“Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns,
To whose bright image nightly by the moon,
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.”
They heard gods in winds and in fire—and altars to these were among the
earliest raised. They saw a terrible divinity in the vastness or angry
billows of the sea, and imagined a crowd of lesser beings to haunt its
caverns and depths. The forests were sacred to the universal Pan—his
fauns, sylvans and satyrs; every oak had its hamadryad, every river its
naiad or potamid; the oreads took charge of the flowery meadows, and the
napææ wandered forever in the shady valleys. Impatient of mere reality,
men filled the universe with phantasies and theories—
“The intelligible forms of ancient poets—
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest, by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms or watery depths.”
Suppose we demolish all these graceful fallacies, and the poetry, also,
in which they are embalmed. What a throng of splendid deeds, of heroic
and beautiful figures—demigods, warriors, kings—bright women and brave
men, moving in gorgeous panorama over the vast back-ground of
antiquity—is extinguished in the darkness! The creations of the ancient
poets and imaginative writers have filled up a space in the earlier ages
of the world, which without them would be a blank and lost to the human
mind, as much as the pre-Adamite chaos is. What a disinheritance it
would be to take away the Iliad and Odyssey! to obliterate Hector, the
kind-hearted and manly hero; and Priam with his mighty sorrows a
suppliant for his dead son; and the warring Achilles—
“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,”
and the wandering Ulysses, seeing strange shores and cities, and the
varying manners of men! Not alone would much be wanted in the want of
these venerable works, but in the want of all that literature which they
inspired and gave rise to in after time. The succeeding poets and
dramatists of Greece and Rome drew light from Homer, as Milton’s stars
did in their golden urns from the sun. They took his historic
imaginations and characters as their models, and reproduced them in
forms which the world will not willingly let die, and which it prizes
nearly as much as the Institutes and Pandects of Justinian, or any thing
else of that authentic and substantial kind.
To come to our own familiar literature, the fictions of our insular or
continental writers are as favorably and generally remembered as the
historic facts of the English-speaking peoples. In our genial moments,
when the mind desires to be refreshed or pleased it will revert, with an
almost universal preference, to what is imaginary, or adorned with the
graces of imaginative literature; and half the world regard with as much
attention the men and women of Shakspeare and Scott as those of Hume and
Prescott. And how intimately and lovingly we give our interest to the
words and actions of these imaginary beings! What a world of thought and
life is in the dramas of Shakspeare! There is the venerable Lear, driven
out into the storm, and talking the finest philosophy to the wild
elements, that so feelingly persuade him what he is; and Hamlet, so
sententious in his antic disposition; the fair Ophelia, and the prosy
old courtier, Polonius; and the immortal bed-presser, and huge hill of
flesh—the greatest liar and the greatest favorite in the world; and
Macbeth, with his terrible hags on the heath, and his more terrible
wife; and Richard, wooing Lady Anne, or fighting desperately his last
battle. Then there are the witty and adventurous Rosalind, and
“The gentle lady wedded to the Moor;”
and Portia, the beautiful, wise young judge; and the impassioned Juliet,
with the southern lightnings in her veins; and Miranda, the enchantress,
of an enchanted island—and all that magnificent array of womanhood
which reflects for ever the unequaled genius of Shakspeare.
We have also the creations of Scott—coming nearest of any to those of
the great dramatic poet, and enjoying even a more general popularity.
Successive generations prize them as an imperishable legacy, and the
memory has a pleasure in conjuring them up—so vivid and picturesque in
their colors and outlines: The hall of Cedric, the Saxon—the swineherd,
the templar, the gorgeous tournament at Ashby de la Zouche, Friar Tuck,
the storming of Torquilstone, the Black Knight, fighting as if ten men’s
strength were in his single arm; and the beautiful Jewess—what splendid
series of images—bringing back so vividly the old pomp and circumstance
of the feudal times! We shall never forget the feelings with which we
first read Ivanhoe, and there found all our vague feelings of romance
and dreams of knightly doings put into such spirit-stirring expression.
