innocence of that sweet child,
His only shrine of feelings undefiled."
These three passages are from a poem in which there is more wit than
poetry, and more cynicism than either; a poem in spirit unsanctified,
Mephistophelian, written by a man of the world, a terrible
egotist, _blasé_ already in early manhood, in whose life, through
organization, inherited temperament, and miseducation, humanity was so
cramped, distorted, envenomed, that the best of it was in the fiery
sway of the more urgent passions, his inmost life being, as it must
always be with poets, inwoven into his verse. From the expiring
volcano in his bosom his genius, in this poem, casts upon the world a
lurid flame, making life look pale or fever-flushed. With unslumbering
vivacity, human nature is exhibited in that misleading light made by
the bursting of half-truths that relate to its lower side, a light the
more deceptions from the sparkling accompaniment of satire and wit.
Above the pungent secularities, the nimble intellectualities, the
specious animalism, the derisive skepticism, the snapping
personalities, the witty worldliness, that interlace and constitute
the successive cantos of "Don Juan," the passages just quoted and
similar ones (they are not many) rise, as above the desires and the
discontents, the plots and contentions, the shrewd self-seekings of a
heated, noisy city rises a Gothic spire, aspiring, beautiful, drawing
most of its beauty from its aspiration, on whose pinnacle, calmly
glistening in the upper air, plays the coming and the parting day,
while shadows fill the streets below, and whose beauty throws over the
town a halo that beckons men from afar. The spire, in its steadfast
tranquillity and its beauty, so unlike the restless wrangling
dissonance below it, grew nevertheless out of the same hearts that
make the dissonance, and, typifying what is spiritual and eternal in
them, tends by its ideal presence to enlarge and uplift those by whose
eyes it is sought. These upshootings in "Don Juan" irradiate the
cantos, giving an attractiveness which draws to them eyes that
otherwise would not have known them; and if too pure in their light
and too remote to mingle directly with the flare and flash that dazzle
without illuminating, silently they shine and steadily, an unconscious
heavenly influence, above these coruscations of earthly
thoughts,--thoughts telling from their lively numerousness, but
neither grand nor deep.
From the same solar center fall frequently single rays that make lines
and stanzas glisten, and but for which this poem, lacking their
perfusive light, would soon pass into oblivion; for from the
beautiful it is that the satire, the wit, the voluptuousness get their
sparkle and their sheen. If passages morally censurable are hereby
made more captivating, we are not content with saying that God's sun
fructifies and beautifies poison-oak and hemlock; but we affirm that
the beautiful, being by its nature necessarily pure, communicates of
its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure
counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad,
deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting
or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being
therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is
completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be made
captivating through the beautiful. Iago and Edmund are poetical as
parts of a whole; and when in speech they approach the upper region of
thought, it is because the details allotted to them have to be highly
wrought for the sake of the general plot and effect, and further,
because humanity and truth speak at times through strange organs.
Besides, the ideal may be used to show more glaringly the hideousness
of evil, and thence Iago and Edmund, as ideal villains, through the
very darkness in which only poetic art could have enveloped them, help
us by indirection to see and value the lights that surround the noble
and the good.
In healthy function all the feelings are pure and moral, those whose
action is most earthly and animal and selfish uniting themselves at
their highest with the spiritual, for performance whose compass
reaches beyond an individual, momentary good. A burglar or a murderer
may exhibit courage; but here, a manly quality backing baseness and
brutality for selfish, short-sighted ends, there is an introverted and
bounded action, no expansive upward tendency, and thence no poetry.
But courage, when it is the servant of principle for large, unselfish
ends, becomes poetical, exhibiting the moral beautiful, as in the
fable of Curtius and the fact (or fable) of Winkelried. In the
poetical there is always enlargement, exaltation, purification; animal
feeling, self-seeking propensity, becoming so combined with the higher
nature as to rise above themselves, above the self.
The lioness, pursuing the robber of her cub, if in her rage she
scarcely heed that he (to stay her steps) has dropped the cub in her
path, but, casting at it a glance of recognition, bounds with a
wilder howl after the robber, the incident is purely bestial, an
exhibition of sheer brute fury, and as such repulsive and most
unpoetical. But let her, instantly drawing her fiery eye from the
robber, stop, and for the infuriated roar utter a growl of leonine
tenderness over her recovered cub, and our sympathy leaps towards her.
Through the red glare of rage there shines suddenly a stream of white
light, gushing from one of the purest fountains: wrathful fury is
suddenly subdued by love. A moment before she was possessed with
savage fierceness, her blood boiling with hate and revenge; now it
glows with a mother's joy. Her nature rises to the highest whereof it
is capable. It is the poetry of animalism.
