Two hundred and twenty-four copies printed
in the month of March, 1897.
This is No.
LECTURES
ON
ENGLISH POETS
BY
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
“--CALL UP HIM WHO LEFT HALF-TOLD
THE STORY OF CAMBUSCAN BOLD.”
[Illustration]
CLEVELAND
THE ROWFANT CLUB
MDCCCXCVII
Copyright, 1897,
BY THE ROWFANT CLUB.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION, vii
LECTURE I, DEFINITIONS, 3
LECTURE II, PIERS PLOUGHMAN’S VISION, 23
LECTURE III, THE METRICAL ROMANCES, 39
LECTURE IV, THE BALLADS, 59
LECTURE V, CHAUCER, 79
LECTURE VI, SPENSER, 97
LECTURE VII, MILTON, 117
LECTURE VIII, BUTLER, 135
LECTURE IX, POPE, 149
LECTURE X, POETIC DICTION, 167
LECTURE XI, WORDSWORTH, 183
LECTURE XII, THE FUNCTION OF THE POET, 199
INTRODUCTION
Whilst midway in his thirty-fifth year Lowell was appointed to deliver
a course of lectures before the Institute founded by a relative, and
bearing the family name. He was then known as the author of two volumes
of poems besides the biting “Fable for Critics” and the tender “Vision
of Sir Launfal,” and the nimbus was still brightly shining around the
head of him who had created the tuneful “Hosea Biglow” and the erudite
“Parson Wilbur.” It was not the accident of relationship that procured
this appointment; he had fairly earned the honor by his scholarly
acquirements and poetly achievements.
When the twelfth and last lecture had been delivered, the correspondent
of the “New York Evening Post” wrote:
“Mr. Lowell has completed his course of lectures on English Poetry,
which have been attended throughout by crowded audiences of the
highest intelligence. The verdict of his hearers has been a unanimous
one of approval and delight. Certainly no course of literary lectures
has ever been delivered here so overflowing with vigorous, serious
thought, with sound criticism, noble, manly sentiments, and genuine
poetry. Mr. Lowell is a poet, and how could a true poet speak
otherwise?
“His appointment to the Professorship of Belles Lettres in Harvard
College, made vacant by the resignation of Longfellow, is the very
best that could have been made, and gives high satisfaction. It is
such names that are a tower of strength and a crown of glory to our
Alma Mater. Everett, Sparks, Ticknor, Longfellow, Agassiz, Peirce,
are known in their respective departments wherever science and polite
letters have a foothold, and the nomination of James Russell Lowell as
the associate and successor of such men is the most ‘fit to be made.’”
A quarter of a century after their delivery, one who heard them bore
this testimony: “The lectures made a deep impression upon cultivated
auditors, and full reports of them were printed in the Boston
‘Advertiser.’ Their success was due to their intrinsic merits. The
popular lecturer is often led to imitate the vehement action of the
stump-speaker and the drollery of the comedian by turns. Mr. Lowell’s
pronunciation is clear and precise, and the modulations of his voice
unstudied and agreeable, but he seldom if ever raised a hand for
gesticulation, and his voice was kept in its natural compass. He
read like one who had something of importance to utter, and the just
emphasis was felt in the penetrating tone. There were no oratorical
climaxes, and no pitfalls set for applause. But the weighty thoughts,
the earnest feeling, and the brilliant poetical images gave to every
discourse an indescribable charm. The younger portion of the audience,
especially, enjoyed a feast for which all the study of their lives had
been a preparation.”
The same auditor, writing after Lowell’s death, mentions them again:
“In 1854 [it was really 1855] Lowell delivered a course of twelve
lectures on the British Poets at the Lowell Institute. They were not
printed at the time, except, partially, in newspaper reports, but
doubtless many of their ideas were absorbed in the published essays. In
these lectures the qualities of his prose style began to be manifested.
It was felt by every hearer to be the prose of a poet, as it teemed
with original images, fortunate epithets, and artistically wrought
allusions, and had a movement and music all its own. A few friends
from Cambridge attended these lectures, walking into the city, and more
than once through deep snow. The lecturer humorously acknowledged his
indebtedness to them, saying that when he saw their faces he was in
the presence of his literary conscience. These lectures have not been
published as yet, and may not be.”
* * * * *
Even while they were yet ringing in the ears of those delighted
audiences, Ticknor and Fields were eager to publish them, but Lowell
withheld consent. The lectures had been rapidly written, and needed
the labor of the file, and this the unexpected duties of the equally
unexpected professorship precluded. There were five applicants for the
chair vacated by Longfellow, but Lowell was not one of them; both his
nomination and his appointment were made without his knowledge. He
accepted the chair with the understanding that he should be allowed to
spend one year abroad for some necessary study in Germany and Spain.
Then his professorial duties engaged him and the “Lectures on English
Poets” were left as a waif stranded on the forgotten columns of a
newspaper. When at length the opportunity of leisure came Lowell found
himself capable of better things, and he was satisfied with absorbing
into later essays some fragments of the early lectures. There ended
his concern for them; but an enthusiastic hearer had preserved the
Boston “Advertiser’s” reports of them in a special scrap-book, which
ultimately became the property of the University of Michigan and thus
fell into the editor’s hands, who felt the charm thereof, and was
desirous of sharing his pleasure with the _Rowfant Club_.
