was the securest retreat. Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, the son
of Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, was the first builder; but I do
not doubt its antiquity was very great, and it seems likely that this
was the original Siculian stronghold before the coming of the Greeks,
and the building of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins that exist are
part of the fortress made by that governor who lost the city to the
Saracens, to defend it against them on this side; and here it stood for
nigh a thousand years, like the citadel itself, an impregnable hold of
war. It seldom yielded, and always by treachery or mutiny; for more than
once, when Taormina was sacked, its citadel and Mola remained untaken
and unconquerable on their extreme heights. I shall not tell its story;
but one brave man once commanded here, and his name shall be its fame
now, and my last tale of the Taorminian past.
He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the days when the Messenians revolted
against the chancellor of Queen Margaret. He was placed over this
castle; and when a certain Count Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy
to murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, he was given into
Matteo's charge, and imprisoned here. The Messenians came and surprised
the lower city of Taormina, but they could not gain Mola nor persuade
Matteo to yield Riccardo up to them. So they thought to overcome his
fidelity cruelly. They took his wife and children, who were at Messina,
threw them into a dungeon, and condemned them to death. Then they sent
Matteo's brother-in-law to treat with him. But when the count knew the
reason of the visit he said: "It seems to me that you little value the
zeal of an honest man who, loyal to his office, does not wish, neither
knows how, to break his sworn faith. My wife and children would look on
me with scornful eyes should I be renegade; for shame is not the reward
that sweetens life, but burdens it. If the Messenians stain themselves
with innocent blood, I shall weep for the death of my wife and sons, but
the heart of an honest citizen will have no remorse." Then he was
silent. But treachery could do what such threats failed to accomplish.
One Gavaretto was found, who unlocked the prison, and Riccardo was
already escaping when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword in
hand, and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, "to save his
wages," struck Matteo in the body, and the faithful count fell dead in
his blood. I thought of this story, standing there, and nothing else in
the castle's filled with bloom; then the infinite beauty, slowly
fading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly it parted from my eyes.
VIII
Yet once more I step out upon the terrace into the night. I hear the
long roar of the breakers; I see the flickering fishers' lights, and
Etna pale under the stars. The place is full of ghosts. In the darkness
I seem to hear vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of
many tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost
Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves,
Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange African dialects, Norman and
Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp
battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, the
death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on the
hard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercer
pain--century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe. My
fancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly lifted, castle-rock the
triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman in the
age-long duel, and as these fade, the springing brands of Byzantine,
Arab, and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of France, Spain, and
Sicily; and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone
hill-wide. "Oh, wherefore?" I whisper; and all is silent save the surge
still lifting round the coast the far voices of the old Ionian sea. I
have wondered that the children of Etna should dwell in its lovely
paradise, as I thought how often, how terribly, the lava has poured
forth upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black horror of volcanic
eruption overwhelmed the land. Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that
Etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, the agonies of her
burnings, the terrors of her living entombments, all her manifold deaths
at once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that has flowed
on this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here
suffered at the hands of man. O Etna, it is not thou that man should
fear! He should fear his brother-man.
IX
The stars were paling over Etna, white and ghostly, as I came out to
depart. In the dark street I met a woman with a young boy clinging to
her side. Her black hair fell down over her shoulders, and her bosom was
scantily clothed by the poor garment that fell to her ankles and her
feet. She was still young, and from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine
with that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; the
child, half naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother's hand. What
brought her there at that hour, alone with her child? She seemed the
epitome of the human life I was leaving behind, come forth to bid
farewell; and she passed on under the shadows of the dawn. The last star
faded as I went down the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed white
and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, and, as I dipped down, was
gone.
A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY
There was an old cry, Return to Nature! Let us rather return unto the
soul. Nature is great, and her science marvellous; but it is man who
knows it. In what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. Know thyself,
was the first command of reason; and wisdom was an ancient thing when
the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the path of Arcturus with his
sons were young in human thought. These late conquests of the mind in
the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space,
its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, this
new mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of
achievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid
spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in human
welfare, the sense of the increase of man's power springing from
unsuspected and illimitable resources,--all this has made us forgetful
of truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. In the balances of
thought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravitation measures.
