LETTERS
AND
SOCIAL AIMS.
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1876.
COPYRIGHT, 1875.
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
POETRY AND IMAGINATION 1
SOCIAL AIMS 69
ELOQUENCE 97
RESOURCES 119
THE COMIC 137
QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY 155
PROGRESS OF CULTURE 183
PERSIAN POETRY 211
INSPIRATION 239
GREATNESS 267
IMMORTALITY 287
POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
THE perception of matter is made the common-sense, and for cause. This
was the cradle, this the go-cart, of the human child. We must learn the
homely laws of fire and water; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These
are ends of necessity, and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost,
famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to
common-sense. The intellect, yielded up to itself, cannot supersede this
tyrannic necessity. The restraining grace of common-sense is the mark of
all the valid minds,--of Æsop, Aristotle, Alfred, Luther, Shakspeare,
Cervantes, Franklin, Napoleon. The common-sense which does not meddle
with the absolute, but takes things at their word,--things as they
appear,--believes in the existence of matter, not because we can touch
it, or conceive of it, but because it agrees with ourselves, and the
universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest,--is the house of
health and life. In spite of all the joys of poets and the joys of
saints, the most imaginative and abstracted person never makes, with
impunity, the least mistake in this particular,--never tries to kindle
his oven with water, nor carries a torch into a powder-mill, nor seizes
his wild charger by the tail. We should not pardon the blunder in
another, nor endure it in ourselves.
But whilst we deal with this as finality, early hints are given that we
are not to stay here; that we must be making ready to go;--a warning
that this magnificent hotel and conveniency we call Nature is not final.
First innuendoes, then broad hints, then smart taps, are given,
suggesting that nothing stands still in nature but death; that the
creation is on wheels, in transit, always passing into something else,
streaming into something higher; that matter is not what it
appears;--that chemistry can blow it all into gas. Faraday, the most
exact of natural philosophers, taught that when we should arrive at the
monads, or primordial elements (the supposed little cubes or prisms of
which all matter was built up), we should not find cubes, or prisms, or
atoms, at all, but spherules of force. It was whispered that the globes
of the universe were precipitates of something more subtle; nay,
somewhat was murmured in our ear that dwindled astronomy into a
toy;--that too was no finality;--only provisional,--a makeshift;--that
under chemistry was power and purpose: power and purpose ride on matter
to the last atom. It was steeped in thought,--did everywhere express
thought; that, as great conquerors have burned their ships when once
they were landed on the wished-for shore, so the noble house of Nature
we inhabit has temporary uses, and we can afford to leave it one day.
The ends of all are moral, and therefore the beginnings are such. Thin
or solid, everything is in flight. I believe this conviction makes the
charm of chemistry,--that we have the same avoirdupois matter in an
alembic, without a vestige of the old form; and in animal transformation
not less, as in grub and fly, in egg and bird, in embryo and man;
everything undressing and stealing away from its old into new form, and
nothing fast but those invisible cords which we call laws, on which all
is strung. Then we see that things wear different names and faces, but
belong to one family; that the secret cords, or laws, show their
well-known virtue through every variety,--be it animal, or plant, or
planet,--and the interest is gradually transferred from the forms to the
lurking method.
This hint, however conveyed, upsets our politics, trade, customs,
marriages, nay, the common-sense side of religion and literature, which
are all founded on low nature,--on the clearest and most economical mode
of administering the material world, considered as final. The admission,
never so covertly, that this is a makeshift, sets the dullest brain in
ferment;--our little sir, from his first tottering steps,--as soon as he
can crow,--does not like to be practised upon, suspects that some one is
"doing" him,--and, at this alarm, everything is compromised;--gunpowder
is laid under every man's breakfast-table.
But whilst the man is startled by this closer inspection of the laws of
matter, his attention is called to the independent action of the
mind,--its strange suggestions and laws,--a certain tyranny which
springs up in his own thoughts, which have an order, method, and beliefs
of their own, very different from the order which this common-sense
uses.
