This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before
the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never
printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions
were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in
composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print.
How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the
broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his
essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and
1867--essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew,
though not treated at large.
But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the
enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths
it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression
of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline
alike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand with
Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm
and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less
than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture
Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."
_Charles Eliot Norton_
* * * * *
Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a
great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in
friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels
out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the
development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up
out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest
pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions
that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what
little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
certain outward respects, but essentially the same.
And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer
and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the _epea
pteroenta_, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored
future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise
and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by,
as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is
Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey,"
"whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"--the gift of conferring
good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as
they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the
desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust,
because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the
future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their
ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries
ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have
poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up
by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some
provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for
a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The
historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as
they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave
them.
The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have
a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves
continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older
epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.
Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances;
for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the
generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for
a purposeless moment, and reënter the dark again after they have
performed the nothing they came for.
Gradually, however, the poet as the "seer" became secondary to the
"maker." His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher. But
always something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has now
come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing
is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep,
too. If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral,
that man is Shakespeare. But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which
does not see through his tragic--yes, and his comic--masks awful eyes
that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic
meaning--a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all
human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself
unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness
that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the
errand that was laid upon him:
Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely;
the application of which is made clear by the next sonnet, in which he
distinctly alludes to his profession.
There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets--that, however
in little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes a
great and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bear
themselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language. There
is not a mature play of Shakespeare's in which great ideas do not jut up
in mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces of
thought, and known afar to many kindreds of men.
And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for any
faculty of observation and description, that we value the poet. It is in
proportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not a
juggler with words. It is by means of this that for every generation of
man he plays the part of "namer." Before him, as before Adam, the
creation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then the
world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever a
great imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging the
outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away
in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth
beneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggests
the invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. His
imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his
characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also
perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract
thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.
Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel
something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of
contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change,
he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and
conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with
their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as
utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which
faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.
History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the
world for a village. This life could only become other than
phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something
that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power
unseen--that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits
stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy. In the "Odyssey"
we find pure allegory.
Now, under all these names--praiser, seer, soothsayer--we find the same
idea lurking. The poet is he who can best see and best say what is
ideal--what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he
celebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as it
appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still
clings to him; he is the revealer of Deity. He may be unconscious of his
mission; he may be false to it; but in proportion as he is a great poet,
he rises to the level of it the more often. He does not always directly
rebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel what
delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil, it is with
such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that
the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great
poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to
a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever
learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean
and bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly
on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that
they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead
of speaking the true universal language of imagination. He who
translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
is the reverse of a poet.
The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same
thing--imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him the
power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks
about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace,
which whoso has on understands the language of all created things. And
as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole
of himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said a
thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as
there are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than an
interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between
man and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, the
possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected
treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under
the dusty path of our daily life.
And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,--a thing which
enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,--but
all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the
dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping
news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately
ships,--"the city on the inconstant billows dancing,"--as there is
between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybody
remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to
the chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful
chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a
fair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw
himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and
fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced
together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the
visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to
him again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are
typified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscences
of the stately home of our childhood,--for we are all of us poets and
geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of
every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,--and we all remember
the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there. But
somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty
taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end--till
suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and
of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to our
true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature
that the poet reintroduces us.
But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power
of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank
materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show
its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was
sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or
no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
you so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bone
broken."
And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.
No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with
which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
the same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do we
depend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but upon
observation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternal
promontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lower
system.
But it seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late,
that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and all that is
left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
railroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in Brother
Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But because _he_
is a materialist, shall there be no more poets? When we have said that
we live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant more
than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at any
rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespeare
was richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such a
pair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his to
report it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, who
continues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less
than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he
lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not
sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his
little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more
quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have
drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of
affairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground for
the public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere
piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such
ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick
and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink.
It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespeare
received everything that came along,--of what a _present_ man he
was,--that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought into
England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.
It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for that very
reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation
contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. When the
poet comes, he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the
passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not
to have lived in Homer's day, or Dante's, but to be alive now. To be
alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live
in the past, and men yet unborn that live in the future. We are like
Hans in Luck, forever exchanging the burdensome good we have for
something else, till at last we come home empty-handed.
That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton
whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even
now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and
thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus
that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their
triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy,
looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to
behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted
and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when there
was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.
The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its
costume. And that is what makes it prosaic--that we have not faith
enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented
to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is
that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue
of Sir Robert Peel,--a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding
gracefully to the present,--in which the sculptor had done his best to
travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when
England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of
this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord
Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to
the rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, "Thus sat
Francis Bacon"--not "Cneius Pompeius"--"Viscount Verulam." Those men had
faith even in their own shoe-strings.