There is little doubt that Lowell had been too fastidious when he
wrote to James T. Fields, in May, 1855: “It has just got through my
skull, and made a dint into my sensorium, that you wrote me a note,
ever so long ago, about my lectures and the publication of them. I
don’t mean to print them yet--nor ever till they are better--but, at
any rate, I consider myself one of your flock, though not, perhaps, as
lanigerous as some of them.” And when Lowell’s literary executor wrote:
“His powers of critical appreciation and reflection were displayed
to advantage in these lectures. No such discourses had been heard in
America. They added greatly to his reputation as critic, scholar, and
poet,”--there could be no hesitation in setting aside Lowell’s modest
self-depreciation. After the delivery of his first lecture, he had
written to his friend Stillman: “So far as the public are concerned,
I have succeeded.” And his words are as true in 1896 as they were
in 1855; and although his literary art was not so consummate as it
became in his ultimate development, these early lectures will aid and
encourage the student by showing his growth: we see the rivulet become
the flowing river.
We share, too, in the delight of his first audience on reading:
“The lines of Dante seem to answer his every mood: sometimes they have
the compressed implacability of his lips, sometimes they ring like
an angry gauntlet thrown down in defiance, and sometimes they soften
or tremble as if that stern nature would let its depth of pity show
itself only in a quiver of the voice.”
“So in ‘Paradise Lost’ not only is there the pomp of long passages
that move with the stately glitter of Milton’s own angelic squadrons,
but if you meet anywhere a single verse, that, too, is obstinately
epic, and you recognize it by its march as certainly as you know a
friend by his walk.”
“Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme whose eye has ever been
delighted by the visible consonance of a tree growing at once toward
an upward and a downward heaven, on the edge of the unrippled river;
or as the kingfisher flits from shore to shore, his silent echo flies
under him and completes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world
below.”
“Every desire of the heart finds its gratification in the poet because
he always speaks imaginatively and satisfies ideal hungers.”
And see, too, how the “powers of critical appreciation” that Professor
Norton has mentioned were bursting into blossom and giving promise of
the golden harvest to come:
“Sir Thomas Browne, * * * a man who gives proof of more imagination
than any other Englishman except Shakspeare.”
For subtlety and depth of insight Lowell has never excelled this early
example, nor has he ever outdone the critical estimate, so true and so
terse, of his final pronouncement upon Pope:
“Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found
wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivaled.”
And what of such a shining felicity as where he meets Sir Thomas Browne
on common ground and the author of “Religio Medici” gravely smiles and
acknowledges kinship:
“If a naturalist showed us a toad we should feel indifferent, but if
he told us that it had been found in a block of granite we should
instantly look with profound interest on a creature that perhaps ate
moths in Abel’s garden or hopped out of the path of Lamech.”
Most truly “No such lectures had been heard in America,” and as truly
they deserve to be made more than a delightful memory for the early
hearers alone.
Lowell wrote to a friend that at his first lecture he had held his
audience for an hour and a quarter, but the reporter’s notes of that
lecture fall far short of that fullness; nevertheless, compared with
Anstey’s shorthand notes of Carlyle’s lectures on the “History of
Literature,” we come much nearer to the living voice in the Boston
“Advertiser’s” reports of these Lowell lectures. Carlyle spoke
without a written text, nor had he any notes save a few bits of
paper which in his hyper-nervousness he twisted out of all hope of
reportorial decipherment--and without once looking at them; Lowell
had his manuscripts (written _currente calamo_, for the new wine
of life was in full ferment and it was no small feat to bottle any
of it successfully), and we are assured from internal evidence that
the “Advertiser’s” reporter was allowed access to them. His text has
a _tang_ as characteristic as Thoreau’s wild apples, and we do not
feel the dubiety of the blind patriarch, “The voice is Jacob’s, but
the hands are Esau’s.” No; it is James Russell Lowell, his voice, his
inimitable mark, and these are his words sounding in our ears after
half a century.
The only attempt at “editing” has been as far as possible to reproduce
the reporter’s “copy.” To that end Lowell’s profusion of capitals is
retained (and the reader will bear in mind that the Transcendental
spirit was then in both the air and the alphabet), and even his
italics, suggested, as Mr. Underwood says, by the speaker’s emphasis,
find their respective places. Here and there a compositor’s error has
been corrected and a proof-reader’s oversight adjusted; sometimes this
has been conjectural, and again the needful change was obvious. In all
else, save the applause, this Rowfant Book may be called a faint echo
of the Lowell Institute Lectures.
It is “printed, but not published” in loving fealty to Lowell’s memory,
and every Rowfanter has at heart the assurance that his Shade will look
upon this literary _flotsam_ without a frown, or with one that will
soon fade into forgiveness.
S. A. J.
ANN ARBOR, November 10th, 1896.