Then how true is the picturesque bravery of Fergus McIvor—
“All plaided and plumed in his tartan array;”
and the marching of the Scottish clans; the fine old Baron Bradwardine,
the high-spirited Flora, and the tender Rose. We see the fierce Balfour
of Burley, slaying the guardsman at Drumclog, or raving in his cave; and
the swords of the Solemn League and Covenant waving in desperate tumult
on Bothwell Bridge. Edgar and Lucy walk to the haunted spring, Caleb
Balderstone performs laughable prodigies of cunning to save the credit
of Wolf’s Crag, and the last Lord of Ravenswood disappears awfully into
the “Kelpie’s flow,”
“And his name is lost for ever moe.”
Norna of the Fitful-Head, speaks her wild rune of the reimkennar to the
spirits of the North wind; “bold Magnus, the son of the earl;” Minna,
Brenda, Cleveland, Claude Halcro, feast, love, fight and rhyme in the
Udaller’s charmed isle. Diana Vernon, on horseback, clears her
five-barred gate and gallops by; Rob Roy cries “claymore,” and Bailie
Nichol Jarvie fights his highlandman with a hot coulter, and goes up
perilously to the Clachan of Aberfoil; Jeannie Deans stands in the
presence of Queen Caroline, pleading for the life of her sister, while
the Duke of Argyle puts his hand to his chin whenever her Majesty or the
Duchess of Suffolk are in danger of a random hit from the lips of the
unconscious advocate; Monkbarn’s discovers the remains of a Roman
_prætorium_, and Edie Ochiltree comes up and says: “Prætorium here,
prætorium there; I mind the bigging o’t!” The Knight of the Leopard and
the disguised Soldan fight their chivalrous duel in the desert, and then
feast together at the spring, and Richard Plantagenet, leaping from his
sick-bed, in spite of the Hakim, tears down the standard of Austria from
the mound at Acre, and hurls the giant Wallenrode from the top to the
bottom of it. Dominic Sampson exclaims “prodigious!”—Dirk Hatterick
strangles Glossin and shoots Charlotte Cushman—Meg Merrilies we should
say, but it is all one—who recognizes young Bertram and dies hard. Hal
o’ the Wynd “fights for his own band” on the Inch of Perth, in the mêlée
of the clans Chattan and Quhule. Tristram l’Hermit, hangs the trees
around Plessis les Tours with Zingaris, like acorns. Louis and Charles
the Bold ride together into Liege by a breach in the walls, and the head
of the savage De Lamarck secures to the Scottish soldier the hand of
Isabel Croye. The Highland Widow mourns over her condemned son with all
the tragic truth of Æschylus or nature; the Last Minstrel sings a wild
epic of goblin gramarye—the Leaguer of Branksome—knights and
ladies—the lists and the festival. Roderick and the Knight of Snowdon
fight by the ford of Coilantogle; Constance perishes awfully in her
convent cell, and Marmion dies like a courageous knight, at Flodden
“Charge, Chester, charge; on, Stanley, on—
Where the last words of Marmion!”
All these, and more, come thronging at the call of the wizard. And with
them will also pass before the reader’s or muser’s eye the extravagant
hero of him who “smiled Spain’s chivalry away;” Doctor Primrose and his
delightful family, Parson Adams, Sir Roger de Coverley, Evangeline,
Ichabod Crane, and a thousand others, which every body’s memory will
distinguish for itself—just as every eye shapes its proper rainbow.
They have all the distinctness of reality, and it is by an effort that
we draw the line between them and _bona fide_ characters.
Many of these last, in fact, are little better than the fictions of
poets, dramatists and romancers. The histories of the venerable Bede,
Geoffrey of Monmouth, etc. are half imaginative. There are outlines of
truth in them—
“The truth is there; but dashed and brewed with lies.”