Man only is of prime interest to men; and man as a spirit, a creature
but made in the likeness of something divine. The lapse of aeons touches
us as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, and
man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records.
Science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our
mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being
we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past
without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and
some proverbial lore handed down from sire to son. The tree of knowledge
is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of
horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin
guardians of the soul,--the poet and the priest. Conscience and
imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human
spirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged their
treasures, there is wisdom. I desire to renew the long discussion of the
nature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry,
or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which this
wisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, is stored up for the
race in its most manifest, enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literary
tradition and association, a proud task. May I not take counsel of
Spenser and be bold at the first door? Sidney and Shelley pleaded this
cause. Because they spoke, must we be dumb? or shall not a noble example
be put to its best use in trying what truth can now do on younger lips?
The old hunt is up in the Muses' bower; and I would fain speak for that
learning which has to me been light. I use this preface not unwillingly
in open loyalty to studies on which my youth was nourished, and the
masters I then loved whom the natural thoughts of youth made eloquent;
my hope is to continue their finer breath, as they before drank from old
fountains; but chiefly I name them as a reminder that the main argument
is age-long; it does not harden into accepted dogma; and it is thus
ceaselessly tossed because it belongs in that sphere of our warring
nature where conflict is perpetual. It goes on in the lives as well as
on the lips of men. It is a question how to live as well as how to
express life. Each race uses its own tongue, each age its dialect; but,
change the language as man may, he ever remains the questioner of his
few great thoughts.
The defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that links them together
in a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age.
Continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting
in the work of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, and consigns
them to dark closets. New times, new weapons, is the history of all
warfare. The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any
intellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than one
quarter passes into denial. Literature and the other arts of expression
suffer throughout the world. To that point is it come that those of the
old stock who believe that the imagination exercises man's faculty at
its highest pitch, and that the method of idealism is its law, are bid
step down, while others more newly grounded in what belongs to
literature possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, the
obliteration of ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown down, shall
we learn what our predecessors never knew--to abdicate and abandon? I
hear in the temples the footsteps of the departing gods--
Di quibus imperium hoc steterat;
but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was said
that though one rose from the dead they would not believe,--Plato, being
dead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our boards, and (why should I
hesitate?) Tennyson yet breathes among us though already immortal. That
which convinced the master minds of antiquity and many in later ages is
still convincing, if it be attended to; the old tradition is yet
unbroken; therefore, because I was bred in this faith, I will try to set
forth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal ground of reason on
which idealism rests.
The specific question concerns literature and its method, but its import
is not mainly literary. Life is the matter of literature; and thence it
comes that all leading inquiries to which literature gives rise probe
for their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issues
to the unknown limits of human fate. It is an error to think of idealism
as a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters intimately
into the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at
all except in their bodies. What is here proposed is neither
speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter,
universal in interest, and touches upon those things which men most
should heed. I fear rather to incur the reproach of uttering truisms
than paradoxes. But he does ill who is scornful of the trite. To be
learned in commonplaces is no mean education. They make up the great
body of the people's knowledge. They are the living words upon the lips
of men from generation to generation; the real winged words; the matter
of the unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libraries;
the tradition of mankind. Proverb, text, homily,--happy the youth whose
purse is stored with these broad pieces, current, in every country and
for every good, like fairy gifts of which the occasion only when it
arises shows the use. It is with truth as with beauty,--familiarity
endears and makes it more precious. What is common is for that very
reason in danger of neglect, and from it often flashes that divine
surprise which most enkindles the soul. Why must Prometheus bring fire
from heaven to savage man? Did it not sleep in the flint at his feet?
