imaginations; and this excitement accomplished, he is satisfied.
Shakspeare, on the other hand, seldom leaves any work to be done by the
imagination of his readers; and after we have enjoyed the total effect
of a passage, we may always study the particulars with advantage.
Shakspeare never attaches any particular value to his thoughts, or
images, or phrases, but scatters them with a royal carelessness.
Milton seems always to respect his; he lays out broad avenues for the
triumphal processions of his verse; covers the ground with tapestry
inwoven with figures of mythology and romance; builds up arches rich
with historic carvings for them to march under, and accompanies them
with swells and cadences of inspiring music. “Paradise Lost” is full
of what may be called _vistas_ of verse. Notice, for example, how far
off he begins when he is about to speak of himself--as at the beginning
of the third book and of the seventh. When you read “Paradise Lost”
the feeling you have is one of _vastness_. You float under a great sky
brimmed with sunshine, or hung with constellations; the abyss of space
is around you; thunders mutter on the horizon; you hear the mysterious
sigh of an unseen ocean; and if the scene changes, it is with an
elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. Of all books it
seems most purely the work of a disembodied mind. Of all poets he could
most easily afford to be blind; of all, his poetry owes least to the
senses, except that of hearing; everything, except his music, came
to him through a mental medium, and perhaps even that may have been
intellectual--as in Beethoven, who composed behind the veil of deafness.
Milton is a remarkable instance of a great imaginative faculty fed
by books instead of Nature. One has only to read the notes of the
commentators upon his poems to see how perfectly he made whatever
he took his own. Everything that he touches swells and towers into
vastness. It is wonderful to see how, from the most withered and
juiceless hint that he met in his reading, his grand images “rise like
an exhalation”; how from the most hopeless-looking leaden box that he
found in that huge drag-net with which he gathered everything from the
waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius to do his bidding.
That proud consciousness of his own strength, and confidence at the
same time that he is the messenger of the Most High, never forsake him.
It is they which give him his grand manner, and make him speak as if
with the voice of a continent. He reverenced always the sacredness of
his own calling and character. As poet, full of the lore of antiquity,
and, as prophet, charged to vindicate the ways of God, it seems to
me that I see the majestic old man laying one hand upon the shoulder
of the Past, and the other upon that of the Future, and so standing
sublimely erect above that abject age to pour his voice along the
centuries. We are reminded of what is told of Firdusi, whose father
on the night he was born dreamed he saw him standing in the middle of
the earth and singing so loud and clear that he was heard in all four
quarters of the heavens at once.
I feel how utterly inadequate any single lecture must be on such a
theme, and how impossible it is to say anything about Milton in an
hour. I have merely touched upon three or four points that seemed to me
most characteristic of his style, for our concern with him is solely
as a poet. Yet it would be an unpardonable reticence if I did not say,
before I close, how profoundly we ought to reverence the grandeur of
the man, his incorruptible love of freedom, his scholarly and unvulgar
republicanism, his scorn of contemporary success, his faith in the
future and in God, his noble frugality of life.
The noise of those old warfares is hushed; the song of Cavalier and the
fierce psalm of the Puritan are silent now; the hands of his episcopal
adversaries no longer hold pen or crozier--they and their works are
dust; but he who loved truth more than life, who was faithful to the
other world while he did his work in this; his seat is in that great
cathedral whose far-echoing aisles are the ages whispering with blessed
feet of the Saints, Martyrs, and Confessors of every clime and creed;
whose bells sound only centurial hours; about whose spire crowned with
the constellation of the cross no meaner birds than missioned angels
hover; whose organ music is the various stops of endless changes
breathed through by endless good; whose choristers are the elect
spirits of all time, that sing, serene and shining as morning stars,
the ever-renewed mystery of Creative Power.
LECTURE VIII
BUTLER
(_Friday Evening, February 2, 1855_)
VIII
Neither the Understanding nor the Imagination is sane by itself; the
one becomes blank worldliness, the other hypochondria. A very little
imagination is able to intoxicate a weak understanding, and this
appears to be the condition of religious enthusiasm in vulgar minds.
