of them, were infected by the prevailing style. I cannot find any
name that expresses it better than the “Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick
always called wine the “rosy,” sleep the “balmy,” and so forth, so
did these perfectly _correct_ gentlemen always employ either a fluent
epithet or a diffuse paraphrasis to express the commonest emotions or
ideas. If they wished to say _tea_ they would have done it thus:
Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.
Coffee would be
The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray,
or brown or black, as the rhyme demanded. A boot is dignified into
The shining leather that the leg encased.
Wine is
The purple honor of th’ ambrosial vine.
All women are “nymphs,” carriages are “harnessed pomps,” houses are
sumptuous or humble “piles,” as the case may be, and everything is
purely technical. Of nature there seems to have been hardly a tradition.
But instead of attempting to describe in prose the diluent diction
which passed for poetic under the artificial system--which the
influence of Wordsworth did more than anything else to abolish and
destroy--I will do it by a few verses in the same style. Any subject
will do--a Lapland sketch, we will say:
Where far-off suns their fainter splendors throw
O’er Lapland’s wastes of uncongenial snow,
Where giant icebergs lift their horrent spires
And the blank scene a gelid fear expires,
Where oft the aurora of the northern night
Cheats with pale beams of ineffectual light,
Where icy Winter broods o’er hill and plain,
And Summer never comes, or comes in vain;
Yet here, e’en here, kind Nature grants to man
A boon congenial with her general plan.
Though no fair blooms to vernal gales expand,
And smiling Ceres shuns th’ unyielding land,
Behold, even here, cast up a monstrous spoil,
The sea’s vast monarch yields nutritious oil,
Escaped, perchance, from where the unfeeling crews
Dart the swift steel, and hempen coils unloose,
He whirls impetuous through the crimson tide,
Nor heeds the death that quivers in his side;
Northward he rushes with impulsive fin,
Where shores of crystal groan with ocean’s din,
Shores that will melt with pity’s glow more soon
Than the hard heart that launched the fierce harpoon.
In vain! he dies! yet not without avail
The blubbery bulk between his nose and tail.
Soon shall that bulk, in liquid amber stored,
Shed smiling plenty round some Lapland board.
Dream not, ye nymphs that flutter round the tray
When suns declining shut the door of day,
While China’s herb, infused with art, ye sip,
And toast and scandal share the eager lip.
Dream not to you alone that Life is kind,
Nor Hyson’s charms alone can soothe the mind;
If you are blest, ah, how more blest is he
By kinder fate shut far from tears and tea,
Who marks, replenished by his duteous hand,
Dark faces oleaginously expand;
And while you faint to see the scalding doom
Invade with stains the pride of Persia’s loom,
Happier in skins than you in silks perhaps,
Deals the bright train-oil to his little Lap’s.
LECTURE XI
WORDSWORTH
(_Tuesday Evening, February 13, 1855_)
XI
A few remarks upon two of the more distinguished poets of the
eighteenth century will be a fitting introduction to Wordsworth, and,
indeed, a kind of commentary on his poetry. Of two of these poets we
find very evident traces in him--Thomson and Cowper--of the one in an
indiscriminating love of nature, of the other in a kind of domestic
purity, and of both in the habit of treating subjects essentially
prosaic, in verse; whence a somewhat swelling wordiness is inevitable.
* * * * *
Thomson had the good luck to be born in Scotland, and to be brought up
by parents remarkable for simplicity and piety of life. Living in the
country till he was nearly twenty, he learned to love natural beauty,
and must have been an attentive student of scenery. That he had true
instincts in poetry is proved by his making Milton and Spenser his
models. He was a man of force and originality, and English poetry
owes him a large debt as the first who stood out both in precept and
practice against the vicious artificial style which then reigned, and
led the way back to purer tastes and deeper principles. He was a man
perfectly pure in life; the associate of eminent and titled personages,
without being ashamed of the little milliner’s shop of his sisters in
Edinburgh; a lover of freedom, and a poet who never lost a friend, nor
ever wrote a line of which he could repent. The licentiousness of the
age could not stain him. His poem of “Winter” was published a year
before the appearance of the “Dunciad.”
Thomson’s style is not equal to his conceptions. It is generally
lumbering and diffuse, and rather stilted than lofty. It is very likely
that his Scotch birth had something to do with this, and that he could
not write English with that unconsciousness without which elegance is
out of the question--for there can be no true elegance without freedom.
Burns’s English letters and poems are examples of this.
But there are passages in Thomson’s poems full of the truest feelings
for nature, and gleams of pure imagination.