LECTURE I
DEFINITIONS
(_Tuesday Evening, January 9, 1855_)
I
Mr. Lowell began by expressing his sense of the responsibility he had
assumed in undertaking a course of lectures on English Poets. Few men,
he said, had in them twelve hours of talk that would be worth hearing
on _any_ subject; but on a subject like poetry no person could hope to
combine in himself the qualities that would enable him to do justice
to his theme. A lecturer on science has only to show how much he
knows--the lecturer on Poetry can only be sure how much he _feels_.
Almost everybody has a fixed opinion about the merits of certain poets
which he does not like to have disturbed. There are no fanaticisms so
ardent as those of Taste, especially in this country, where we are
so accustomed to settle everything by vote that if a majority should
decide to put a stop to the precession of the Equinoxes we should
expect to hear no more of that interesting ceremony.
A distinguished woman [Mrs. Stowe] who has lately published a volume of
travels, affirms that it is as easy to judge of painting as of poetry
by instinct. It _is_ as easy. But without reverent study of their
works no instinct is competent to judge of the masters of either art.
Yet every one has a right to his private opinion, and the critic should
deal tenderly with illusions which give men innocent pleasure. You may
sometime see japonicas carved out of turnips, and if a near-sighted
friend should exclaim, “What a pretty japonica!” do not growl “Turnip!”
unless, on discovering his mistake, he endeavors to prove that the
imitation is as good as the real flower.
In whatever I shall say, continued Mr. Lowell, I shall, at least,
have done my best to think before I speak, making no attempt to say
anything new, for it is only strange things and not new ones that come
by effort. In looking up among the starry poets I have no hope of
discovering a new Kepler’s law--one must leave such things to great
mathematicians like Peirce. I shall be content with resolving a nebula
or so, and bringing to notice some rarer shade of color in a double
star. In our day a lecturer can hardly hope to instruct. The press
has so diffused intelligence that everybody has just misinformation
enough on every subject to make him thoroughly uncomfortable at the
misinformation of everybody else.
Mr. Lowell then gave a brief outline of his course, stating that this
first lecture would indicate his point of view, and treat in part of
the imaginative faculty.
After some remarks upon Dr. Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” the
lecturer proceeded: Any true criticism of poetry must start from the
axiom that what distinguishes that which we call the poetical in
anything, and makes it so, is that it transcends the understanding,
by however little or much, and is interpreted by the intuitive
operation of some quite other faculty of the mind. It is precisely
the something-more of feeling, of insight, of thought, of expression
which for the moment lulls that hunger for the superfluous which is
the strongest appetite we have, and which always gives the lie to the
proverb that enough is as good as a feast. The boys in the street
express it justly when they define the indefinable merit of something
which pleases them, by saying it is a touch beyond--or it is first-rate
and a half. The poetry of a thing is this touch beyond, this third half
on the farther side of first-rate.
Dr. Johnson said that that only was good poetry out of which good prose
could be made. But poetry cannot be translated into prose at all. Its
condensed meaning may be paraphrased, and you get the sense of it, but
lose the condensation which is a part of its essence. If on Christmas
day you should give your son a half-eagle, and should presently take it
back, and give him the excellent prose version of five hundred copper
cents, the boy would doubtless feel that the translation had precisely
the same meaning in tops, balls, and gibraltars; but the feeling
of infinite riches in a little room, of being able to carry in his
waistcoat pocket what Dr. Johnson would have called the potentiality
of tops and balls and gibraltars beyond the dreams of avarice--this
would have evaporated. By _good_ prose the Doctor meant prose that was
sensible and had a meaning. But he forgot his own theory sometimes when
he thought he was writing poetry. How would he contrive to make any
kind of sense of what he says of Shakspeare? that
Panting Time toiled after him in vain.
The difference between prose and poetry is one of essence and not
one of accident. What may be called the negatively poetical exists
everywhere. The life of almost every man, however prosaic to himself,
is full of these dumb melodies to his neighbor. The farmer looks from
the hillside and sees the tall ship lean forward with its desire
for the ocean, every full-hearted sail yearning seaward, and takes
passage with her from his drudgery to the beautiful conjectured land.
Meanwhile he himself has Pegasus yoked to his plough without knowing
it, and the sailor, looking back, sees him sowing his field with the
graceful idyl of summer and harvest. Little did the needle-woman dream
that she was stitching passion and pathos into her weary seam, till
Hood came and found them there.
The poetical element may find expression either in prose or verse. The
“Undine” of Fouqué is poetical, but it is not poetry. A prose writer
may have imagination and fancy in abundance and yet not be a poet. What
is it, then, that peculiarly distinguishes the poet? It is not merely
a sense of the beautiful, but so much keener _joy_ in the sense of it
(arising from a greater fineness of organization) that the emotion must
_sing_, instead of only _speaking_ itself.
The first great distinction of poetry is _form_ or arrangement. This is
not confined to poems alone, but is found involved with the expression
of the poetical in all the Arts. It is here that the statue bids
good-bye to anatomy and passes beyond it into the region of beauty;
that the painter passes out of the copyist and becomes the Artist.