Puritanism, as long as it had a material object to look forward to,
was strong and healthy. But Fanaticism is always defeated by success;
the moment it is established in the repose of power, it necessarily
crystallizes into cant and formalism around any slenderest threads
of dogma; and if the intellectual fermentation continue after the
spiritual has ceased, as it constantly does, it is the fermentation
of putrefaction, breeding nothing but the vermin of incoherent and
destructively-active metaphysic subtleties--the maggots, as Butler,
condensing Lord Bacon, calls them, of corrupted texts. That wise
man Oliver Cromwell has been reproached for desertion of principles
because he recognized the truth that though enthusiasm may overturn a
government, it can never carry on one. Our Puritan ancestors came to
the same conclusion, and have been as unwisely blamed for it. While we
wonder at the prophetic imagination of those heroic souls who could see
in the little _Mayflower_ the seeds of an empire, while we honor (as it
can only truly be honored--by imitating) that fervor of purpose which
could give up everything for principle, let us be thankful that they
had also that manly English sense which refused to sacrifice _their_
principles to the fantasy of every wandering Adoniram or Shear-Jashub
who mistook himself for Providence as naturally and as obstinately as
some lunatics suppose themselves to be tea-pots.
The imaginative side of Puritanism found its poetical expression in
Milton and its prose in Bunyan. The intellectual vagaries of its
decline were to have their satirist in Butler. He was born at Strensham
in Worcestershire in 1612, the son of a small farmer who was obliged to
pinch himself to afford his son a grammar-school education. It is more
than doubtful whether he were ever at any university at all. His first
employment was as clerk to Mr. Jeffereys, a Worcestershire justice of
the peace, called by the poet’s biographers an eminent one. While in
this situation he employed his leisure in study, and in cultivating
music and painting, for both of which arts he had a predilection. He
next went into the family of the Countess of Kent, where he had the use
of a fine library, and where he acted as amanuensis to John Selden--the
mere drippings of whose learning were enough to make a great scholar
of him. After this he was employed (in what capacity is unknown) in
the house of Sir Samuel Luke, an officer of Cromwell, and a rigid
Presbyterian. It was here that he made his studies for the characters
of _Sir Hudibras_ and his squire, _Ralpho_, and is supposed to have
begun the composition of his great work. There is hardly anything more
comic in “Hudibras” itself than the solemn Country Knight unconsciously
furnishing clothes from his wardrobe, and a rope of his own twisting,
to hang himself in eternal effigy with. Butler has been charged with
ingratitude for having caricatured his employer; but there is no hint
of any obligation he was under, and the service of a man like him must
have been a fair equivalent for any wages.
On the other hand, it has been asserted that Butler did not mean Sir
Samuel Luke at all, but a certain Sir Henry Rosewell, or a certain
Colonel Rolle, both Devonshire men. And in confirmation of it we are
told that Sir Hugh de Bras was the tutelary saint of Devonshire.
Butler, however, did not have so far to go for a name, but borrowed
it from Spenser. He himself is the authority for the “conjecture,”
as it is called, that his hero and Sir Samuel Luke were identical.
At the end of the first canto of part first of “Hudibras” occurs a
couplet of which the last part of the second verse is left blank. This
couplet, for want of attention to the accent, has been taken to be in
ten-syllable measure, and therefore an exception to the rest of the
poem. But it is only where we read it as a verse of four feet that the
inevitable rhyme becomes perfectly Hudibrastic. The knight himself is
the speaker:
’Tis sung there is a valiant Mameluke
In foreign lands yclept (Sir Sam Luke)
To whom we have been oft compared
For person, parts, address and beard.
Butler died poor, but not in want, on the 25th of September, 1680, in
his sixty-eighth year.
Butler’s poem is commonly considered the type of the burlesque--that
is, as the representative of the gravely ludicrous, which seems to
occupy a kind of neutral ground between the witty and the humorous. But
this is true of the form rather than the matter of the poem. Burlesque
appears to be wit infused with animal spirits--satire for the mere fun
of the thing, without any suggestion of intellectual disapproval, or
moral indignation. True wit is a kind of instantaneous logic which
gives us the _quod erat demonstrandum_ without the intermediate steps
of the syllogism. Coleridge, with admirable acuteness, has said that
“there is such a thing as scientific wit.” Therefore pure wit sometimes
gives an intellectual pleasure without making us laugh. The wit that
makes us laugh most freely is that which instantly accepts another
man’s premises, and draws a conclusion from them in its own favor. A
country gentleman was once showing his improvements to the Prince de
Ligne, and, among other things, pointed out to him a muddy spot which
he called his lake. “It is rather shallow, is it not?” said the Prince.
