The world is nearly all discovered, mapped and described. In the hot
hearts of two continents, and the “thrilling regions of thick-ribbed
ice” about the poles, uncertainty still holds sway over a lessening
domain, and there Fancy waves her joyous wing unclipped by knowledge.
As in the material world, so in the world of mind. The daring
incursions of conjecture have been followed and discredited by the
encroachments of science, whereby the limits of the unknown have been
narrowed to such mean dimensions that imagination has lost her free,
exultant stride, and moves with mincing step and hesitating heart.
I do not mean to say that to-day knows much more that is worth
knowing than did yesterday, but that with regard to poetry’s
materials—the visible and audible without us, and the emotional
within—we have compelled a revelation of Nature’s secrets, and found
them uninteresting to the last degree. To the modern “instructed
understanding” she has something of the air of a detected impostor,
and her worshipers have neither the sincerity that comes from faith,
nor the enthusiasm that is the speech of sincerity. The ancients not
only had, as Dr. Johnson said, “the first rifling of the beauties of
Nature”; they had the immensely greater art advantage of ignorance of
her dull, vulgar and hideous processes, her elaborate movements tending
nowhither, and the aimless monotony of her mutations. The telescope
had not pursued her to the heights, nor the microscope dragged her
from her ambush. The meteorologists had not analyzed her temper, nor
constructed mathematical formulæ to forecast her smiles and frowns.
Mr. Edison had not arrived to show that the divine gift of speech
(about the only thing that distinguishes men, parrots, and magpies
from the brutes) is also an attribute of metal. In the youth of the
world they had, in short, none of the disillusionizing sciences with
which a critical age, delving curiously about the roots of things, has
sapped the substructure of religion and art alike. I do not regret the
substitution of knowledge for conjecture, and doubt for faith; I only
say that it has its disadvantages, and among them we reckon the decay
of poesy. In an enlightened age, Macaulay says,
Men will judge and compare; but they will not create. They will
talk about the old poets, and comment on them, and to a certain
extent enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the
effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the agony,
the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek rhapsodists,
according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into
convulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping-knife while he
shouts his death-song. The power which the ancient bards of Wales
and Germany exercised over their auditors seems to modern readers
almost miraculous. Such feelings are very rare in a civilized
community, and most rare among those who participate most in its
improvements. They linger among the peasantry.
While it is true in a large sense that the world’s greatest poets have
lived in rude ages, when their races were not long emerged from the
night of barbarism—like birds the poets sing best at sunrise—it must
not be supposed that similarly favorable conditions are supplied to
a rude individual intelligence in an age of polish. With a barbarous
age that had recently set its face to the dawn a Joaquin Miller would
have been in full sympathy, and might have interpreted its spirit in
songs of exceeding splendor. But the very qualities that would have
made him _en rapport_ with such an era make him an isolated voice in
ours; while Tennyson, the man of culture, full of the disposition of
his time—albeit the same is of less adequate vitality—touches with a
valid hand the harp which the other beats in vain. The altar is growing
cold, the temple itself becoming a ruin; the divine mandate comes with
so feeble and faltering a voice that the priest has need of a trained
and practiced ear to catch it and the gift of tongues to impart its
meaning to a generation concerned with the unholy things whose voice
is prose. As a poetical mental attitude, that of doubt is meaner
than that of faith, that of speculation less commanding than that of
emotion; yet the poet of to-day must assume them, and “In Memoriam”
attests the wisdom of him who “stoops to conquer”—loyally accepting
the hard conditions of his epoch, and bending his corrigible genius in
unquestioning assent to the three thousand and thirty-nine articles of
doubt.
As inspiration grows weak and acceptance disobedient, form of delivery
becomes of greater moment; in so far as it can, the munificence of
manner must mitigate the poverty of matter; so it occurs that the
poets of later life excel their predecessors in the delicate and
difficult arts and artifices of versification as much as they fall
below them in imagination and power.
1878.