Mr. Lowell here quoted Spenser’s statement of Plato’s doctrine:
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form and doth the body make.
This coördination of the spirit and form of a poem is especially
remarkable in the “Divina Commedia” of Dante and the “Paradise Lost” of
Milton, and that not only in the general structure, but in particular
parts. The lines of Dante seem to answer his every mood: sometimes they
have the compressed implacability of his lips, sometimes they ring like
an angry gauntlet thrown down in defiance, and sometimes they soften
or tremble as if that stern nature would let its depth of pity show
itself only in a quiver of the voice; but always and everywhere there
is subordination, and the pulse of the measure seems to keep time to
the footfall of the poet along his fated path, as if a fate were on the
verses too. And so in the “Paradise Lost” not only is there the pomp
of long passages that move with the stately glitter of Milton’s own
angelic squadrons, but if you meet anywhere a single verse, that, too,
is obstinately epic, and you recognize it by its march as certainly as
you know a friend by his walk.
The instinctive sensitiveness to order and proportion, this natural
incapability of the formless and vague, seems not only natural to the
highest poetic genius, but to be essential to the universality and
permanence of its influence over the minds of men. The presence of it
makes the charm of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” perennial; its absence
will always prevent such poems as the “Faëry Queene,” “Hudibras,”
and the “Excursion” (however full of beauty, vivacity, and depth of
thought) from being popular.
Voltaire has said that epic poems were discourses which at first were
written in verse only because it was not yet the custom to narrate
in prose. But instead of believing that verse is an imperfect and
undeveloped prose, it seems much more reasonable to conclude it the
very consummation and fortunate blossom of speech, as the flower is the
perfection towards which the leaf yearns and climbs, and in which it at
last attains to fullness of beauty, of honey, of perfume, and the power
of reproduction.
There is some organic law of expression which, as it must have dictated
the first formation of language, must also to a certain extent govern
and modulate its use. That there is such a law a common drum-head
will teach us, for if you cover it with fine sand and strike it,
the particles will arrange themselves in a certain regular order in
sympathy with its vibrations. So it is well known that the wood of a
violin shows an equal sensibility, and an old instrument is better than
a new one because all resistance has been overcome. I have observed,
too, as something that distinguishes singing birds from birds of prey,
that their flight is made up of a series of parabolic curves, with
rests at regular intervals, produced by a momentary folding of the
wings; as if the law of their being were in some sort metrical and they
_flew_ musically.
Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme whose eye has ever been
delighted by the visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward
an upward and a downward heaven on the edge of an unrippled river; or,
as the kingfisher flits from shore to shore, his silent echo flies
under him and completes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world
below? Who can question the divine validity of number, proportion, and
harmony, who has studied the various rhythms of the forest? Look for
example at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray out
from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to
spray, and leaf to leaf in ordered strophe and antistrophe, till the
perfect tree stands an embodied ode, through which the unthinking wind
cannot wander without finding the melody that is in it and passing away
in music.
Language, as the poets use it, is something more than an expedient for
conveying thought. If mere meaning were all, then would the Dictionary
be always the most valuable work in any tongue, for in it exist
potentially all eloquence, all wisdom, all pathos, and all wit. It is
a great wild continent of words ready to be tamed and subjugated, to
have its meanings and uses applied. The prose writer finds there his
quarry and his timber; but the poet enters it like Orpheus, and makes
its wild inmates sing and dance and keep joyous time to every wavering
fancy of his lyre.
All language is dead invention, and our conversational currency is one
of shells like that of some African tribes--shells in which poetic
thoughts once housed themselves, and colored with the tints of morning.
But the poet can give back to them their energy and freshness; can
conjure symbolic powers out of the carnal and the trite. For it is only
an enchanted sleep, a simulated death, that benumbs language; and see
how, when the true prince-poet comes, the arrested blood and life are
set free again by the touch of his fiery lips, and as Beauty awakens
through all her many-chambered palace runs a thrill as of creation,
giving voice and motion and intelligence to what but now were dumb and
stiffened images.
The true reception of whatever is poetical or imaginative presupposes a
more exalted, or, at least, excited, condition of mind both in the poet
and the reader. To take an example from daily life, look at the wholly
diverse emotions with which a partizan and an indifferent person
read the same political newspaper. The one thinks the editor a very
sound and moderate person whose opinion is worth having on a practical
question; the other wonders to see one very respectable citizen drawn
as a Jupiter Tonans, with as near an approach to real thunderbolts as
printer’s ink and paper will concede, and another, equally respectable
and a member of the same church, painted entirely black, with horns,
hoofs, and tail. The partizan is in the receptive condition just spoken
of; the indifferent occupies the solid ground of the common sense.