“I assure you, Prince, a man drowned himself in it.” “Ah, he must have
been a flatterer, then,” answered De Ligne. Of the same kind is the
story told of one of our old Massachusetts clergymen, Dr. Morse. At
an association dinner a debate arose as to the benefit of whipping in
bringing up children. The doctor took the affirmative, and his chief
opponent was a young minister whose reputation for veracity was not
very high. He affirmed that parents often did harm to their children
by unjust punishment from not knowing the facts in the case. “Why,”
said he, “the only time my father ever whipped me was for telling the
truth.” “Well,” retorted the doctor, “it cured you of it, didn’t it?”
In wit of this sort, there is always a latent syllogism.
Then there is the wit which detects an unintentional bit of satire in
a word of double meaning; as where Sir Henry Wotton takes advantage
of the phrase commonly used in his day to imply merely residence, and
finds an under meaning in it, saying that “ambassadors were persons
sent to _lie_ abroad for the service of their prince.”
On the other hand I think unconsciousness and want of intention, or at
least the pretense of it, is more or less essential to the ludicrous.
For this reason what may be called the wit of events is always
ludicrous. Nothing can be more so, for example, than the Pope’s sending
a Cardinal’s hat to John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, which arrived in
England after Henry VIII had taken off that prelate’s head. So, when
Dr. Johnson said very gravely one day, that he had _often thought_ that
if he had a harem he would dress all the ladies in white linen, the
unintentional incongruity of the speech with the character of the great
moralist threw Boswell into an ecstasy of laughter. Like this is the
ludicrousness of Pope Paul III writing to the Council of Trent “that
they should begin with original sin, observing yet a due respect unto
the Emperor.”
Captain Basil Hall, when he traveled in this country, found the
Yankees a people entirely destitute of wit and humor. Perhaps our
gravity, which ought to have put him on the right scent, deceived him.
I do not know a more perfect example of wit than something which, as I
have heard, was said to the captain himself. Stopping at a village inn
there came up a thunderstorm, and Captain Hall, surprised that a new
country should have reached such perfection in these meteorological
manufactures, said to a bystander, “Why, you have very heavy thunder
here.” “Well, yes,” replied the man, “we _du_, considerin’ the number
of inhabitants.” Here is another story which a stage-driver told me
once. A wag on the outside of the coach called to a man by the roadside
who was fencing some very poor land: “I say, mister, what are you
fencing that pasture for? It would take forty acres on’t to starve a
middle-sized cow.” “Jesso; and I’m a-fencing of it to keep eour kettle
eout.”
Now in the “forty acre” part of this story we have an instance of what
is called American exaggeration, and which I take to be the symptom
of most promise in Yankee fun. For it marks that desire for intensity
of expression which is one phase of imagination. Indeed many of these
sayings are purely imaginative; as where a man said of a painter he
knew, that “he painted a shingle so exactly like marble that when it
fell into the river it sunk.” A man told me once that the people of
a certain town were so universally dishonest that “they had to take
in their stone walls at night.” In some of these stories imagination
appears yet more strongly, and in that contradictory union with the
understanding lies at the root of highest humor. For example, a
coachman driving up some steep mountains in Vermont was asked if they
were as steep on the other side also. “Steep! chain-lightnin’ couldn’t
go down ’em without the breechin’ on.” I believe that there is more
latent humor among the American people than in any other, and that it
will one day develop itself and find expression through Art.
