striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend
upon conscientious and laborious finish as well as upon natural
endowments.
I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was
brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that
ever lived, and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and
my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric
doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I
had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic
beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope
was a master of style? I felt, as Addison says in his “Freeholder” in
answering an argument in favor of the Pretender because he could speak
English and George I could not, “that I did not wish to be tyrannized
over in the best English that was ever spoken.” There was a time when I
could not read Pope, but disliked him by instinct, as old Roger Ascham
seems to have felt about Italy when he says: “I was once in Italy
myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days.”
But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry,
and must be studied by every one who would come to a clear knowledge
of it. I have since read every line that Pope ever wrote, and every
letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not
come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe I am
at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I
have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of
expression; but, as a fact, he represents something more--nothing less,
namely, than one of those external controversies of taste which will
last as long as the Imagination and Understanding divide men between
them. It is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or
demonstration. Men are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or
Kantists; and there is nothing more to be said of the matter. We do not
hear that the green spectacles persuaded the horse into thinking that
shavings were grass.
That reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural
school for its nature and the artificial for its artificiality,
provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow
that a man who can produce one perfect work is either a great genius
or a very lucky one. As far as we who read are concerned, it is of
secondary importance which. And Pope has done this in the “Rape of
the Lock.” For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been
surpassed. I do not say that there is in it poetry of the highest
order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as the
companion of his best hours. There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet
call; but for pure entertainment it is unmatched.
The very earliest of Pope’s productions gives indications of that
sense and discretion, as well as wit, which afterwards so eminently
distinguished him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and we
find also that perfect balance of metre which he afterwards carried so
far as to be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth
year, and their publication immediately brought him into notice. The
following four verses from the first Pastoral are quite characteristic
in their antithetic balance:
You that, too wise for pride, too good for power,
Enjoy the glory to be great no more,
And carrying with you all the world can boast,
To all the world illustriously are lost.
The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future period
of Pope’s correspondence with his friends, where Swift, his heart
corroding with disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising
delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretending to disregard the
lampoons which embittered his life, played together the solemn farce of
affecting to despise the world which it would have agonized them to be
forgotten by.
In Pope’s next poem, the “Essay on Criticism,” the wit and poet become
apparent. It is full of clear thoughts compactly expressed. In this
poem, written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur some of those lines
which have become proverbial, such as:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread;
True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed;
For each ill author is as bad a friend.
In all these we notice that terseness in which (regard being had to his
especial range of thought) Pope has never been equaled. One cannot help
being struck also with the singular _discretion_ which the poem gives
evidence of. I do not know where to look for another author in whom it
appeared so early; and considering the vivacity of his mind and the
constantly besetting temptation of his wit, it is still more wonderful.
In his boyish correspondence with poor old Wycherly, one would suppose
him to be a man and Wycherly the youth. Pope’s understanding was no
less vigorous than his fancy was lightsome and sprightly.
I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalized him
as a poet, the “Rape of the Lock,” in which, indeed, he appears more
purely as a poet than in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has
shown more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such
a truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His genius has
here found its true direction, and the very same artificiality which
in his Pastorals was unpleasing heightens the effect and adds to the
general keeping. As truly as Shakspeare is the poet of man as God made
him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope
the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those
motives which may be called acquired, whose spring is in institutions
and habits of purely worldly origin.
The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything
Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the
supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is
allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself
as one of the purest works of human fancy. Whether that fancy be truly
poetical or not is another matter. The perfection of form in the “Rape
of the Lock” is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius
of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his
poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than
harmonious wholes.
Mr. Lowell gave a detailed analysis of the poem, with extracts of some
length.
The “Essay on Man” has been praised and admired by men of the
most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and
free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval.
And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley
of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question:
that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found a
thought, no matter what, he would express it so tersely, so clearly,
and with such smoothness of versification, as to give it an everlasting
currency. Hobbes’s unwieldy “Leviathan,” left stranded on the shore of
the last age and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness--from this
Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of
his philosophy, lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go
out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive
doctrine in the poem is the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and
the pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace.
Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught in the “Essay
on Man.”
The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he is
commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. But
the supposition is that in the “Essay on Man” Pope did not know what he
was writing himself. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of
Bolingbroke--a fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or if he _did_ know,
we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he threw in
some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson
asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope’s having been made
the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly
probable when we consider the relations between them. It is giving Pope
altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did
not understand the principles of his intimate friend.
Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of
Spinozism from the “Essay on Man.” He would have found it harder
to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would not
overthrow the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his
poem all that the Bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we
must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit--clearness.
If we did _not_, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense
of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the
difficulty is that Pope’s precision of thought was not equal to his
polish of style.
But it is in his “Moral Essays” and part of his “Satires” that Pope
deserves the praise which he himself desired--
Happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe.
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please.
Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of his own, in
which he is without a rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at every
page.
In his epistle on the characters of woman, no one who has ever known
a noble woman will find much to please him. The climax of his praise
rather degrades than elevates:
O blest in temper, whose unclouded ray
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day,
She who can love a sister’s charms, or hear
Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear,
She who ne’er answers till a husband cools,
Or if she rules him, never shows she rules,
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
Yet has her humor most when she obeys;
Let fops or fortune fly which way they will,
Disdains all loss of tickets, or codille,
Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all;
And mistress of herself though china fall.
The last line is very witty and pointed; but consider what an ideal
of womanly nobleness he must have had who praises his heroine for not
being jealous of her daughter.
It is very possible that the women of Pope’s time were as bad as they
could be, but if God made poets for anything it was to keep alive the
traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the
influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no
age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast
and a wanderer while there is a poet-nature left; will never fail of
the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense
of the nice rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted in the
blemish more than in the charm.
Personally, we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He
kept no secret about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag,
he always contrived to give her tail a pinch so that we might know she
was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his disposition
seems to have been a truly amiable one, and his character as an author
was as purely fictitious as his style. I think that there was very
little real malice in him.
A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which he lived, and
not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. In his own province
he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be the greatest satirist
of individual men rather than of human nature; if to be the highest
expression which the life of court and the ball-room has ever found in
verse; if to have added more phrases to our language than any other but
Shakspeare; if to have charmed four generations makes a man a great
poet, then he is one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style
of writing which in his hand was living and powerful because he used
it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of
society. Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found
wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivaled.
To what fatuities his theory of correctness led in the next generation,
when practised upon by men who had not his genius, I shall endeavor to
show in my next lecture.
LECTURE X
POETIC DICTION
(_Friday Evening, February 9, 1855_)
X
No one who has read any early poems, of whatever nation, can have
failed to notice a freshness in the language--a sort of game flavor,
as it were--that gradually wastes out of it when poetry becomes
domesticated, so to speak, and has grown to be a mere means of
amusement both to writers and readers, instead of answering a deeper
necessity in their natures. Our Northern ancestors symbolized the
eternal newness of song by calling it the Present, and its delight by
calling it the drink of Odin.
There was then a fierce democracy of words; no grades had then been
established, and no favored ones advanced to the Upper House of Poetry.
Men had a meaning, and so their words had to have one, too. They were
not representatives of value, but value itself. They say that Valhalla
was roofed with golden shields; that was what they believed, and in
their songs they called them golden shingles. We should think shields
the more poetical word of the two; but to them the poetry was in the
_thing_, and the thought of it and the phrase took its life and
meaning from them.
It is one result of the admixture of foreign words in our language
that we use a great many phrases without knowing the force of them.
There is a metaphoric vitality hidden in almost all of them, and we
talk poetry as Molière’s citizen did prose, without ever suspecting
it. Formerly men _named_ things; now we merely label them to know
them apart. The Vikings called their ships sea-horses, just as the
Arabs called their camels ships of the desert. Capes they called
sea-noses, without thinking it an undignified term which the land
would resent. And still, where mountains and headlands have the luck
to be baptized by uncultivated persons, Fancy stands godmother.