Mr. Lowell here read a passage from “Summer,” which, he said,
illustrated better than almost any other his excellences and defects.
It is a description of a storm, beginning:
At first heard solemn o’er the verge of Heaven
The tempest growls.
This is fustian patched with cloth of gold. The picture, fine as
it is in parts, is too much frittered with particulars. The poet’s
imagination does not seem powerful enough to control the language.
There is no autocratic energy, but the sentences are like unruly
barons, each doing what he likes in his own province. Many of them
are prosaic and thoroughly _un_picturesque, and come under the fatal
condemnation of being _flat_. Yet throughout the passage,
The unconquerable genius struggles through
half-suffocated in a cloud of words.
But the metre is hitchy and broken, and seems to have no law but that
of five feet to the verse. There is no Pegasean soar, but the unwieldy
gallop of an ox. The imagination, which Thomson undoubtedly had,
contrasted oddly with the lumbering vehicle of his diction. He takes a
bushel-basket to bring home an egg in. In him poetry and prose entered
into partnership, and poetry was the sleeping partner who comes down
now and then to see how the business is getting on. But he had the
_soul_ of a poet, and that is the main thing.
Of Gray and Collins there is no occasion to speak at length in this
place. Both of them showed true poetic imagination. In Gray it was
thwarted by an intellectual timidity that looked round continually for
precedent; and Collins did not live long enough to discharge his mind
thoroughly of classic pedantry; but both of them broke away from the
reigning style of decorous frigidity. Collins’s “Ode to Evening” is
enough to show that he had a sincere love of nature--but generally the
scenery of both is borrowed from books.
In Cowper we find the same over-minuteness in describing which makes
Thomson wearisome, but relieved by a constant vivacity of fancy which
in Thomson was entirely wanting. But Cowper more distinctly preluded
Wordsworth in his delight in simple things, in finding themes for his
song in the little incidents of his own fireside life, or his daily
walks, and especially in his desire to make poetry a means of conveying
moral truth. The influence of Cowper may be traced clearly in some
of Wordsworth’s minor poems of pure fancy, and there is one poem of
his--that on “Yardly Oak”--which is almost perfectly Wordsworthian. But
Cowper rarely rises above the region of fancy, and he often applied
verse to themes that would not sing. His poetry is never more than
agreeable, and never reaches down to the deeper sources of delight.
Cowper was one of those men who, wanting a vigorous understanding
to steady the emotional part of his nature, may be called peculiar
rather than original. Great poetry can never be made out of a morbid
temperament, and great wits are commonly the farthest removed from
madness. But Cowper had at least the power of believing that his own
thoughts and pleasures were as good, and as fit for poetry, as those of
any man, no matter how long he had enjoyed the merit of being dead.
The closing years of the eighteenth century have something in common
with those of the sixteenth. The air was sparkling with moral and
intellectual stimulus. The tremble of the French Revolution ran through
all Europe, and probably England, since the time of the great Puritan
revolt, had never felt such a thrill of national and indigenous
sentiment as during the Napoleonic wars. It was a time fitted to give
birth to something original in literature. If from the collision of
minds sparks of wit and fancy fly out, the shock and jostle of great
events, of world-shaping ideas, and of nations who do their work
without knowing it, strike forth a fire that kindles heart and brain
and tongue to more inspired conceptions and utterances.
It was fortunate for Wordsworth that he had his breeding in the
country, and not only so, but among the grandest scenery of England.
His earliest associates were the mountains, lakes, and streams of his
native district, and the scenery with which his mind was stored during
its most impressionable period was noble and pure. The people, also,
among whom he grew up were a simple and hardy race, who kept alive the
traditions and many of the habits of a more picturesque time. There
was also a general equality of condition which kept life from becoming
conventional and trite, and which cherished friendly human sympathies.
When death knocked at any door of the hamlet, there was an echo from
every fireside; and a wedding dropped an orange blossom at every door.
There was not a grave in the little churchyard but had its story; not
a crag or glen or aged tree without its legend. The occupations of
the people, who were mostly small farmers and shepherds, were such as
fostered independence and originality of character. And where everybody
knew everybody, and everybody’s father had known everybody’s father,
and so on immemorially, the interest of man in man was not likely to
become a matter of cold hearsay and distant report. It was here that
Wordsworth learned not only to love the simplicity of nature, but
likewise that homely and earnest manliness which gives such depth and
sincerity to his poems. Travel, intercourse with society, scholarly
culture, nothing could cover up or obliterate those early impressions.