If we apply the definitions we have made to Butler’s poem, we shall
find that it is not properly humorous at all; that the nearest approach
to the humorous is burlesque. Irony is Butler’s favorite weapon. But he
always has an ulterior object. His characters do not live at all, but
are only caricatured effigies of political enemies stuffed with bran
and set up as targets for his wit. He never lets us forget for a moment
that Presbyterian and Independent are primarily knaves and secondarily
men. The personality never by accident expands into humanity. There
is not a trace of imagination or of sympathy in his poem. It is pure
satire, and intellectual satire only. There is as much creativeness
in Trumbull’s “McFingal,” or Fessenden’s “Terrible Tractoration” as
in “Hudibras.” Butler never works from within, but stands spectator
covering his victims with merciless ridicule; and we enjoy the fun
because his figures are as mere nobodies as Punch and Judy, whose
misfortunes are meant to amuse us, and whose unreality is part of the
sport. The characters of truly humorous writers are as real to us as
any of our acquaintances. We no more doubt the existence of the Wife of
Bath, of Don Quixote and Sancho, of Falstaff, Sir Roger de Coverley,
Parson Adams, the Vicar, Uncle Toby, Pickwick or Major Pendennis, than
we do our own. They are the contemporaries of every generation forever.
They are our immortal friends whose epitaph no man shall ever write.
The only incantation needed to summon them is the taking of a book from
our shelf, and they are with us with their wisdom, their wit, their
courtesy, their humanity, and (dearer than all) their weaknesses.
But the figures of Butler are wholly contemporaneous with himself. They
are dead things nailed to his age, like crows to a barn-door, for an
immediate _in terrorem_ purpose, to waste and blow away with time and
weather. The Guy Fawkes of a Fifth of November procession has as much
manhood in it.
Butler, then, is a wit--in the strictest sense of the word--with only
such far-off hints at humor as lie in a sense of the odd, the droll,
or the ludicrous. But in wit he is supreme. “Hudibras” is as full
of point as a paper of pins; it sparkles like a phosphorescent sea,
every separate drop of which contains half a dozen little fiery lives.
Indeed, the fault of the poem (if it can be called a fault) is that it
has too much wit to be easy reading.
Butler had been a great reader, and out of the dryest books of
school divinity, Puritan theology, metaphysics, medicine, astrology,
mathematics, no matter what, his brain secreted wit as naturally as
a field of corn will get so much silex out of a soil as would make
flints for a whole arsenal of old-fashioned muskets, and where even
Prometheus himself could not have found enough to strike a light with.
I do sincerely believe that he would have found fun in a joke of
Senator--well, any senator; and that is saying a great deal. I speak of
course, of senators at Washington.
Mr. Lowell illustrated his criticism by copious quotations from
“Hudibras.” He concluded thus:
It would not be just to leave Butler without adding that he was an
honest and apparently disinterested man. He wrote an indignant satire
against the vices of Charles the Second’s court. Andrew Marvel, the
friend of Milton, and the pattern of incorruptible Republicanism,
himself a finer poet and almost as great a wit as Butler--while he
speaks contemptuously of the controversialists and satirists of his
day, makes a special exception of “Hudibras.” I can fancy John Bunyan
enjoying it furtively, and Milton, if he had had such a thing as fun in
him, would have laughed over it.
Many greater men and greater poets have left a less valuable legacy
to their countrymen than Butler, who has made them the heirs of a
perpetual fund of good humor, which is more nearly allied to good
morals than most people suspect.
LECTURE IX
POPE
(_Thursday Evening, February 6, 1855_)
IX
There is nothing more curious, whether in the history of individual men
or of nations, than the reactions which occur at more or less frequent
intervals.
The human mind, both in persons and societies, is like a pendulum
which, the moment it has reached the limit of its swing in one
direction, goes inevitably back as far on the other side, and so on
forever.
These reactions occur in everything, from the highest to the lowest,
from religion to fashions of dress. The close crop and sober doublet
of the Puritan were followed by the laces and periwigs of Charles the
Second. The scarlet coats of our grandfathers have been displaced by as
general a blackness as if the world had all gone into mourning. Tight
sleeves alternate with loose, and the full-sailed expanses of Navarino
have shrunk to those close-reefed phenomena which, like Milton’s
Demogorgon, are the _name_ of bonnet without its appearance.
English literature, for half a century from the Restoration, showed the
marks of both reaction and of a kind of artistic vassalage to France.
From the compulsory saintship and short hair of the Roundheads the
world rushed eagerly toward a little wickedness and a wilderness of
wig. Charles the Second brought back with him French manners, French
morals, and French taste. The fondness of the English for foreign
fashions had long been noted. It was a favorite butt of the satirists
of Elizabeth’s day. Everybody remembers what _Portia_ says of the
English lord: “How oddly is he suited! I think he bought his doublet
in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his
behavior everywhere.”