How often, at the master stroke of life, has some text of Holy
Scripture, which lay in the mind from childhood almost like the debris
of memory, illuminated the remorseful darkness of the mind, or
interpreted the sweetness of God's sunshine in the happy heart! Common
as light is love, sang Shelley; and equally common with beauty and truth
and love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that feeds it and
gives it power; if aught be lacking, it is the eye to see and the heart
to understand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk and cotton, gold,
silver and iron, steam and electricity,--were not all, like the spark,
within arm's reach of savage man? The slow material progress of mankind
through ages is paralleled by the slow growth of the individual soul in
laying hold of and putting to use the resources of spiritual strength
that are nigh unto it. The service of man to man in the ways of the
spirit is, in truth, an act as simple as the giving of a cup of cold
water to him who is athirst.
Can there be any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that
of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so
far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the
logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in
creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought;
and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of
gravitation. Experience is the matter of all knowledge. It is given to
the mind as a complex of particular facts, a series, ever continuing, of
impressions outward and inward. It is stored in the memory, and were
memory the only mental faculty, no other knowledge than this of
particular facts in their temporal sequence could be acquired; the sole
method of obtaining knowledge would be by observation. All literature
would then be merely annals of the contents of successive moments in
their order. Reason, however, intervenes. Its process is well known. In
every object of perception, as it exists in the physical world and is
given by sensation to our consciousness, there is both in itself and in
its relations a likeness to other objects and relations, and this
likeness the mind takes notice of; it thus analyzes the complex of
experience, discerns the common element, and by this means classifies
particular facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions,--
abstract ideas, formulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in the
course of its normal operation. As soon as we think at all, we speak
of white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size,--of
uniformities in the behaviour of nature, or laws; by such classification
of qualities, objects, and various relations, not merely in the sensuous
but in every sphere of our consciousness, the mind simplifies its
experience, compacts its knowledge, and economizes its energies. To this
work it brings, also, the method of experiment. It then interferes
arbitrarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings that to
pass which otherwise would not have been; and this method it uses to
investigate, to illustrate what was previously known, and to confirm
what was surmised. Its end, whether through observation or experiment,
is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, universals more
or less embracing as opposed to particulars, the units of thought as
opposed to the units of phenomena. The body of these constitutes
rational knowledge.
Nature then becomes known, not as a series of impressions on the retina
of sense merely, but as a system seized by the eye of reason; for the
senses show man the aspect worn by the world as it is at the moment, but
reason opens to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be at
every moment; and the instrument by which man rises from the phenomenal
plane of experience to the necessary sphere of truth is the generalizing
faculty whose operation has just been described. The office of the
reason in the exercise of this faculty is to find organic form in that
experience which memory preserves in the mass,--to penetrate, that is,
to that mould of necessity in the world which phenomena, when they
arise, must put on. The species once perceived, the mind no longer cares
for the individual; the law once known, the mind no longer cares for the
facts; for in these universals all particular instances, past, present,
and to come, are contained in their significance. All sciences are
advanced in proportion as they have thus organized their appropriate
matter in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in proportion
as there remains much in their provinces not yet so coordinated and
systematized; and in their hierarchy, from astronomical physics
downward, each takes rank according to the nature of the universals it
deals with, as these are more or less embracing.
The matter of literature--that part of total experience which it deals
with--is life; and, to confine attention to imaginative literature where
alone the question of idealism arises, the matter with which imaginative
literature deals is the inward and spiritual order in man's breast as
distinguished from the outward and physical order with which science
deals. The reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in this
great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of
true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses
him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and
metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such
knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to
mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge;
for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp it with the
mind and conform to it with the will, is not, as is the case with every
other sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort of selected
minds, but the daily business of all men in their lives. The method of
the mind here is and must be the same with that by which it accomplishes
its work elsewhere, its only method. Here, too, its concern is with the
universal; its end is to know life--the life with which literature
deals--not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in its necessary
order, not phenomenally in the senses but rationally in the mind, not
without relation in its mere procession but organically in its laws; and
its instrument here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciences
and of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty.