The history of Scotland, for ages, from the reign of Fergus, and of
Ireland from the days of Heber, Heremon and Ith, down to the conquest of
the country by Strongbow, are just as fanciful as the metrical romances
of Scott and Moore. Then, for the annals of Greece; Herodotus, the
patriarch of history, sets down almost every thing he hears from the
lying priests of Egypt, or that he can gather from vague tradition; and
people don’t exactly know whether to call the Cyropædia of Xenophon a
romance or an authentic narration. Plutarch romances at times like the
Scuderis. An old English author, Taylor, says, of his fallacies and
blunders in the lives of the orators—_mendaxille Plutarchus qui vitas
oratorum dolis et erroribus consutas, olim conscribillavit_. Neibuhr has
got into our old history of Rome and laid about him like an iconoclast.
He destroys a crowd of our beliefs, and makes a solitude in the first
ages of Rome—so wonderful and picturesque in our school-boy days. He
makes a solitude and calls it truth. He demolishes Mars, Rhea Sylvia,
Romulus and Remus and the Wolf—Numitor, Evander, and so forth. Under
the flourishing of his pen they make themselves into thin air in which
they vanish. Then the Tarquins, their insolence and expulsion; Lars
Porsenna of Clusium, the siege of Rome, Cocles on the Bridge and Scævola
at the flaming Altar—all are inventions of Fabius Pictor, Ennius,
Nævius, and others. This portion of the history of Rome, says the
German, should be called the Lay of the Tarquins, and is just as
authentic as the Lay of the Nibelungen! “Livy’s _pictored_ page,” (if we
may be permitted to make a critical emendation of Byron’s phrase in the
spirit of Bishop Warburton’s Notes on Shakspeare,) is allowed to be just
as fallible as it is brilliant. Thus we have a vast amount of what is
called ancient history confounded with the professed creations of
fanciful minds; and there does not seem to be any very marked difference
between Agamemnon or Ajax, and Cecrops or Codrus; between Æneas or Dido,
and Numa or Clelia—they are all equally distinct or indistinct. Scott’s
King Richard, singing a roundelay and exchanging a buffet with the Clerk
of Copmanhurst, is as firm on the canvas as Alfred baking his cakes, or
Canute sitting on a chair to rebuke his flatterers on the sea-shore.
And even as regards the more modern and authentic annals of history, we
do not think they have paid much more respect to the actual truth of
things than do the fictionists. Sir Robert Walpole used to say to his
friends, “Don’t read history; that must be false.” And Sir Walter
Raleigh, looking from the window of his prison in the Tower, and
witnessing a quarrel in the court-yard or the street, and the
after-testimony of the by-standers respecting it, was tempted, it is
said, to throw his History of the World into the fire, in despair of
ever being able to gather any thing like truth from conflicting
authorities. And, certainly, the differences of historians—their doubts
concerning motives, and their disagreements concerning facts, tend to
give us very unsettled ideas of history in general. Writers have sent
Col. Kirke down to us from James the Second’s reign with a very black
and bloody renown. But he was not half so black as he was painted by the
whigs; and the story of the poor girl whose husband he hanged before her
eyes, in the morning, though she had dearly purchased his life on
Kirke’s own terms, is pronounced by Ritson to be an impudent and
bare-faced lie. The story is much older than Kirke. Richard the Third is
also one of the historical reprobates; though it is not unlikely that
the young princes were not murdered in the Tower, and that Perkin
Warbeck was really the prince after all; as truly as the surreptitious,
warming-pan prince is known to have been the true son of James the
Second, in spite of the Protestant historians. Then there are Jack Cade
and Wat Tyler; these have been receiving cruel wrong at the hands of the
annalists. They dared, in an age when the rights of the people were
imperfectly understood, and the influence of the feudal system still
strong in the nation, to take up arms and go to war with the king and
the nobles for liberty! Their sufferings and provocations were
undeniable, and their spirit was certainly heroic—kindred to that which
glowed in the bosoms of Melchthal, Furst, and Stauffacher, at the
Brunnens of Grutli. The Swiss peasants were successful, and are held in
honorable remembrance forever. But the Englishmen failed, and are set up
as scarecrows and _Indibria_, upon the field of history. Poor Tyler and
Cade were animated by the same kind of blood which boiled in the face of
a tyrant at Naseby, Marston Moor, Dunbar, and elsewhere—which warmed
the hearts of the exiles on the cold rock of Plymouth, and flowed so
freely at Lexington and Bunker Hill. We should honor these English
rebels—in spite of history, and in spite of Shakspeare. It is
remarkable to see this myriad-minded man, so full of the finer
humanities of our nature, yet incapable of sympathizing with the cause
and feelings of the mass of the lower classes. But Shakspeare was a man
of his era—to which, with an astonishing and happy wizardry, he obliged
chronology and human nature to conform; he dreamed as little of the
later evangils of democracy as he did of the Daguerreotype and the
electric telegraph. In this way Cade, Richard, and a thousand others are
in the hands of the historians, tricked out as much in the colors of
imagination as in those of fact.