Suppose there were in the ocean certain strong currents which drove a
ship, caught in them, with a force that no skill of sailing with the
best wind, and no strength of oars, or sails, or steam, could make any
head against, any more than against the current of Niagara: such
currents--so tyrannical--exist in thoughts, those finest and subtilest
of all waters,--that, as soon as once thought begins, it refuses to
remember whose brain it belongs to,--what country, tradition, or
religion,--and goes whirling off--swim we merrily--in a direction
self-chosen, by law of thought, and not by law of kitchen clock or
county committee. It has its own polarity. One of these vortices or
self-directions of thought is the impulse to search resemblance,
affinity, identity, in all its objects, and hence our science, from its
rudest to its most refined theories.
The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years
ago,--_arrested and progressive development_,--indicating the way upward
from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organisms,--gave the poetic
key to Natural Science,--of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire,
of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz, and Owen, and Darwin, in zoölogy and
botany, are the fruits,--a hint whose power is not yet exhausted,
showing unity and perfect order in physics.
The hardest chemist, the severest analyzer, scornful of all but dryest
fact, is forced to keep the poetic curve of nature, and his result is
like a myth of Theocritus. All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into
unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit arrested or progressive ascent in
each kind; the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to the
highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate, mollusk,
articulate, vertebrate,--up to man; as if the whole animal world were
only a Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind.
Identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect parallelism between
the laws of Nature and the laws of thought exist. In botany we have the
like, the poetic perception of metamorphosis,--that the same vegetable
point or eye which is the unit of the plant can be transformed at
pleasure into every part, as bract, leaf, petal, stamen, pistil, or
seed.
In geology, what a useful hint was given to the early inquirers on
seeing in the possession of Professor Playfair a bough of a fossil tree
which was perfect wood at one end, and perfect mineral coal at the
other. Natural objects, if individually described, and out of
connection, are not yet known, since they are really parts of a
symmetrical universe, like words of a sentence; and if their true order
is found, the poet can read their divine significance orderly as in a
Bible. Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior, and
predicts the next higher.
There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force. The laws of
light and of heat translate each other;--so do the laws of sound and of
color; and so galvanism, electricity, and magnetism are varied forms of
the selfsame energy. While the student ponders this immense unity, he
observes that all things in nature, the animals, the mountain, the
river, the seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor,--have a mysterious
relation to his thoughts and his life; their growths, decays, quality,
and use so curiously resemble himself, in parts and in wholes, that he
is compelled to speak by means of them. His words and his thoughts are
framed by their help. Every noun is an image. Nature gives him,
sometimes in a flattered likeness, sometimes in caricature, a copy of
every humor and shade in his character and mind. The world is an immense
picture-book of every passage in human life. Every object he beholds is
the mask of a man.
"The privates of man's heart
They speken and sound in his ear
As tho' they loud winds were";
for the universe is full of their echoes.
Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance
older and deeper than either of these old nobilities. We see the law
gleaming through, like the sense of a half-translated ode of Hafiz. The
poet who plays with it with most boldness best justifies himself,--is
most profound and most devout. Passion adds eyes,--is a
magnifying-glass. Sonnets of lovers are mad enough, but are valuable to
the philosopher, as are prayers of saints, for their potent symbolism.
Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile
or mollusk, and isolated it,--which is hunting for life in graveyards.
Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.
The metaphysician, the poet, only sees each animal form as an inevitable
step in the path of the creating mind. The Indian, the hunter, the boy
with his pets, have sweeter knowledge of these than the savant. We use
semblances of logic until experience puts us in possession of real
logic. The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives. The poet
gives us the eminent experiences only,--a god stepping from peak to
peak, nor planting his foot but on a mountain.
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe
that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. He was himself
conscious of its help, which made him a prophet among the doctors. From
this vision he gave brave hints to the zoölogist, the botanist, and the
optician.
_Poetry._--The primary use of a fact is low: the secondary use, as it is
a figure or illustration of my thought, is the real worth. First, the
fact; second, its impression, or what I think of it. Hence Nature was
called "a kind of adulterated reason." Seas, forests, metals, diamonds,
and fossils interest the eye, but 'tis only with some preparatory or
predicting charm. Their value to the intellect appears only when I hear
their meaning made plain in the spiritual truth they cover. The mind,
penetrated with its sentiment or its thought, projects it outward on
whatever it beholds. The lover sees reminders of his mistress in every
beautiful object; the saint, an argument for devotion in every natural
process; and the facility with which Nature lends itself to the thoughts
of man, the aptness with which a river, a flower, a bird, fire, day, or
night, can express his fortunes, is as if the world were only a
disguised man, and, with a change of form, rendered to him all his
experience. We cannot utter a sentence in sprightly conversation without
a similitude. Note our incessant use of the word _like_,--like fire,
like a rock, like thunder, like a bee, "like a year without a spring."