To illustrate the superiority of the poetic imagination over the
prosaic understanding, Mr. Lowell quoted a story told by Le Grand in a
note to one of his “Fabliaux.” A sinner lies dying, and an angel and
a fiend, after disputing the right to his soul, agree to settle the
affair by a throw of dice. The fiend gets the first chance, and the
fatal cubes come up--two sixes! He chuckles and rubs his claws, for
everybody knows that no higher number is possible. But the angel thinks
otherwise, throws, and, behold, a six and seven! And thus it is, that
when the understanding has done its best, when it has reached, as it
thinks, down to the last secret of music and meaning that language is
capable of, the poetical sense comes in with its careless miracle, and
gets one more point than there are in the dice.
Imagination is not necessarily concerned with poetic expression.
Nothing can be more poetical than the lines of Henry More the Platonist:
What doth move
The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?
The thrush or lark, that mounting high above,
Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn,
Heavily hanging in the dewy morn.
But compare it with Keats’
Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the _alien_ corn.
The imagination has touched that word “alien,” and in it we see the
field through Ruth’s eyes, as _she_ looked round on the hostile spikes,
and not through those of the poet.
Imagination enters more or less into the composition of all _great_
minds, all minds that have what we call _breadth_ as distinguished from
mere force or acuteness. We find it in philosophers like Plato and
Bacon, in discoverers like Kepler and Newton, in fanatics like George
Fox, and in reformers like Luther.
The shape which the imaginative faculty will take is modified by the
force of the other qualities with which it is coördinated in the mind.
If the moral sense predominates, the man becomes a reformer, or a
fanatic, and his imagination gets itself uttered in his life. Bunyan
would have been nothing but a fanatic, if he had not been luckily shut
up in Bedford jail, alone with his imagination, which, unable to find
vent in any other way, possessed and tortured him till it had wrung
the “Pilgrim’s Progress” out of him--a book the nearest to a poem,
without being one, that ever was written. Uniting itself with the sense
of form, Imagination makes a sculptor; with those of form and color,
a painter; with those of time and tune, a musician. For in itself it
is dumb, and can find expression only through the help of some other
faculty.
Imagination _plus_ the poetic sense is poesy, _minus_ the poetic sense
it is science, though it may clothe itself in verse. To those who are
familiar with Dr. Donne’s verses, I need only mention his name as a
proof of my last position. He solves problems in rhyme, that is all.
Shakspeare was so charged with the highest form of the poetic
imagination, as some persons are with electricity, that he could not
point his finger at a word without a spark of it going out of him. I
will illustrate it by an example taken at random from him. When Romeo
is parting from Juliet, Shakspeare first projects his own mind into
Romeo, and then, as Romeo becomes so possessed with the emotion of the
moment that his words take color from it, all nature is infected and is
full of _partings_. He says:
But look what _envious_ streaks
Do lace the _severing_ clouds.
Shakspeare’s one hundred and thirteenth sonnet was here also quoted in
illustration.
The highest form of imagination, Mr. Lowell said, is the dramatic,
of which Shakspeare must always stand for the only definition. Next
is the narrative imagination, where the poet forces his own personal
consciousness upon us and makes our senses the slaves of his own. Of
this kind Dante’s “Divina Commedia” is the type. Below this are the
poems in which the imagination is more diffused; where the impression
we receive is rather from _mass_ than from particulars; where single
lines are not so strong in themselves as in forming integral portions
of great sweeps of verse; where effects are produced by allusion
and suggestion, by sonorousness, by the use of names which have a
traditional poetic value. Of this kind Milton is the type.
Lastly, said Mr. Lowell, I would place in a class by themselves those
poets who have properly no imagination at all, but only a pictorial
power. These we may call the imaginary poets, writers who give us
images of things that neither they nor we believe in or can be deceived
by, like pictures from a magic lantern. Of this kind are the Oriental
poems of Southey, which show a knowledge of Asiatic mythologies, but
are not livingly mythologic.
Where the imagination is found in combination with great acuteness
of intellect, we have its secondary or prose form. Lord Bacon is an
example of it. Sir Thomas Browne is a still more remarkable one--a man
who gives proof of more imagination than any other Englishman except
Shakspeare.
Fancy is a frailer quality than Imagination, and cannot breathe the
difficult air of the higher regions of intuition. In combination with
Sentiment it produces poetry; with Experience, wit. The poetical
faculty is in closer affinity with Imagination; the poetical
temperament with Fancy. Contrast Milton with Herrick or Moore. In
illustration Mr. Lowell quoted from Marvell, the poet of all others
whose fancy hints always at something beyond itself, and whose wit
seems to have been fed on the strong meat of humor.
As regards _man_, Fancy takes delight in life, manners, and the
result of culture, in what may be called _Scenery_; Imagination is
that mysterious something which we call Nature--the unfathomed base
on which Scenery rests and is sustained. Fancy deals with feeling;
Imagination with passion. I have sometimes thought that Shakspeare,
in the scene of the “Tempest,” intended to typify the isle of _Man_,
and in the characters, some of the leading qualities or passions which
dwell in it. It is not hard to find the Imagination in Prospero, the
Fancy in Ariel, and the Understanding in Caliban; and, as he himself
was the poetic imagination incarnated, is it considering too nicely
to think that there is a profound personal allusion in the breaking
of Prospero’s wand and the burying of his book to the nature of that
man who, after such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live
there for years, only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre,
lending money on mortgage, and leaning over the gate to chat and
chaffer with his neighbors?