No man can be sure of the lesser details of the annals, though he may
put faith in some of their great facts. We are not indisposed to allow
that there was a man named Julius Cæsar; though whether he ever said,
_Quid times? vehis Cæzarem_, in the boat, or _Et tu Brute!_ when the
republicans set upon him in the senate-house, is not quite so credible.
Most of these picturesque properties of character or fact, so to speak,
are furnished by the fancies and after-thoughts of the narrators, or
fabricated wilfully for a purpose. We need not go very far back in
history to discover the truth of this. In a late memoir (Achille de
Vaulabelle’s) of the “Two Restorations,” we are told that an old story
of the consternation of the members of the Directory, on its violent
dissolution by Bonaparte, in 1800, was a false one. There was no
hurry-skurry, nor jumping out of windows, any more than when Oliver
Cromwell put an end to the Long Parliament. Again, that glorification
made on the sinking of the _Vengeur_, in an engagement with the English
fleet, during the first French revolution, has been latterly put out of
countenance. The story in France was, that, being terribly damaged, this
ship sunk with all on board, her flag flying, and the crew shouting,
“Long live the republic!” Carlyle adopted this version in his history,
and makes quite a cartoon of it, in his own outlandish phraseology. But
on the appearance of the story in an English work, a naval officer who
witnessed the affair of the _Vengeur_, wrote a letter to the Times, in
which he stated that, instead of going down with true republican
devotion, the poor French sailors, small blame to them! jumped
overboard, and tried to save themselves, and that some hundreds of them
were rescued in the British boats. That message, said to have come from
the dying Dessaix to Bonaparte, on the field of Marengo, (“Tell the
First Consul I die regretting I can no farther serve him and France,”)
was fabricated in the bulletin by the aforesaid consul himself. The
story of the Duke of Wellington lying in the hollow square of the Guards
at Waterloo, and, on the advance of the French, crying, “Up, Guards, and
at them!” is as untenable as our own famous saying—“A little more
grape, Captain Bragg!” or the military speeches of the great generals of
antiquity, as recorded by Tacitus, Sallust, Cæsar, and the rest of the
writers. Then, as regards great facts, different nations give different
accounts. Ask who gained Waterloo? “We did,” say the Prussians. “We gave
vast assistance,” say the Belgians. Ask John Bull, or rather, don’t; his
answer would be rather brief than polite. We should like to see a
history of the campaigns in Greece of Darius, Xerxes, and Mardonius,
written by Persians. All history is more or less deserving of Sir Robert
Walpole’s designation. Hume, in one of his letters to Robertson,
alluding to the publication of Murdin’s State Papers, which threw
unexpected light upon the annals, exclaims, “We are all in the wrong!”
And, indeed, Hume himself is among those to whom we are mostly indebted
for the imaginative character of history. He had little of the industry
of Gibbon, and trusted very much to his own sagacity for his views. He
was also a tory, and became, in his scorn of whiggery, the apologist of
the Stuarts. His history is charming as a composition, but errs in its
colorings of facts and its conclusions from them.
Imagination, as we have said, seems the complement of the world of facts
and things, in all mental exercises, except the logical and
mathematical. If we contemplate nature it enhances what we behold. The
mountains, rivers, forests, and the elements that gird them round about,
would be only blank conditions of matter, if the mind did not fling its
own divinity around them. Nature was thus endowed from the
beginning—when men heard voices in the winds, and the supernatural
inhabitants of terra firma,
“Met on the hill, the dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea;”
or, in the train of powerful Poseidon,
“Took in by lot, ’twixt high and nether Jove,
Imperial rule of all the sea-girt isles.”