Dryden is the first eminent English poet whose works show the marks
of French influence, and a decline from the artistic toward the
artificial, from nature toward fashion. Dryden had known Milton, had
visited the grand old man probably in that “small chamber hung with
rusty green,” where he is described as “sitting in an elbow-chair,
neatly dressed in black, pale but not cadaverous”; or had found him
as he “used to sit in a gray, coarse cloth coat, at the door of his
house near Bunhill Fields, in warm, sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh
air.” Dryden undertook to put the “Paradise Lost” into rhyme, and on
Milton’s leave being asked, he said, rather contemptuously, “Ay, he
may _tag_ my verses if he will.” He also said that Dryden was a “good
rhymist, but no poet.” Dryden turned the great epic into a drama called
“The State of Innocence,” and intended for representation on the stage.
Sir Walter Scott dryly remarks that the _costume_ of our first parents
made it rather an awkward thing to bring them before the footlights. It
is an illustration of the character of the times that Dryden makes Eve
the mouthpiece of something very like obscenity. Of the taste shown by
such a travesty nothing need be said.
In the poems of Dryden nothing is more striking than the alternations
between natural vigor and warmth of temperament and the merest
common-places of diction. His strength lay chiefly in the
understanding, and for weight of sterling sense and masculine English,
and force of argument, I know nothing better than his prose. His mind
was a fervid one, and I think that in his verse he sometimes mistook
metrical enthusiasm for poetry. In his poems we find wit, fancy, an
amplitude of nature, a rapid and graphic statement of the externals
and antitheses of character, and a dignified fluency of verse rising
sometimes to majesty--but not much imagination in the high poetic
meaning of the term.
I have only spoken of his poems at all because they stand midway
between the old era, which died with Milton and Sir Thomas Browne, and
the new one which was just beginning. In the sixty years extending from
1660 to 1720, more French was imported into the language than at any
other time since the Norman Conquest. What is of greater importance,
it was French ideas and sentiments that were coming in now, and which
shaped the spirit and, through that, the form of our literature.
The condition of the English mind at the beginning of the last century
was one particularly capable of being magnetized from across the
Channel. The loyalty of everybody, both in politics and religion,
had been dislocated. A generation of materialists was to balance
the over-spiritualism of the Puritans. The other world had had its
turn long enough, and now _this_ world was to have its chance. There
seems to have been a universal skepticism, and in its most dangerous
form--that is, united with a universal pretense of conformity. There
was an unbelief that did not believe even in itself. Dean Swift, who
looked forward to a bishopric, could write a book whose moral, if
it had any, was that one religion was about as good as another, and
accepted a cure of souls when it was doubtful if he thought men had any
souls to be saved, or, at any rate, that they were worth saving if
they had. The answer which Pulci’s _Margutte_ makes to _Morgante_, when
he asks him if he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have expressed
well enough the creed of the majority of that generation:
Margutte answered then, To tell thee truly,
My faith in black’s no greater than in azure;
But I believe in capons, roast meat, bouilli,
And above all in wine--and carnal pleasure.
It was impossible that anything truly great--great, I mean, on the
moral and emotional as well as on the intellectual sides--could be
produced in such a generation. But something intellectually great could
be, and was. The French mind, always stronger in the perceptive and
analytic than in the imaginative faculty, loving precision, grace, and
fineness, had brought wit and fancy, and the elegant arts of society,
to the perfection, almost, of science. Its ideal in literature was
to combine the appearance of carelessness and gayety of thought with
intellectual exactness of statement. Its influence, then, in English
literature will appear chiefly in neatness and facility of expression,
in point of epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and these in conveying
conventional rather than universal experiences; in speaking for good
society rather than for man.
Thus far in English poetry we have found life represented by Chaucer,
the real life of men and women; the ideal or interior life as it
relates to this world, by Spenser; what may be called imaginative
life, by Shakspeare; the religious sentiment, or interior life as it
relates to the other world, by Milton. But everything aspires toward a
rhythmical utterance of itself, and accordingly the intellect and life,
as it relates to what may be called the world, were waiting for their
poet. They found or made a most apt one in Alexander Pope.