I think that every man is conscious at times that it is only his
borders, his seaboard, that is civilized and subdued. Behind that
narrow strip stretches the untamed domain, shaggy, unexplored, of the
natural instincts. Is not this so? Then we can narrow our definition
yet farther, and say that Fancy and Wit appear to the artificial man;
Imagination and Humor to the natural man. Thus each of us in his dual
capacity can at once like Chaucer and Pope, Butler and Jean Paul, and
bury the hatchet of one war of tastes.
And now, finally, what is the secret of the great poet’s power over
us? There is something we love better than love, something that is
sweeter to us than riches, something that is more inspiring to us
than success--and that is the imagination of them. No woman was ever
loved enough, no miser was ever rich enough, no ambitious man ever
successful enough, but in imagination. Every desire of the heart finds
its gratification in the poet because he speaks always imaginatively
and satisfies ideal hungers. We are the always-welcome guests of his
ennobling words.
This, then, is why the poet has always been held in reverence among
men. All nature is dumb, and we men have mostly but a stunted and
stuttering speech. But the longing of every created thing is for
utterance and expression. The Poet’s office, whether we call him Seer,
Prophet, Maker, or Namer, is always this--to be the Voice of this
lower world. Through him, man and nature find at last a tongue by
which they can utter themselves and speak to each other. The beauties
of the visible world, the trembling attractions of the invisible,
the hopes and desires of the heart, the aspirations of the soul, the
passions and the charities of men; nay, the trees, the rocks, our poor
old speechless mother, the earth herself, become voice and music, and
attain to that humanity, a divine instinct of which is implanted in
them all.
LECTURE II
PIERS PLOUGHMAN’S VISION
(_Friday Evening, January 12, 1855_)
II
In literature, as in religion and politics, there is a class of
men who may be called Fore-runners. As there were brave men before
Agamemnon, so there must have been brave poets before Homer. All of
us, the great as well as the little, are the result of the entire
Past. It is but just that we should remember now and then that the
very dust in the beaten highways of thought is that of perhaps
nameless saints and heroes who thought and suffered and died to make
commonplace practicable to us. Men went to the scaffold or the stake
for ideas and principles which we set up in our writings and our talk
as thoughtlessly as a printer sticks his type, and the country editor,
when he wrote his last diatribe on the freedom of the press, dipped
his pen without knowing it in the blood of the martyrs. It would be
well for us to remember, now and then, our dusty benefactors, and to be
conscious that we are under bonds to the Present to the precise amount
that we are indebted to the Past.
Thus, from one point of view, there is nothing more saddening than a
biographical dictionary. It is like a graveyard of might-have-beens and
used-to-be’s, of fames that never ripened and of fames already decayed.
Here lies the great Thinker who stammered and could not find the best
word for his best thought, and so the fame went to some other who had
the gift of tongues. Here lies the gatherer of great masses of learning
from which another was to distil the essence, and to get his name upon
all the phials and show-bills. But if these neglected headstones preach
the vanity of a selfish ambition, they teach also the better lesson
that every man’s activity belongs not to himself but to his kind, and
whether he will or not must serve at last some other, greater man. We
are all foot-soldiers, and it is out of the blood of a whole army of us
that iron enough is extracted to make the commemorative sword that is
voted to the great Captain.
In that long aqueduct which brings the water of life down to us from
its far sources in the Past, though many have done honest day-labor
in building it, yet the keystone that unites the arch of every period
is engraved with the name of the greatest man alone. These are our
landmarks, and mentally we measure by these rather than by any scheme
of Chronology. If we think of Philosophy, we think of four or five
great names, and so of Poetry, Astronomy, and the rest. Geology may
give what age she will to the globe; it matters not, it will still be
only so many great men old; and wanting these, it is in vain that Egypt
and Assyria show us their long bead-roll of vacant centuries. It is in
the life of its great men that the life and thought of a people becomes
statuesque, rises into poetry, and makes itself sound out clearly in
rhythm and harmony.
These great persons get all the fame and all the monuments like the
generals of armies, though _we_ may lead the forlorn hope, or make a
palpitating bridge with our bodies in the trenches. Rank and file may
grumble a little--but it is always so, and always must be so. Fame
would not be fame if it were or could be divided infinitesimally, and
every man get his drachm and scruple. It is good for nothing unless it
come in a lump. And besides, if every man got a monument or an epitaph
who felt quite sure he deserved it, would marble hold out, or Latin?
The fame of a great poet is made up of the sum of all the appreciations
of many succeeding generations, each of which he touches at some one
point. He is like a New World into which explorer after explorer
enters, one to botanize, one to geologize, one to ethnologize, and
each bringing back his report. His great snowy mountains perhaps only
one man in a century goes to the top of and comes back to tell us how
he saw from them at once the two great oceans of Life and Death, the
Atlantic out of which we came, the Pacific toward which we tend.