In the poetical, thought is amplified and ripened, while purified, in
the calm warmth of emotion. From being emotive, poetry draws in more
of the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose. The poetical has,
must have, rotundity. No poet ever had a square head. Prose, in its
naked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving,
flesh-and-spirit-endowed body. From the skeleton you can learn
osteology, but neither æsthetics nor human nature. Imaginative prose
partakes of the spiritual character of poetry. When a page is
changed from poetry into prose it is flattened, deadened; when from
prose into poetry it is uplifted, enlivened. You get a something else
and a something more. Reduced to plain prose, the famous passage from
the mouth of Viola in "Twelfth Night" would read somewhat thus: "My
father had a daughter who loved a man and would let no one know of her
love, but concealed it, until her cheek grew pale with grief,
patiently bearing within her bosom the misery of an untold
attachment." Now hear the poet:--
"She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought:
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief."
What has been done with the prose statement? Instead of a bare fact we
have a picture, a twofold picture; and this, in its compact, fresh,
rose-tinted vividness, carries the whole into our hearts with a
tenfold success. Through emotional joy we apprehend, as by the light
of an instantaneous ignition, the state of the sufferer. The
prose-report is a smoldering fire on the hearth, through whose sleepy
smoke there comes a partial heat; the poetic is the flame in
full fervor, springing upward, illuminating, warming the heart,
delighting the intellect. The imagination of the reader, quickened by
illustrations so apt and original, is by their beauty tuned to its
most melodious key, while by the rare play of intellectual vitality
his mind is dilated. He has become mentally a richer man, enriched
through the refining and enlarging of his higher sensibilities, and
the activity imparted to his intellect.
To say of a man that he is without imagination were to say he is an
idiot; that is, one lacking the inward force and the inward
instruments to grasp and handle the materials collected from without
by perception and memory, and from within by consciousness. To say of
a poet that he is without poetic imagination were to say he is no
poet. What is poetic imagination? This, for our theme, is a vital
question. Can there be given to it an approximate answer?
Figure to yourself a company of men and women in presence of a
September sunset near the sea, the eye taking in at once ocean and a
variegated landscape. The company must not be a score of tawny
American aborigines, nor of European peasants, nor of individuals
whose life of monotonous labor, whether for necessaries or
luxuries, has no opportunity or no will for the finer mental culture;
but, to give aptness to our illustration, should consist of persons
whose being has been unfolded to the tissue of susceptibility to the
wonders and beauties of nature, and whose intellect has been tilled
sufficiently to receive and nourish any fresh seed of thought that may
be thrown upon it; in short, a score of cultivated adults. The
impression made by such a scene on such a company is heightened by a
rare atmospheric calm. The heart of each gazer fills with emotion, at
first unutterable except by indefinite exclamation; when one of the
company says,--
"A fairer face of evening cannot be."
These words, making a smooth iambic line, give some utterance, and
therefore some relief, to the feeling of all. Then another adds,--
"The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration."
Instantly the whole scene, steeped in the beams of the sinking sun, is
flooded with a light that illuminates the sunlight, a spiritual light.
The scene is transfigured before their eyes: it is as if the heavens
had opened, and inundated all its features with a celestial
subtilizing aura. How has this been accomplished? The first line has
little of the quality of poetic imagination.
"A fairer face of evening cannot be."
is simple and appropriate, but in it there is no fresh glow, no
mysterious throb. Above the level of this line rise suddenly the first
three words of the second, "the holy time." The presence of a scene
where sky, earth, and ocean combine for the delight of the beholders
puts them in a mood which crowns the landscape with a religious halo.
That the time is holy they all feel; and now, to make its tranquillity
appreciable by filling the heart with it, the poet adds--"is quiet as
a nun breathless with adoration." By this master-stroke of poetic
power the atmospheric earthly calm is vivified with, is changed into,
super-earthly calm. By a fresh burst of spiritual light the mind is
set æsthetically aglow, as by the beams of the setting sun the
landscape is physically. By an exceptionally empowered hand the soul
is strung to a high key. Fullness and range of sensibility open to the
poet[4] a wide field of illustration; its exacting fineness reveals
the one that carries his thought into the depths of the
reader's mind, bringing him that exquisite joy caused by keen
intellectual power in the service of pure emotion.
[4] Wordsworth.
Take now other samples from the treasury of choicest poetry. Here is
one from Coleridge:--
"And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring."
Here again the intellect is urged to its highest action, the abstract
or imaginative action, to do the hests of a sensibility so finely
wrought by the inward impulsion to seek for the most exquisite that
nature can furnish, that it yields similitudes most delicate, most
apt, most expressive.
Milton thus opens the fifth book of "Paradise Lost:"--
"Now morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl."
Shakespeare makes Romeo describe daybreak:--
"And jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops."
Keats begins "Hyperion" with these lines:
"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn."
In the Monody on Keats, Shelley, describing the lamentation of
nature at his death, concludes a stanza as follows:--
"Morning sought
Her eastern watch-tower, and, her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears that should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay."
Such passages are the very flower of poetry, thought exquisitely dyed
in sentiment, laying suddenly bare a picture with so much light in it
that each passage irradiates its page and the reader's mind. By their
happiness the similitudes emphasize and enforce the thought; and they
do a higher service than this; for, being a breath from the inner life
of genius, they blow power into the reader. To translate these
passages into prose were like trying to translate a lily into the mold
out of which it springs, or a bar of Beethoven into the sounds of the
forum, or the sparkle of stars into the warmth of a coal fire.