After all, how is our poor scapegoat of a nineteenth century to blame?
Why, for not being the seventeenth, to be sure! It is always raining
opportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago who
were intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up. We are like
beggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must be
counterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece of
familiar copper. And so, as we stand in our mendicancy by the wayside,
Time tosses carefully the great golden to-day into our hats, and we turn
it over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised at
finding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes. Till Dante's time
the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings
into but Latin,--and indeed a dead tongue was the best for dead
thoughts,--but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men
bargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of the
world around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang.
In our day, it is said despairingly, the understanding reigns
triumphant: it is the age of common sense. If this be so, the wisest way
would be to accept it manfully. But, after all, what is the meaning of
it? Looking at the matter superficially, one would say that a striking
difference between our science and that of the world's gray fathers is
that there is every day less and less of the element of wonder in it.
What they saw written in light upon the great arch of heaven, and, by a
magnificent reach of sympathy, of which we are incapable, associated
with the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only a
professor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn and
unapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanized
among the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in every
calyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The stars
can no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is a
conjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sends
thither its special reporter with his telescope. Over those arcana of
life where once a mysterious presence brooded, we behold scientific
explorers skipping like so many incarnate notes of interrogation. We pry
into the counsels of the great powers of nature, we keep our ears at the
keyhole, and know everything that is going to happen. There is no longer
any sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, and
life turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needs
no more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" We
have found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription upon
it, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted.
Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in our
cradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples the
day with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimation
of demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material for
thought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, as
sapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathy
with man or nature as a town history with its genealogies of Mr.
Nobody's great-grandparents.
We have utilized everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar
system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a
symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass
through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a
museum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum of
supernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has been
going on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern and
historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of
the death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic
imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus.
Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On those
sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.
It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see
farther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom of
a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all this
is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced
itself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are not
arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set
all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In my
opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful
than the discoveries themselves."
But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if it
would, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination. No two
men have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, that
something more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that a
logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as
every man's _own_ logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a
structure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring
together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one.
When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if a
leaf has fallen. I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in the
pulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have not sometimes
found the popular giant as provokingly insensible. The [sqrt of -x] is
nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower
which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day
of childhood. Demonstration may lead to the very gate of heaven, but
there she makes us a civil bow, and leaves us to make our way back again
to Faith, who has the key. That science which is of the intellect alone
steps with indifferent foot upon the dead body of Belief, if only she
may reach higher or see farther.
But we cannot get rid of our wonder--we who have brought down the wild
lightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be our
errand-boy and penny-postman. Wonder is crude imagination; and it is
necessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exact
knowledge is not enough. Do we get nearer the truth or farther from it
that we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit? We
go on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it? The evasive
genius flits into something else, and defies us. The powers of the outer
and inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connection
man is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps
it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was
vainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it
wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man of
science remakes the old spirit. But we seem to have created too many
wonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, when
asked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them. But
nature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best but
scotch it, not kill it. In this day of newspapers and electric
telegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole
continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as
Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!
Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster on
Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblin
is laid at last!"--and while I mused the tables were turning, and the
chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have a
neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed
out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son,
and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with
it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so
brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp.
It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
sort or other. If they cannot get the best they will get some substitute
for it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine's slur that it is wine
of devils. The mind bound down too closely to what is practical either
becomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wilderness
of "isms." The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted some
persons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and found
refreshment in taking a scalp now and then. Nature insists above all
things upon balance. She contrives to maintain a harmony between the
material and spiritual, nor allows the cerebrum an expansion at the cost
of the cerebellum. If the character, for example, run on one side into
religious enthusiasm, it is not unlikely to develop on the other a
counterpoise of worldly prudence. Thus the Shaker and the Moravian are
noted for thrift, and mystics are not always the worst managers. Through
all changes of condition and experience man continues to be a citizen of
the world of idea as well as the world of fact, and the tax-gatherers of
both are punctual.
And these antitheses which we meet with in individual character we
cannot help seeing on the larger stage of the world also, a moral
accompanying a material development. History, the great satirist, brings
together Alexander and the blower of peas to hint to us that the tube of
the one and the sword of the other were equally transitory; but
meanwhile Aristotle was conquering kingdoms out of the unknown, and
establishing a dynasty of thought from whose hand the sceptre has not
yet passed. So there are Charles V, and Luther; the expansion of trade
resulting from the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, and the
Elizabethan literature; the Puritans seeking spiritual El Dorados while
so much valor and thought were spent in finding mineral ones. It seems
to be the purpose of God that a certain amount of genius shall go to
each generation, particular quantities being represented by individuals,
and while no _one_ is complete in himself, all collectively make up a
whole ideal figure of a man. Nature is not like certain varieties of the
apple that cannot bear two years in succession. It is only that her
expansions are uniform in all directions, that in every age she
completes her circle, and like a tree adds a ring to her growth be it
thinner or thicker.
Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, the one trivial and
ordinary, the other sacred and recluse; the one which he carries to the
dinner-table and to his daily work, which grows old with his body and
dies with it, the other that which is made up of the few inspiring
moments of his higher aspiration and attainment, and in which his youth
survives for him, his dreams, his unquenchable longings for something
nobler than success. It is this life which the poets nourish for him,
and sustain with their immortalizing nectar. Through them he feels once
more the white innocence of his youth. His faith in something nobler
than gold and iron and cotton comes back to him, not as an upbraiding
ghost that wrings its pale hands and is gone, but beautiful and
inspiring as a first love that recognizes nothing in him that is not
high and noble. The poets are nature's perpetual pleaders, and protest
with us against what is worldly. Out of their own undying youth they
speak to ours. "Wretched is the man," says Goethe, "who has learned to
despise the dreams of his youth!" It is from this misery that the
imagination and the poets, who are its spokesmen, rescue us. The world
goes to church, kneels to the eternal Purity, and then contrives to
sneer at innocence and ignorance of evil by calling it green. Let every
man thank God for what little there may be left in him of his vernal
sweetness. Let him thank God if he have still the capacity for feeling
an unmarketable enthusiasm, for that will make him worthy of the society
of the noble dead, of the companionship of the poets. And let him love
the poets for keeping youth young, woman womanly, and beauty beautiful.
There is as much poetry as ever in the world if we only knew how to find
it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more
prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped
of material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying
mountain-farm of imagination, which did not appear in the schedule of
his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though he
never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great
poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.
There is no reason why our continent should not sing as well as the
rest. We have had the practical forced upon us by our position. We have
had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we are
descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright
wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the
Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or
they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are
States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.
But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poetical
people. Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men in
visible types. He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap of
invisibility and the purse of Fortunatus. These were once stories for
grown men, and not for the nursery as now. We are apt ignorantly to
wonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction the
absurdity of which any of our primary-school children could demonstrate.
But we forget that the world's gray fathers were children themselves,
and that in their little world, with its circle of the black unknown all
about it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in the
dark. Look at a child's toys, and we shall understand the matter well
enough. Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still),
at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which she
has been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, and
a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.
But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet. In her
railroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness. Fine-Ear herself
could not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listen
in Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans. And what need of
Aladdin's lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill? The
office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these
miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there
is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there
is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed
that fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the
lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul
of poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does not
seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the
"Merchant of Venice" in it. Themes of song are waiting everywhere for
the right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one can
pull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more trouble
than in plucking a violet.
John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford, many years ago,
reckoned the number of whale-ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as
a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that
those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever must
be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity,
but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that a
race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty
Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces.
Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every port
of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies
dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert
only flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot
Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space
occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!
They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible
as the soul.
Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not as the
mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme il
faut_ for a great nation, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy,
for its power of making men better by arousing in them a perception of
their own instincts for what is beautiful, and therefore sacred and
religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not
have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a
people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our
little mother-island sunk beneath the sea, or, worse, were she conquered
by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakespeare would be an immortal England,
and would conquer countries, when the bones of her last sailor had kept
their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched
thunders of her navy.
Old Purchas in his "Pilgrims" tells of a sacred caste in India who, when
they go out into the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world
out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And
it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to
pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever
of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in
the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its
activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty,
if it be bewildered or thwarted by an outward profession of faith
covering up a practical unbelief in anything higher and holier than the
world of sense, it will find vent in such wretched holes and corners as
table-tippings and mediums who sell news from heaven at a quarter of a
dollar the item. Imagination cannot be banished out of the world. She
may be made a kitchen-drudge, a Cinderella, but there are powers that
watch over her. When her two proud sisters, the intellect and
understanding, think her crouching over her ashes, she startles and
charms by her splendid apparition, and Prince Soul will put up with no
other bride.
The practical is a very good thing in its way--if it only be not another
name for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root
which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from
Parthia--which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they
were some great matter till he died.
One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes him
feel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankind
were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism
which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy old
world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany,
talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till
bedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and
beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. But
divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and
messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as
having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of
Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the
sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit
second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of
Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity,
"trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of
sunsets.
No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with every
child. It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon. Every age
says to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I am
like"; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, has
need of seers and will have them. Our time is not an unpoetical one. We
are in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces of
unsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though they
may be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone. It is nothing against us
that we are a commercial people. Athens was a trading community; Dante
and Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was already
commercial when she produced Shakespeare.
This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
the noble, and the true, will never cease out of the world till the God
from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselves
in an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as new
duties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of the
poet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soul
endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while
there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will
still send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hang
their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God with us is
forever the mystical name of the hour that is passing. The lives of the
great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt
most deeply the meaning of the present.