Old Greylock, up in Berkshire, got his surname before we had State
geologists or distinguished statesmen. So did Great Haystack and
Saddle-Mountain. Sailors give good names, if they have no dictionary
aboard, and along our coasts, here and there, the word and the thing
agree, and therefore are poetical. Meaning and poetry still cling to
some of our common phrases, and the crow-foot, mouse-ear, goat’s-beard,
day’s-eye, heart’s-ease, snow-drop, and many more of their vulgar
little fellow-citizens of the wood and roadsides are as happy as if
Linnæus had never been born. Such names have a significance even to
one who has never seen the things they stand for, but whose fancy would
not be touched about a pelargonium unless he had an acquired sympathy
with it. Our “cumulus” language, heaped together from all quarters,
is like the clouds at sunset, and every man finds something different
in a sentence, according to his associations. Indeed, every language
that has become a literary one may be compared to a waning moon, out of
which the light of beauty fades more and more. Only to poets and lovers
does it repair itself from its luminous fountains.
The poetical quality of diction depends on the force and intensity of
meaning with which it is employed. We are all of us full of latent
significance, and let a poet have but the power to touch us, we
forthwith enrich his word with ourselves, pouring into his verse our
own lives, all our own experience, and take back again, without knowing
it, the vitality which we had given away out of ourselves. Put passion
enough into a word, and no matter what it is it becomes poetical; it is
no longer what it was, but is a messenger from original man to original
man, an ambassador from royal Thee to royal Me, and speaks to us from
a level of equality. Pope, who did not scruple to employ the thoughts
of Billingsgate, is very fastidious about the dress they come in,
and claps a tawdry livery-coat on them, that they may be fit for the
service of so fine a gentleman. He did not mind being coarse in idea,
but it would have been torture to him to be thought commonplace. The
sin of composition which he dreaded was,
Lest ten low words should creep in one dull line.
But there is no more startling proof of the genius of Shakspeare than
that he always lifts the language up to himself, and never thinks
to raise himself atop of it. If he has need of the service of what
is called a low word, he takes it, and it is remarkable how many of
his images are borrowed out of the street and the workshop. His pen
ennobled them all, and we feel as if they had been knighted for good
service in the field. Shakspeare, as we all know (for does not Mr.
Voltaire say so?), was a vulgar kind of fellow, but somehow or other
his genius will carry the humblest things up into the air of heaven as
easily as Jove’s eagle bore Ganymede.
Whatever is used with a great meaning, and conveys that meaning to
others in its full intensity, is no longer common and ordinary. It is
this which gives their poetic force to symbols, no matter how low their
origin. The blacksmith’s apron, once made the royal standard of Persia,
can fill armies with enthusiasm and is as good as the oriflamme of
France. A broom is no very noble thing in itself, but at the mast-head
of a brave old De Ruyter, or in the hands of that awful shape which
Dion the Syracusan saw, it becomes poetical. And so the emblems of
the tradesmen of Antwerp, which they bore upon their standards, pass
entirely out of the prosaic and mechanical by being associated with
feelings and deeds that were great and momentous.
* * * * *
Mr. Lowell here read a poem by Dr. Donne entitled “The Separation.”
* * * * *
As respects Diction, _that_ becomes formal and technical when poetry
has come to be considered an artifice rather than an art, and when
its sole object is to revive certain pleasurable feelings already
conventional, instead of originating new sources of delight. Then it is
truly earth to earth; dead language used to bury dead emotion in. This
kind of thing was carried so far by the later Scandinavian poets that
they compiled a dictionary of the metaphors used by the elder Skalds
(whose songs were the utterance of that within them which _would_ be
spoken), and satisfied themselves with a new arrangement of them.
Inspiration was taught, as we see French advertised to be, in six
lessons.
In narrative and descriptive poetry we feel that proper keeping demands
a certain choice and luxury of words. The question of propriety
becomes one of prime importance here. Certain terms have an acquired
imaginative value from the associations they awake in us. Certain
words are more musical than others. Some rhymes are displeasing;
some measures wearisome. Moreover, there are words which have become
indissolubly entangled with ludicrous or mean ideas. Hence it follows
that there is such a thing as Poetic Diction, and it was this that
Milton was thinking of when he spoke of making our English “search her
coffers round.”