They widened with the range of his knowledge and added to his power
of expression, but they never blunted that fine instinct in him which
enables him always to speak directly to men and to gentleman, or
scholar, or citizen. It was this that enabled his poetry afterwards to
conquer all the reviews of England. The great art of being a man, the
sublime mystery of being _yourself_, is something to which one must be
apprenticed early.
Mr. Lowell here gave an outline of Wordsworth’s personal history and
character.
As a man we fancy him just in the least degree uninteresting--if the
horrid word must come out--why, a little bit of a bore. One must regard
him as a prophet in order to have the right kind of feeling toward him;
and prophets are excellent for certain moods of mind, but perhaps are
creatures
Too bright and good
For human nature’s daily food.
I fancy from what I have heard from those who knew him that he had a
tremendous prose-power, and that, with his singing-robes off, he was
dry and stiff as a figure-head. He had a purity of mind approaching
almost to prudery, and a pupil of Dr. Arnold told me he had heard him
say once at dinner that he thought the first line of Keats’s ode to a
“Grecian Urn” indecorous. The boys considered him rather _slow_. There
was something rocky and unyielding in his mind; something that, if we
found it in a man we did not feel grateful to and respect, we should
call hard. Even his fancy sometimes is glittering and stiff, like
crystallizations in granite. But at other times how tender and delicate
and dewy from very contrast, like harebells growing in a crag-cleft!
There seem to have been two distinct natures in him--Wordsworth the
poet, and Wordsworth the man who used to talk about Wordsworth the
poet. One played a kind of Baruch to the other’s Jeremiah, and thought
a great deal of his master the prophet. Baruch was terrifically
_un_inspired, and was in the habit of repeating Jeremiah’s poems at
rather more length than was desired, selecting commonly the parts
which pleased him, Baruch, the best. Baruch Wordsworth used to praise
Jeremiah Wordsworth, and used to tell entertaining anecdotes of
him,--how he one day saw an old woman and the next did _not_, and so
came home and dictated some verses on this remarkable phenomenon; and
how another day he saw a cow.
But in reading Wordsworth we must skip all the Baruch interpolations,
and cleave wholly to Jeremiah, who is truly inspired and noble--more
so than any modern. We are too near him, perhaps, to be able wholly to
separate the personal from the poetical. I acknowledge that I reverence
the noble old man both for his grand life and his poems, that are
worthy expressions of it. But a lecturer is under bonds to speak what
he believes to be the truth. While I think that Wordsworth’s poetry is
a thing by itself, both in its heights and depths, something sacred and
apart, I cannot but acknowledge that his prosing is sometimes a gift
as peculiar to himself. Like old Ben Jonson, he apparently wished that
a great deal of what he wrote should be called “works.” Especially is
this true of his larger poems, like the “Excursion” and the “Prelude.”
However small, however commonplace the thought, the ponderous machine
of his verse runs on like a railway train that must start at a certain
hour though the only passenger be the boy that cries lozenges. He seems
to have thought that inspiration was something that could be turned
on like steam. Walter Savage Landor told me that he once said to
Wordsworth: “Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix as much poetry with prose as
he likes, and it will make it the better; but the moment he mixes a bit
of prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole.” Wordsworth, he
added, never forgave him.
There was a great deal in Wordsworth’s character that reminds us of
Milton; the same self-reliance, the same purity and loftiness of
purpose, and, I suspect, the same personal dryness of temperament and
seclusion of self. He seems to have had a profounder imagination than
Milton, but infinitely less music, less poetical faculty. I am not
entirely satisfied of the truth of the modern philosophy which, if a
man knocks another on the head, transfers all the guilt to some peccant
bump on his own occiput or sinciput; but if we measure Wordsworth in
this way, I feel as if he had plenty of forehead, but that he wanted
hind-head, and would have been more entirely satisfactory if he had had
one of the philo-something-or-other.
It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the
poetical mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse
and commonplace. It is in the Understanding (always prosaic) that the
great golden veins of his imagination are embedded. He wrote too much
to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a
compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. He sets
tasks to the divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make
Jove’s eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout the “Prelude”
and the “Excursion,” he seems striving to bind the wizard imagination
with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the
potent spell-word which would make the particulars adhere. There is
an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome;
yet with what splendors of mountain-sunsets are we not rewarded! What
golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching heavenward, with angels
ascending and descending! What haunting melodies hover around us,
deep and eternal, like the undying barytone of the sea! And if we are
compelled to fare through sands and desert wilderness, how often do we
not hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling personal
appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as
we might wait for in vain in any other poet.
Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow,
and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humor,
no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless
quality that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a
letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most
successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of
natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression
of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own
mind. His finest passages are always monologues. He had a fondness
for particulars, and there are parts of his poems which remind us of
local histories in the undue importance given to trivial matter. He
was the historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization
(for it is as truly a power as generalization) is what gives such
vigor and greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and
to poems developing a single thought or word. It was this that made
him so fond of the sonnet. His mind had not that reach and elemental
movement of Milton’s which, like the trade-winds, gathered to itself
thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some, deep
with silks and spicery, come brooding over the silent thunders of their
battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track,
over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by
the unifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an organ that
Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet’s
ardors, or the slim delicacy of the flute; and sometimes it bursts
forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for
solace in the intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the
trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his
appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew
by any vulgar stream, but that which Apollo breathed through tending
the flocks of Admetus, that which Pan endowed with every melody of the
visible universe, the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph
took refuge and gifted with her dual nature, so that ever and anon,
amid notes of human joy and sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and
almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten
divinity.
Of no other poet, except Shakspeare, have so many phrases become
household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more
epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise
of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those
faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentler
ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely
ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure
immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds
at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship,
and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest
heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the purity and abstinence
of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to trust
ourselves to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to
our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to
Bid Beaumont lie
A little farther off to make him room,
for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he is
now enrolled as the fifth in the succession of the great English poets.
LECTURE XII
THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
(_Friday Evening, February 16, 1855_)
XII
Whether, as some philosophers here assume, we possess only the
fragments of a great cycle of knowledge, in whose center stood the
primeval man in friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and
build our hovels out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether,
according to the developing theory of others, we are rising gradually
and have come up from an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so
that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoöphyte
at last, are questions which will keep for a good many centuries yet.
Confining myself to what little we can learn from History, we find
tribes rising slowly out of barbarism to a higher or lower point of
culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also is found under one
name or another, changing in certain outward respects, but essentially
the same.
But however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
the priest were united originally in the same person: which means that
the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as
that of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
highest function, and hence his name of seer.
I suppose the word _epic_ originally meant nothing more than this, that
the poet was the person who was the greatest master of speech. His
were the ἔπεα πτερόεντα, the true winged words that could fly down the
unexplored future and carry thither the names of ancestral heroes, of
the brave, and wise, and good. It was thus that the poet could reward
virtue, and, by and by, as society grew more complex, could burn in the
brand of shame. This is Homer’s character of Demodocus in the eighth
book of the “Odyssey,”
When the Muse loved and gave the good and ill,
the gift of conferring good or evil immortality.
The first histories were in verse, and, sung as they were at the feasts
and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the desire of fame,
which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust, because it
teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the future. We may
fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they were recited
to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their ancestors,
by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said only two centuries ago: “When I
read Homer I feel as if I were twenty feet high.”
Nor have poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante
lifts up by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith and
Brown of some provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno
glare upon it for a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of
mankind. The historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard III. as
smooth as they can; they will never get over the wrench that Shakspeare
gave them.
The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to
have a double meaning; that underneath its natural we find ourselves
continually seeing and suspecting a supernatural meaning. Even in
the older epics the characters seem to be only half-historical and
half-typical. They appear as the Pilgrim Fathers do in Twenty-second
of December speeches at Plymouth. The names may be historical, but
the attributes are ideal. The orator draws a portrait rather of what
he thinks the founders ought to have been than a likeness which
contemporaries would have recognized. Thus did early poets endeavor
to make reality out of appearances. For, except a few typical men in
whom certain ideas get embodied, the generations of mankind are mere
apparitions who come out of the dark for a purposeless moment, and
enter the dark again after they have performed the nothing they came
for.
The poet’s gift, then, is that of seer. He it is that discovers the
truth as it exists in types and images; that is the spiritual meaning,
which abides forever under the sensual. And his instinct is to express
himself also in types and images. But it was not only necessary that
he himself should be delighted with his vision, but that he should
interest his hearers with the faculty divine. Pure truth is not
acceptable to the mental palate. It must be diluted with character and
incident; it must be humanized in order to be attractive. If the bones
of a mastodon be exhumed, a crowd will gather out of curiosity; but
let the skeleton of a man be turned up, and what a difference in the
expression of the features! Every bystander then creates his little
drama, in which those whitened bones take flesh upon them and stalk as
chief actor.