One difference there is between scientific and imaginative truth,--a
difference in the mode of statement. Science and also philosophy
formulate truth and end in the formula; literature, as the saying is,
clothes truth in a tale. Imagination is brought in, and by its aid the
mind projects a world of its own, whose principle of being is that it
reembodies general or abstract truth and presents it concretely to the
eye of the mind, and in some arts gives it physical form. So, to draw an
example from science itself, when Leverrier projected in imagination the
planet Uranus, he incarnated in matter a whole group of universal
qualities and relations, all that go to make up a world, and in so doing
he created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his
imagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of reality
in the planet itself after it swam into his ken. This creation of the
concrete world of art is the joint act of the imagination and the reason
working in unison; and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribed
is sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power of the mind,
in distinction from the scientific intellect which merely knows. The
term is intended to convey at once the double phase, under one aspect of
which the reason controls imagination, and under the other aspect the
imagination formulates the reason; it is meant to free the idea, on the
one hand, from that suggestion of abstraction implied by the reason, and
to disembarrass it, on the other, of any connection with the irrational
fancy; for the world of art so conceived is necessarily both concrete,
correspondent to the realities of experience, and truthful, subject to
the laws of the universe; it cannot contain the impossible, it cannot
amalgamate the actual with the unreal, it cannot in any way lie and
retain its own nature. The use of this rational imagination is not
confined to the world of art. It is only by its aid that we build up the
horizons of our earthly life and fill them with objects and events
beyond the reach of our senses. To it we are indebted for our knowledge
of the greater part of others' lives, for our idea of the earth's
surface and the doings of foreign nations, of all past history and its
scene, and the events of primaeval nature which were even before man
was. So far as we realize the world at all beyond the limit of our
private experience of it, we do so by the power of the imagination
acting on the lines of reason. It fills space and time for us through
all their compass. Nor is it less operative in the practical pursuits of
men. The scientist lights his way with it; the statesman forecasts
reform by it, building in thought the state which he afterward realizes
in fact; the entire future lives to us--and it is the most important
part of life--only by its incantation. The poet acts no otherwise in
employing it than the inventor and the speculator even, save that he
uses it for the ends of reason instead of for his private interest. In
some parts of this field there is, or was once, or will be, a physical
parallel, an actuality, containing the verification of the imagined
state of things; but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a conception
of the reason just as normal, which is not the less real because it is a
tissue of abstract thought. In art this governance of the imagination by
the reason is fundamental, and gives to the office of the latter a
seeming primacy; and therefore emphasis is rightly placed on the
universal element, the truth, as the substance of the artistic form. But
in the light of this preliminary description of the mental processes
involved, let us take a nearer view of their particular employment in
literature.
Human life, as represented in literature, consists of two main branches,
character and action. Of these, character, which is the realm of
personality, is generalized by means of type, which is ideal character;
action, which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal
action. It is convenient to examine the nature of these separately. A
type, the example of a class, contains the characteristic qualities
which make an individual one of that class; it does not differ in this
elementary form from the bare idea of the species. The traits of a tree,
for instance, exist in every actual tree, however stunted or imperfect;
and in the type which condenses into itself what is common in all
specimens of the class, these traits only exist; they constitute the
type. Comic types, in literature, are often simple abstractions of some
single human quality, and hence easily afford illustrations. The
braggart, the miser, the hypocrite, contain that one trait which is
common to the class; and in their portrayal this characteristic only is
shown. In proportion as the traits are many in any character, the type
becomes complex. In simple types attention is directed to some one vice,
passion, or virtue, capable of absorbing a human life in to itself. This
is the method of Jonson, and, in tragedy, of Marlowe. As human energy
displays itself more variously in a life, in complex types, the mind
contemplates human nature in a more catholic way, with a less exclusive
identification of character with specific trait, a more free conception
of personality as only partially exhibited; thus, in becoming complex,
types gather breadth and depth, and share more in the mystery of
humanity as something incompletely known to us at the best. Such are the
characters of Shakspere.