I will illustrate this. Longfellow’s “Evangeline” opens with a noble
solemnity:
This is the forest primeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like the Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
There is true feeling here, and the sigh of the pines is heard in
the verses. I can find only one epithet to hang a criticism on, and
that is the “_wail_ of the forest” in the last line, which is not in
keeping with the general murmur. Now I do not suppose that the poet
turned over any vocabulary to find the words he wanted, but followed
his own poetic instinct altogether in the affair. But suppose for a
moment, that instead of being a true poet, he had been only a gentleman
versifying; suppose he had written, “This is the primitive forest.”
The prose meaning is the same, but the poetical meaning, the music,
and the cadence would be gone out of it, and gone forever. Or suppose
that, instead of “garments green,” he had said “dresses green”; the
idea is identical, but the phrase would have come down from its
appropriate remoteness to the milliner’s counter. But not to take such
extreme instances, only substitute instead of “harpers hoar,” the words
“harpers gray,” and you lose not only the alliteration, but the fine
hoarse sigh of the original epithet, which blends with it the general
feeling of the passage. So if you put “sandy beaches” in the place of
“rocky caverns,” you will not mar the absolute truth to nature, but you
will have forfeited the relative truth to keeping.
When Bryant says so exquisitely,
Painted moths
Have _wandered the blue sky_ and died again,
we ruin the poetry, the sunny spaciousness of the image, without
altering the prose sense, by substituting
Have _flown through the clear air_.
But the words “poetic diction” have acquired a double meaning, or
perhaps I should say there are two kinds of poetic diction, the one
true and the other false, the one real and vital, the other mechanical
and artificial. Wordsworth for a time confounded the two together in
one wrathful condemnation, and preached a crusade against them both.
He wrote, at one time, on the theory that the language of ordinary
life was the true dialect of poetry, and that one word was as good
as another. He seemed even to go farther and to adopt the Irishman’s
notion of popular equality, that “one man is as good as another, and
a dale better, too.” He preferred, now and then, prosaic words and
images to poetical ones. But he was not long in finding his mistake
and correcting it. One of his most tender and pathetic poems, “We are
Seven,” began thus in the first edition:
A simple child, _dear brother Jim_.
All England laughed, and in the third edition Wordsworth gave in and
left the last half of the line blank, as it has been ever since. If the
poem had been a translation from the Turkish and had begun,
A simple child, dear Ibrahim,
there would have been nothing unpoetical in it; but the “dear brother
Jim,” which would seem natural enough at the beginning of a familiar
letter, is felt to be ludicrously incongruous at the opening of a poem.
To express a profound emotion, the simpler the language and the less
removed from the ordinary course of life the better. There is a very
striking example of this in Webster’s tragedy of “The Duchess of
Malfy.” The brother of the Duchess has procured her murder, and when he
comes in and sees the body he merely says:
“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.”
Horror could not be better expressed than in these few words, and
Webster has even taken care to break up the verse in such a way that a
too entire consciousness of the metre may not thrust itself between us
and the bare emotion he intends to convey.
In illustration, Mr. Lowell quoted from Shakspeare (“Henry V”),
Marlowe, Chapman, Dunbar, Beaumont and Fletcher, Waller, Young, and
Cawthorn.
These men [the poets of the eighteenth century] were perfectly
conscious of the fact that poetry is not produced under an ordinary
condition of the mind, and accordingly, when they begin to grind their
barrel-organs, they go through the ceremony of invoking the Muse, talk
in the blandest way of divine rages and sacred flames, and one thing
or another, and ask for holy fire to heat their little tea-urns with
as coolly as one would borrow a lucifer. They appeal ceremoniously to
the “sacred Nine,” when the only thing really necessary to them was the
ability to count as high as the sacred ten syllables that constituted
their verse. If the Muse had once granted their prayer, if she _had_
once unveiled her awful front to the poor fellows, they would have
hidden under their beds, every man John of them.