Conversation is not permitted without tropes; nothing but great weight
in things can afford a quite literal speech. It is ever enlivened by
inversion and trope. God himself does not speak prose, but communicates
with us by hints, omens, inference, and dark resemblances in objects
lying all around us.
Nothing so marks a man as imaginative expressions. A figurative
statement arrests attention, and is remembered and repeated. How often
has a phrase of this kind made a reputation. Pythagoras's Golden Sayings
were such, and Socrates's, and Mirabeau's, and Burke's, and Bonaparte's.
Genius thus makes the transfer from one part of Nature to a remote part,
and betrays the rhymes and echoes that pole makes with pole. Imaginative
minds cling to their images, and do not wish them rashly rendered into
prose reality, as children resent your showing them that their doll
Cinderella is nothing but pine wood and rags: and my young scholar does
not wish to know what the leopard, the wolf, or Lucia, signify in
Dante's Inferno, but prefers to keep their veils on. Mark the delight of
an audience in an image. When some familiar truth or fact appears in a
new dress, mounted as on a fine horse, equipped with a grand pair of
ballooning wings, we cannot enough testify our surprise and pleasure. It
is like the new virtue shown in some unprized old property, as when a
boy finds that his pocket-knife will attract steel filings and take up a
needle; or when the old horse-block in the yard is found to be a Torso
Hercules of the Phidian age. Vivacity of expression may indicate this
high gift, even when the thought is of no great scope, as when Michel
Angelo, praising the _terra cottas_, said, "If this earth were to become
marble, woe to the antiques!" A happy symbol is a sort of evidence that
your thought is just. I had rather have a good symbol of my thought, or
a good analogy, than the suffrage of Kant or Plato. If you agree with
me, or if Locke or Montesquieu agree, I may yet be wrong; but if the
elm-tree thinks the same thing, if running water, if burning coal, if
crystals, if alkalies, in their several fashions, say what I say, it
must be true. Thus, a good symbol is the best argument, and is a
missionary to persuade thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, the Koran, are
each remembered by their happiest figure. There is no more welcome gift
to men than a new symbol. That satiates, transports, converts them. They
assimilate themselves to it,--deal with it in all ways, and it will last
a hundred years. Then comes a new genius, and brings another. Thus the
Greek mythology called the sea "the tear of Saturn." The return of the
soul to God was described as "a flask of water broken in the sea." Saint
John gave us the Christian figure of "souls washed in the blood of
Christ." The aged Michel Angelo indicates his perpetual study as in
boyhood,--"I carry my satchel still." Machiavel described the papacy as
"a stone inserted in the body of Italy to keep the wound open." To the
Parliament debating how to tax America, Burke exclaimed, "Shear the
wolf." Our Kentuckian orator said of his dissent from his companion, "I
showed him the back of my hand." And our proverb of the courteous
soldier reads: "An iron hand in a velvet glove."
This belief that the higher use of the material world is to furnish us
types or pictures to express the thoughts of the mind is carried to its
logical extreme by the Hindoos, who, following Buddha, have made it the
central doctrine of their religion, that what we call Nature, the
external world, has no real existence,--is only phenomenal. Youth, age,
property, condition, events, persons,--self, even,--are successive
_maias_ (deceptions) through which Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul.
I think Hindoo books the best gymnastics for the mind, as showing
treatment. All European libraries might almost be read without the swing
of this gigantic arm being suspected. But these Orientals deal with
worlds and pebbles freely.