And the modern lovers of nature, though they no longer recognize the
mythologic people of the ancient beliefs in her picturesque
wildernesses, clothe them with the attributes of the mysterious abstract
power which is over all things. And, in the towering of her peaks, the
murmur of her forests and seas, the roar of her storms, the singing of
her nightly stars, they find revelations and prophecies of higher and
farther existences. In this respect, the modern poetry of nature has a
nobler scope and purer inspiration than the ancient. Wordsworth and
Byron speculate more sublimely than Lucretius.
In another sense, the imagination materially imposes upon facts. In
contemplating cities, works of art, ruins, or scenes of nature, we
almost always appreciate them for the associations that belong to
them—the imaginations they excite. Look at a gray bleak sort of plateau
between mountains and the sea, and you see little to admire. But let
somebody say, “that is Marathon!” while the blood thrills at the name, a
flood of glory flashes over the immortal ground; the air is thick with
phantoms—
To the hearer’s eye appear,
The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror’s career—
The dying Mede, his shaftless, broken bow;
The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;
Mountains above, earth’s, ocean’s plain below;
Death in the front, destruction in the rear!
It is this quality of the imagination which gives old countries their
superior attractions when compared with new soils. At the sight of
battle-fields, religious houses, cathedrals, castles, either in ruins or
otherwise, we are pleased in calling up a crowd of shadows from the
dust, and finding a sort of mysterious companionship with them during
our passing reveries.
Campbell says very well, that distance lends enchantment to the view,
and it is generally true of the human mind that it regards the past with
a feeling of tenderness—a disposition to make the best of it. There is
a certain charm in Time, whom we regard as the dominator of us all; and
the ruins or remnants of any thing speak an impressive warning of our
own evanescent fate. That belief in the good old times is an instinct
too strong for the philosophy of most of us. We have a thousand proofs
that they were rude, bad, ignorant times. But the poetry of our nature
will not be reasoned with, and we believe with the bard—
Not rough or barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers.
Any thing old or historic is appreciated in proportion to the scope it
gives to the imagination—to point a moral or adorn a tale. We gaze on
the wild hill, vale, stream or forest of a new country, with none of
those feelings which fill us in beholding similar objects in an old
land. The former may be as fair or fairer to see; but, as
“A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him.”
of whom Wordsworth speaks, so the latter is a stream, a forest, a
hill—nothing more. The nameless savages had the place from the
beginning, and the solitude. The other is a tradition, a romance, a
memory. In the valley is the legendary well, and the fairy ring; by the
stream is the fortalice of the feudal period, or the abbey dwindled to a
few ivied walls and the oriel, on the site of a bloody battle where a
king fell fighting, a thousand years ago; and, on the slope of the hill
stand the Druid stones, in a circle, set there, certainly, in the
ancient time of the giants, who descended from Thor and
Lived in the oldé days of King Artour.
As Webster, the old English dramatist, says:
We love these ancient ruins;
We never tread upon them, but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history.
They receive all their witchery from the imagination of him who surveys
them. This faculty is potentially mingled with all that is most real in
nature; nay, it would seem to be as much a reality as any thing else we
call such. The preacher calls the world a vain shadow, and the Berkleyan
philosopher calls it a huge accident of the five senses; and Shakspeare
is inclined to think there is nothing that is but thinking makes it so.
The practical men, therefore,—the directors of railways, the managers
of stock, and the owners of electric telegraphs cannot be considered to
have matters all to themselves. The poet and the romancist control as
much of the “thick rotundity of the world” as they; and certainly the
most enchanting portion. Schiller gives us in an admired lyric, the idea
that the imaginative being was forgotten by Jove in the distribution of
the earth; but received a general invitation to the Court of Olympus.
Our nether “maker,” or “finder,” does still, of course, avail himself of
this privilege; but not as one without alternative. He has a great share
and dominion in all sublinary things; and his castles in the air may be
found as firmly fixed, after all, and as well tenanted, as any existing
on any other element.
* * * * *