to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he celebrates the brave and
good, or the gods, or the beautiful as it appears in man or nature,
something of a religious character still clings to him. He may be
unconscious of his mission; he may be false to it, but in proportion
as he is a great poet, he rises to the level of it more often. He
does not always directly rebuke what is bad or base, but indirectly,
by making us feel what delight there is in the good and fair. If he
besiege evil it is with such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch
tells us of Demetrius) that the besieged themselves are charmed with
them. Whoever reads the great poets cannot but be made better by it,
for they always introduce him to a higher society, to a greater style
of manners and of thinking. Whoever learns to love what is beautiful
is made incapable of the mean and low and bad. It is something to
be thought of, that all the great poets have been good men. He who
translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
is the reverse of a poet.
It seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late; that
there has been a feast of the imagination formerly, and all that is
left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry
in railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs, and especially in Brother
Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But, because _he_
is a materialist, shall there be no poets? When we have said that we
live in a materialistic age, we have said something which meant more
than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another; and, at any
rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakspeare
seems richer than our own only because he was lucky enough to have such
a pair of eyes as his to see it and such a gift as his to report it.
Shakspeare did not sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn
the wheels of his little private mill there at the Bankside. He appears
to have gone more quietly about his business than any playwright in
London; to have drawn off what water-power he wanted from the great
prosy current of affairs that flows alike for all, and in spite of all;
to have ground for the public what grist they want, coarse or fine; and
it seems a mere piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity
reflected with ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and
earth, every stick and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that
stood upon its brink. It is a curious illustration of the friendly
manner in which Shakspeare received everything that came along, of what
a _present_ man he was, that in the very same year that the mulberry
tree was brought into England, he got one and planted it in his garden
at Stratford.
It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for this
very reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every
generation contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky’s
falling. When the poet comes he always turns out to be the man who
discovers that the passing moment is the inspired one, and that the
secret of poetry is not to have lived in Homer’s day or Dante’s, but
to be alive now. To be alive now, that is the great art and mystery.
They are dead men who live in the past, and men yet unborn who live
in the future. We are like Hans-in-Luck, forever exchanging the
burthensome good we have for something else, till at last we come home
empty-handed. The people who find their own age prosaic are those who
see only its costume. And this is what makes it prosaic: that we have
not faith enough in ourselves to think that our own clothes are good
enough to be presented to Posterity in. The artists seem to think that
the court dress of posterity is that of Vandyke’s time or Cæsar’s. I
have seen the model of a statue of Sir Robert Peel--a statesman whose
merit consisted in yielding gracefully to the present--in which the
sculptor had done his best to travesty the real man into a make-believe
Roman. At the period when England produced its greatest poets, we find
exactly the reverse of this, and we are thankful to the man who made
the monument of Lord Bacon that he had genius enough to copy every
button of his dress, everything down to the rosettes on his shoes.
These men had faith even in their own shoe-strings. Till Dante’s time
the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings
into but Latin (and, indeed, a dead tongue was the best for dead
thoughts), but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men
bargained, and scolded, and made love, good enough for him, and out of
the world around him made such a poem as no Roman ever sang.
We cannot get rid of our wonder, we who have brought down the wild
lightning from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven to be our
errand-boy and penny postman. In this day of newspapers and electric
telegraphs, in which common-sense and ridicule can magnetise a whole
continent between dinner and tea, we may say that such a phenomenon
as Mahomet were impossible; and behold Joe Smith and the State of
Deseret! Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of Webster
on “Witchcraft” which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, Well, that
goblin is laid at last! And while I mused, the tables were dancing and
the chairs beating the devil’s tattoo all over Christendom. I have a
neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay-slate to a spring
pointed out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son’s
seventh son, and the water is sweeter to him for the wonder that is
mixed with it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never
so brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin’s lamp.
It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
sort or another. If they cannot get the best, they will get at some
substitute for it. But there is as much poetry as ever in the world if
we can ever know how to find it out; and as much imagination, perhaps,
only that it takes a more prosaic direction. Every man who meets with
misfortune, who is stripped of his material prosperity, finds that he
has a little outlying mountain-farm of imagination, which does not
appear in the schedule of his effects, on which his spirit is able to
keep alive, though he never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job
turns out to be a great poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken
away from him.
Perhaps our continent will begin to sing by and by, as the others
have done. We have had the Practical forced upon us by our condition.
We have had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we
are descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright
wrestle with Necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the
Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
be the descendants of those very Puritans. They had enough of it, or
they could not have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are
States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.
John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford many years ago,
reckoned the number of whale ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took
it as a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other
oil that those far-shining lamps of a nation’s true glory which burn
forever must be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor
or prosperity, but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of the
imagination, that a race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us
from the once mighty Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid
her crumbling palaces; of Carthage, whose merchant fleets once furled
their sails in every port of the known world, nothing is left but the
deeds of Hannibal. She lies dead on the shore of her once subject sea,
and the wind of the desert flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her
corpse. A fog can blot Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how
large is the space occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens or
powerless Italy. They were great by the soul, and their vital force is
as indestructible as the soul.
Till America has learned to love Art, not as an amusement, not as a
mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme
il faut_ for a great nation, but for its harmonizing and ennobling
energy, for its power of making men better by arousing in them the
perception of their own instincts for what is beautiful and sacred and
religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not
have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of
a people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our
little mother-island sunk beneath the sea; or worse, were she conquered
by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakspeare would be an immortal England,
and would conquer countries when the bones of her last sailor had kept
their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched
thunders of her navy.
This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
the noble, and the true will never cease out of the world till the God
from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that the sacred duty and noble
office of the poet is to reveal and justify them to man; that as long
as the soul endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song;
that while there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty,
God will still send poets to find them, and bear witness of them,
and to hang their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. _God
with us_ is forever the mystical theme of the hour that is passing.
The lives of the great poets teach us that they were men of their
generation who felt most deeply the meaning of the Present.
I have been more painfully conscious than any one else could be of
the inadequacy of what I have been able to say, when compared to the
richness and variety of my theme. I shall endeavor to make my apology
in verse, and will bid you farewell in a little poem in which I have
endeavored to express the futility of all _effort_ to speak the
loveliness of things, and also my theory of where the Muse is to be
found, if ever. It is to her that I sing my hymn.
Mr. Lowell here read an original poem of considerable length, which
concluded the lecture, and was received with bursts of applause.