For the value of a trope is that the hearer is one; and indeed Nature
itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes. As the
bird alights on the bough,--then plunges into the air again, so the
thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form. All thinking is
analogizing, and 'tis the use of life to learn metonymy. The endless
passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis,
explains the rank which the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental
powers. The imagination is the reader of these forms. The poet accounts
all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses
them representatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to value
much their primary meaning. Every new object so seen gives a shock of
agreeable surprise. The impressions on the imagination make the great
days of life: the book, the landscape, or the personality which did not
stay on the surface of the eye or ear, but penetrated to the inward
sense, agitates us, and is not forgotten. Walking, working, or talking,
the sole question is how many strokes vibrate on this mystic
string,--how many diameters are drawn quite through from matter to
spirit; for, whenever you enunciate a natural law, you discover that you
have enunciated a law of the mind. Chemistry, geology, hydraulics, are
secondary science. The atomic theory is only an interior process
_produced_, as geometers say, or the effect of a foregone metaphysical
theory. Swedenborg saw gravity to be only an external of the
irresistible attractions of affection and faith. Mountains and oceans we
think we understand:--yes, so long as they are contented to be such, and
are safe with the geologist,--but when they are melted in Promethean
alembics, and come out men, and then, melted again, come out words,
without any abatement, but with an exaltation of power!--
In poetry we say we require the miracle. The bee flies among the
flowers, and gets mint and marjoram, and generates a new product, which
is not mint and marjoram, but honey; the chemist mixes hydrogen and
oxygen to yield a new product, which is not these, but water; and the
poet listens to conversation, and beholds all objects in nature, to give
back, not them, but a new and transcendent whole.
Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to
pass the brute body, and search the life and reason which causes it to
exist;--to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the spirit
or necessity which causes it subsists. Its essential mark is that it
betrays in every word instant activity of mind, shown in new uses of
every fact and image,--in preternatural quickness or perception of
relations. All its words are poems. It is a presence of mind that gives
a miraculous command of all means of uttering the thought and feeling of
the moment. The poet squanders on the hour an amount of life that would
more than furnish the seventy years of the man that stands next him.
The term genius, when used with emphasis, implies imagination; use of
symbols, figurative speech. A deep insight will always, like Nature,
ultimate its thought in a thing. As soon as a man masters a principle,
and sees his facts in relation to it, fields, waters, skies, offer to
clothe his thoughts in images. Then all men understand him: Parthian,
Mede, Chinese, Spaniard, and Indian hear their own tongue. For he can
now find symbols of universal significance, which are readily rendered
into any dialect; as a painter, a sculptor, a musician, can in their
several ways express the same sentiment of anger, or love, or religion.
The thoughts are few; the forms many; the large vocabulary or
many-colored coat of the indigent unity. The savans are chatty and
vain,--but hold them hard to principle and definition, and they become
mute and near-sighted. What is motion? what is beauty? what is matter?
what is life? what is force? Push them hard, and they will not be
loquacious. They will come to Plato, Proclus, and Swedenborg. The
invisible and imponderable is the sole fact. "Why changes not the violet
earth into musk?" What is the term of the ever-flowing metamorphosis? I
do not know what are the stoppages, but I see that a devouring unity
changes all into that which changes not.
The act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight. It infuses a
certain volatility and intoxication into all nature. It has a flute
which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance. Our indeterminate size is
a delicious secret which it reveals to us. The mountains begin to
dislimn, and float in the air. In the presence and conversation of a
true poet, teeming with images to express his enlarging thought, his
person, his form, grows larger to our fascinated eyes. And thus begins
that deification which all nations have made of their heroes in every
kind,--saints, poets, lawgivers, and warriors.
_Imagination._--Whilst common-sense looks at things or visible nature as
real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a
second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words
for thoughts which they signify. Or is this belief a metaphysical whim
of modern times, and quite too refined? On the contrary, it is as old as
the human mind. Our best definition of poetry is one of the oldest
sentences, and claims to come down to us from the Chaldæan Zoroaster,
who wrote it thus: "Poets are standing transporters, whose employment
consists in speaking to the Father and to matter; in producing apparent
imitations of unapparent natures, and inscribing things unapparent in
the apparent fabrication of the world"; in other words, the world exists
for thought: it is to make appear things which hide: mountains,
crystals, plants, animals, are seen; that which makes them is not seen:
these, then, are "apparent copies of unapparent natures." Bacon
expressed the same sense in his definition, "Poetry accommodates the
shows of things to the desires of the mind"; and Swedenborg, when he
said, "There is nothing existing in human thought, even though relating
to the most mysterious tenet of faith, but has combined with it a
natural and sensuous image." And again: "Names, countries, nations, and
the like are not at all known to those who are in heaven; they have no
idea of such things, but of the realities signified thereby." A symbol
always stimulates the intellect; therefore is poetry ever the best
reading. The very design of imagination is to domesticate us in another,
in a celestial, nature.