Of the poet we do not ask everything, but the best expression of the
_best_ of everything. If a man attain this but once, though only in a
frail song, he is immortal; while every one who falls just short of
it, if only by a hair’s breadth, is as sure to be forgotten. There is
a wonderful secret that poets have not yet learned, and this is that
small men cannot do great things, but that the small man who can do
small things _best_ is great. The most fatal ill-success is to almost
succeed, as, in Italy, the worst lemons are those large ones which come
nearest to being oranges. The secret of permanent fame is to express
some idea the most compactly, whether in your life, your deed, or your
writing. I think that if anything is clear in history, it is that
every idea, whether in morals, politics, or art, which is laboring to
express itself, feels of many men and throws them aside before it finds
the one in whom it can incarnate itself. The noble idea of the Papacy
(for it _was_ a noble one--nothing less than the attempt to embody the
higher law in a human institution) whispered itself to many before it
got the man it wanted in Gregory the Great. And Protestantism carried
numbers to the stake ere it entered into Luther: a man whom nature made
on purpose--all asbestos so that he could not burn. Doubtless Apollo
spoiled many a reed before he found one that would do to pipe through
even to the sheep of Admetus, and the land of song is scattered thick
with reeds which the Muse has experimented with and thrown away.
It is from such a one that I am going to try to draw a few notes of
music and of mirth to-night. Contemporary with Chaucer lived a man who
satirized the clergy and gave some lively pictures of manners before
the “Canterbury Tales” were written. His poem was very popular, as
appears from the number of manuscript copies of it remaining, and after
being forgotten for two centuries, it was revived again, printed,
widely read, and helped onward the Reformation in England. It has been
reprinted twice during the present century. This assures us that it
must have had a good deal of original force and vivacity. It may be
considered, however, to be tolerably defunct now. This poem is the
vision of Piers Ploughman.
I have no hope of reviving it. Dead poets are something _very_ dead,
and critics blow their trumpets over them in vain. What I think is
interesting and instructive in the poem is that it illustrates in a
remarkable manner what may be considered the Anglo-Saxon element in
English poetry. I refer to race, and not to language. We find here a
vigorous common-sense, a simple and hearty love of nature, a certain
homely tenderness, held in check always by a dogged veracity. Instead
of Fancy we have Feeling; and, what more especially deserves notice,
there is almost an entire want of that sense of form and outline and
proportion which alone brings anything within the province of Art.
Imagination shows itself now and then in little gleams and flashes, but
always in the form of Humor. For the basis of the Anglo-Saxon mind is
beef and beer; what it considers the _real_ as distinguished from, or
rather opposed to, the _ideal_. It spares nothing merely because it is
beautiful. It is the Anglo-Saxon who invented the word _Humbug_, the
potent exorcism which lays the spirit of poetry in the Red Sea. It is
he who always translates Shows into Shams.
Properly speaking, “Piers Ploughman’s Vision” is not a poem at all. It
is a sermon rather, for no verse, the chief end of which is not the
representation of the beautiful, and whose moral is not included in
that, can be called poetry in the true sense of the word. A thought
will become poetical by being put into verse when a horse hair will
turn into a snake by being laid in water. The poetical nature will
delight in Mary Magdalen more for her fine hair than for her penitence.
But whatever is poetical in this book seems to me characteristically
Saxon. The English Muse has mixed blood in her veins, and I think
that what she gets from the Saxon is a certain something homely and
practical, a flavor of the goodwife which is hereditary. She is the
descendant on one side of Poor Richard, inspired, it is true, but who
always brings her knitting in her pocket. The light of the soul that
shines through her countenance, that “light that never was on land or
sea,” is mingled with the warm glow from the fireside on the hearth
of Home. Indeed, may it not be attributed to the Teutonic heart as
something peculiar to it, that it has breadth enough to embrace at once
the chimney-corner and the far-reaching splendors of Heaven? Happy for
it when the smoke and cookery-steam of the one do not obscure the other!
I find no fault with the author of Piers Ploughman for not being a
poet. Every man cannot be a poet (fortunately), nor every poet a great
one. It is the privilege of the great to be always contemporaneous,
to speak of fugacious events in words that shall be perennial. But
to the poets of the second rate we go for pictures of manners that
have passed away, for transitory facts, for modes of life and ways of
thinking that were circumstantial merely. They give us reflections of
our outward, as their larger brethren do of our inward, selves. They
deal, as it were, with costume; the other with man himself.
But these details are of interest, so fond are we of facts. We all have
seen the congregation which grew sleepy while the preacher talked of
the other world give a stir of pleased attention if he brought in a
personal anecdote about _this_. Books are written and printed, and we
read them to tell us how our forefathers cocked their hats, or turned
up the points of their shoes; when blacking and starch were introduced;
who among the Anglo-Saxons carried the first umbrella, and who borrowed
it.