The best poetry has a far background; it comes out of deeps within the
poet, unfathomed by himself, unfathomable. He feels more than he can
express. Hence the imaginative poet always suggests, revealing enough
to inspirit the reader's higher faculties to strive for more;
not because, with artistic design, he leaves much untold, which he
often does, but because through imaginative susceptibility he at times
grasps at and partly apprehends much that cannot be embodied. He feels
his subject more largely and deeply than he can see or represent it.
To you his work is suggestive because to him the subject suggested
more than he could give utterance to. Every subject, especially every
subject of poetic capability, having infinite relations, he who most
apprehends this boundlessness--and indeed because he does apprehend
it--can do or say what will open it to you or me; and the degree of
his genius is measured by the extent to which he can present or expose
it. The unimaginative gives surface-work, and, suggesting nothing, is
at once exhausted.
The poetic imagination shows itself in the epithets the poet has at
his command, creative insight drawing an epithet out of the heart of
an object; whence, there is beneath such an epithet a depth that keeps
feeding it with significance, bringing out its aptness the longer we
look. Sometimes epithets are brighter than their object; the
unimaginative thus futilely striving to impart power instead of
deriving it. To be lasting, the light of the epithet must be struck by
the imagination out of its object. The inspired poet finds a word so
sympathetic with the thought that it caresses and hugs it.
Depth and breadth of nature are implied in the full poetic
imagination. The love of the beautiful, wielding a keen intellect,
needs furthermore rich material to mold, and only out of the poet's
individual resources can this be drawn. To make a high artist, you
must have very much of a man. Behind "Paradise Lost" and "Samson
Agonistes" is a big Miltonic man. The poet has to put a great deal of
himself, and the best of him, into his work; thence, for high poetry,
there must be a great deal of high self to put in. He must coin his
soul, and have a large soul to coin; the best work cannot be made out
of materials gathered by memory and fancy. His stream of thought must
flow from springs, not from reservoirs. Hence the universal
biographical interest in such men; they have necessarily a rich
personality.
The passages I have cited are all pictures of outward nature, natural
scenes mirrored on the mind, or rather refracted through it, and in
the act transfigured, spiritualized; for such scenes, having
the fortune to fall on the minds of poets, are reproduced with joyful
revelation of their inmost being, as sunbeams are through a crystal
prism. Exhibiting material nature spiritualized, well do these
passages show the uplifting character of poetic imagination. But this
displays a higher, and its highest power when, striking like a
thunderbolt into the core of things, it lays bare mysteries of God and
of the heart which mere prosaic reason cannot solve or approach,
cannot indeed alone even dimly apprehend.
I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet are
opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in
single or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamond
are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of
fossil carbon.
When, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost," Milton narrates the
arrival on the battle-field of the Son,--
"Attended by ten thousand thousand saints,"
and then adds:--
"Far off his coming shone,"
in these five short words is a sudden glare of grandeur that dilates
the capable mind with light, and, as the sublime always does, with
awe.
When Ferdinand, in "The Tempest," leaps "with hair up-staring"
into the sea, crying,--
"Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here,"
the mind is suddenly filled with an image of the tumult and flaming
rage of a thunder-storm at sea, such as words have never elsewhere
carried. What a reach in the imaginative stroke! In the first scene of
"Faust," the earth-spirit, whom Faust has evoked, concludes the
whirling, dazzling, brief, but gigantic sketch of his function with
these words, the majesty of which translation cannot entirely
subdue:--
"I ply the resounding great loom of old Time,
And work at the Godhead's live vesture sublime."
How ennobling is the idea the mind harbors of humanity, after taking
in these lines from Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of
Immortality:"--
"But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home."
With a single epithet, coined for the occasion, Keats flashes upon our
imagination the dethroned Saturn and the immensity of his fall:
"Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptered; and his _realmless_ eyes were closed."
The "Hyperion" of this transcendent genius, written in his
twenty-fourth year, the year before he died, is as great poetry as has
ever been treasured in words. In it he lavishes poetic wealth as
though gold were with him as plenty as silver; and so on the next page
he exceeds, if possible, the sublimity of the above lines, making Thea
write in the catalogue of Saturn's colossal deprivations,--
"And all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty."
These passages vividly exemplify poetic imagination, which is the
illumining of a capable material by a spiritual light, a light thrown
into it from the glow kindled in the poet's mind with richest
sensibilities, that are refined and sublimated by an exacting, subtle
inward demand for the best they can render. A single flash of new
thrilling light irradiates a continent of thought. This is the work of
genius, and genius is ever marked by a deeper sympathy with and
recognition of the creative spirit and the divine action, a sympathy
and recognition so sensitive that the spirit and action of the writer
are permeated by the divine effluence, he becoming thereby the
interpreter of divine law, the exhibitor of divine beauty.