This power is in the image because this power is in nature. It so
affects, because it so is. All that is wondrous in Swedenborg is not his
invention, but his extraordinary perception;--that he was necessitated
so to see. The world realizes the mind. Better than images is seen
through them. The selection of the image is no more arbitrary than the
power and significance of the image. The selection must follow fate.
Poetry, if perfected, is the only verity; is the speech of man after the
real, and not after the apparent.
Or, shall we say that the imagination exists by sharing the ethereal
currents? The poet contemplates the central identity, sees it undulate
and roll this way and that, with divine flowings, through remotest
things; and, following it, can detect essential resemblances in natures
never before compared. He can class them so audaciously, because he is
sensible of the sweep of the celestial stream, from which nothing is
exempt. His own body is a fleeing apparition,--his personality as
fugitive as the trope he employs. In certain hours we can almost pass
our hand through our own body. I think the use or value of poetry to be
the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet. The
mind delights in measuring itself thus with matter, with history, and
flouting both. A thought, any thought, pressed, followed, opened, dwarfs
matter, custom, and all but itself. But this second sight does not
necessarily impair the primary or common sense. Pindar and Dante, yes,
and the gray and timeworn sentences of Zoroaster, may all be parsed,
though we do not parse them. The poet has a logic, though it be subtile.
He observes higher laws than he transgresses. "Poetry must first be good
sense, though it is something better."
This union of first and second sight reads nature to the end of delight
and of moral use. Men are imaginative, but not overpowered by it to the
extent of confounding its suggestions with external facts. We live in
both spheres, and must not mix them. Genius certifies its entire
possession of its thought, by translating it into a fact which perfectly
represents it, and is hereby education. Charles James Fox thought
"Poetry the great refreshment of the human mind,--the only thing, after
all; that men first found out they had minds, by making and tasting
poetry."
Man runs about restless and in pain when his condition or the objects
about him do not fully match his thought. He wishes to be rich, to be
old, to be young, that things may obey him. In the ocean, in fire, in
the sky, in the forest, he finds facts adequate and as large as he. As
his thoughts are deeper than he can fathom, so also are these. 'Tis
easier to read Sanscrit, to decipher the arrowhead character, than to
interpret these familiar sights. 'Tis even much to name them. Thus
Thomson's "Seasons" and the best parts of many old and many new poets
are simply enumerations by a person who felt the beauty of the common
sights and sounds, without any attempt to draw a moral or affix a
meaning.
The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value
as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is
only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your
condition, your employment, is the fable of _you_. The world is
thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and
mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always
personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by
giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to
which he is not related; that everything is convertible into every
other. The staff in this hand is the _radius vector_ of the sun. The
chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do,
whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all
things,--marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy
mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy.
The senses imprison us, and we help them with metres as limitary,--with
a pair of scales and a foot-rule, and a clock. How long it took to find
out what a day was, or what this sun, that makes days! It cost thousands
of years only to make the motion of the earth suspected. Slowly, by
comparing thousands of observations, there dawned on some mind a theory
of the sun,--and we found the astronomical fact. But the astronomy is in
the mind: the senses affirm that the earth stands still and the sun
moves. The senses collect the surface facts of matter. The intellect
acts on these brute reports, and obtains from them results which are the
essence or intellectual form of the experiences. It compares,
distributes, generalizes, and uplifts them into its own sphere. It knows
that these transfigured results are not the brute experiences, just as
souls in heaven are not the red bodies they once animated. Many
transfigurations have befallen them. The atoms of the body were once
nebulæ, then rock, then loam, then corn, then chyme, then chyle, then
blood; and now the beholding and co-energizing mind sees the same
refining and ascent to the third, the seventh, or the tenth power of the
daily accidents which the senses report, and which make the raw material
of knowledge. It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience;
when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge,
it was thought.
This metonymy, or seeing the same sense in things so diverse, gives a
pure pleasure. Every one of a million times we find a charm in the
metamorphosis. It makes us dance and sing. All men are so far poets.