These trifles, also, acquire importance in proportion as they are
older. If a naturalist showed us a toad, we should be indifferent, but
if he told us that it had been found in a block of granite, we should
instantly look with profound interest on a creature that perhaps ate
moths in Abel’s garden, or hopped out of the path of Lamech. And the
same precious jewel of instruction we find in the ugly little facts
embedded in early literatures. They teach us the unchangeableness of
man and his real independence of his accidents. He is the same old lay
figure under all his draperies, and sits to one artist for a John and
to another for a Judas, and serves equally well for both portraits. The
oldest fable reappears in the newest novel. Aristophanes makes coats
that fit us still. Voltaire is Lucian translated into the eighteenth
century. Augustus turns up in Louis Napoleon. The whirligig of Time
brings back at regular intervals the same actors and situations,
and under whatever names--Ormuzd and Ahriman, Protestantism and
Catholicism, Reform and Conservatism, Transcendentalism and Realism.
We see the same ancient quarrel renewed from generation to generation,
till we begin to doubt whether this be truly the steps of a Tower of
Babel that we are mounting, and not rather a treadmill, where we get
all the positive good of the exercise and none of the theoretic ill
which might come if we could once solve the problem of getting above
ourselves. Man’s life continues to be, as the Saxon noble described it,
the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall, out of one darkness
and into another, and the two questions _whence?_ and _whither?_ were
no tougher to Adam than to us. The author of Piers Ploughman’s Vision
has offered us his theory of this world and the next, and in doing
so gives some curious hints of modes of life and of thought. It is
generally agreed that one of his names was Langland, and it is disputed
whether the other was Robert or William. Robert has the most authority,
and William the strongest arguments in its favor. It is of little
consequence now to him or us. He was probably a monk at Malvern. His
poem is a long one, written in the unrhymed alliterative measure of the
Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the plan of it is of the simplest kind. It is
a continued allegory, in which all the vices, passions, and follies of
the time, the powers of the mind, the qualities of the spirit, and the
theological dogmas of the author, are personified and mixed up with
real personages with so much simplicity, and with such unconscious
interfusion of actual life as to give the whole an air of probability.
The author of Piers Ploughman’s Vision avoids any appearance of
incongruity by laying his scene in a world which is neither wholly real
nor wholly imaginary--the realm of sleep and dreams. There it does not
astonish us that Langland should meet and talk with the theological
virtues, and that very avoirdupois knights, monks, abbots, friars, and
ploughmen should be found in company with such questionable characters
as Do-well, Do-better, Do-best, Conscience, Nature, Clergy, and Activa
Vita. He has divided his poem into twenty “steps,” as he calls them,
in each of which he falls asleep, has a dream, and wakes up when it
becomes convenient or he is at a loss what else to do. Meanwhile his
real characters are so very real, and his allegorical ones mingle
with them on such a common ground of easy familiarity, that we forget
the allegory altogether. We are not surprised to find those Utopian
edifices, the Tower of Truth and the Church of Unity, in the same
street with an alehouse as genuine as that of Tam o’ Shanter, and it
would seem nothing out of the common if we should see the twelve signs
of the Zodiac saving themselves from Deucalion’s flood in an arc of the
Ecliptic.
Mr. Lowell here read long extracts from the poem, with a commentary of
his own, generally brief, of which we can give only the following fine
passage on Personification.
The truth is, that ideal personifications are commonly little better
than pinchbeck substitutes for imagination. They are a refuge which
unimaginative minds seek from their own sterile imaginativeness. They
stand in the same relation to poetry as wax figures to sculpture. The
more nearly they counterfeit reality, the more unpleasant they are,
and there is always a dejected irresponsibleness about the legs and
a Brattle street air in the boots that is ludicrous. The imagination
gives us no pictures, but the thing itself. It goes out for the moment
to dwell in and inform with its own life the object of its vision--as
Keats says somewhere in one of his letters, “I hop about the gravel
and pick up crumbs in the sparrows.” And so, in personifying, the
imagination must have energy to project its own emotion so as to see
it objectively--just as the disease of the hypochondriac runs before
him in a black dog. Thus it was that the early poets, “who believed the
wonders that they sang,” peopled the forests, floods, and mountains
with real shapes of beauty or terror; and accordingly in primitive
times _ecstasy_ is always attributed to the condition of the poetic
mind. To the great poets these ecstasies are still possible, and
personification had its origin in the tradition of these, and the
endeavor of inferior minds to atone for their own languor by what we
may call historical or reminiscental imagination. Here is indicated
the decline from faith to ritual. Shakspeare has illustrated the true
secret of imaginative personification when he makes the conscience of
Macbeth become external and visible to him in the ghastly shape at the
banquet which he alone can see, and Lady Macbeth’s afterwards in the
blood-stain on her hand. This is the personification of the creative
mind whose thoughts are not images, but _things_. And this seems to
have been the normal condition of Shakspeare’s genius, as it is the
exceptional one of all other poets. He alone has embodied in flesh and
blood his every thought and fancy and emotion, his every passion and
temptation. Beside him all other poets seem but the painters and not
the makers of men. He sent out his profound intellect to look at life
from every point of view, and through the eyes of all men and women
from the highest to the lowest. In every one he seems to have tapped it
with the knuckles, to have said sadly, _Tinnit, inane est_, It rings,
it is hollow; and then to have gone down quietly to wait for death and
another world at Stratford.