When people tell me they do not relish poetry, and bring me Shelley, or
Aikin's Poets, or I know not what volumes of rhymed English, to show
that it has no charm, I am quite of their mind. But this dislike of the
books only proves their liking of poetry. For they relish Æsop,--cannot
forget him, or not use him; bring them Homer's Iliad, and they like
that; or the Cid, and that rings well: read to them from Chaucer, and
they reckon him an honest fellow. "Lear" and "Macbeth" and "Richard
III." they know pretty well without guide. Give them Robin Hood's
ballads, or "Griselda," or "Sir Andrew Barton," or "Sir Patrick Spense,"
or "Chevy Chase," or "Tam O'Shanter," and they like these well enough.
They like to see statues; they like to name the stars; they like to talk
and hear of Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Venus, and the Nine. See how
tenacious we are of the old names. They like poetry without knowing it
as such. They like to go to the theatre and be made to weep; to Faneuil
Hall, and be taught by Otis, Webster, or Kossuth, or Phillips, what
great hearts they have, what tears, what new possible enlargements to
their narrow horizons. They like to see sunsets on the hills or on a
lake shore. Now, a cow does not gaze at the rainbow, or show or affect
any interest in the landscape, or a peacock, or the song of thrushes.
Nature is the true idealist. When she serves us best, when, on rare
days, she speaks to the imagination, we feel that the huge heaven and
earth are but a web drawn around us, that the light, skies, and
mountains are but the painted vicissitudes of the soul. Who has heard
our hymn in the churches without accepting the truth,--
"As o'er our heads the seasons roll,
And soothe with _change of bliss_ the soul"?
Of course, when we describe man as poet, and credit him with the
triumphs of the art, we speak of the potential or ideal man,--not found
now in any one person. You must go through a city or a nation, and find
one faculty here, one there, to build the true poet withal. Yet all men
know the portrait when it is drawn, and it is part of religion to
believe its possible incarnation.
He is the healthy, the wise, the fundamental, the manly man, seer of the
secret; against all the appearance, he sees and reports the truth,
namely, that the soul generates matter. And poetry is the only
verity,--the expression of a sound mind speaking after the ideal, and
not after the apparent. As a power, it is the perception of the symbolic
character of things, and the treating them as representative: as a
talent, it is a magnetic tenaciousness of an image, and by the treatment
demonstrating that this pigment of thought is as palpable and objective
to the poet as is the ground on which he stands, or the walls of houses
about him. And this power appears in Dante and Shakspeare. In some
individuals this insight, or second sight, has an extraordinary reach
which compels our wonder, as in Behmen, Swedenborg, and William Blake,
the painter.
William Blake, whose abnormal genius, Wordsworth said, interested him
more than the conversation of Scott or of Byron, writes thus: "He who
does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and
better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at
all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear
to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organized, than
anything seen by his mortal eye.... I assert for myself that I do not
behold the outward creation, and that to me it would be a hindrance, and
not action. I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would
question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with
it."
* * * * *
'Tis a problem of metaphysics to define the province of Fancy and
Imagination. The words are often used, and the things confounded.
Imagination respects the cause. It is the vision of an inspired soul
reading arguments and affirmations in all nature of that which it is
driven to say. But as soon as this soul is released a little from its
passion, and at leisure plays with the resemblances and types for
amusement, and not for its moral end, we call its action Fancy. Lear,
mad with his affliction, thinks every man who suffers must have the like
cause with his own. "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?"
But when, his attention being diverted, his mind rests from this
thought, he becomes fanciful with Tom, playing with the superficial
resemblances of objects. Bunyan, in pain for his soul, wrote "Pilgrim's
Progress"; Quarles, after he was quite cool, wrote "Emblems."
Imagination is central; fancy, superficial. Fancy relates to surface, in
which a great part of life lies. The lover is rightly said to fancy the
hair, eyes, complexion of the maid. Fancy is a wilful, imagination a
spontaneous act; fancy, a play as with dolls and puppets which we choose
to call men and women; imagination, a perception and affirming of a real
relation between a thought and some material fact. Fancy amuses;
imagination expands and exalts us. Imagination uses an organic
classification. Fancy joins by accidental resemblance, surprises and
amuses the idle, but is silent in the presence of great passion and
action. Fancy aggregates; imagination animates. Fancy is related to
color; imagination, to form. Fancy paints; imagination sculptures.
_Veracity._--I do not wish, therefore, to find that my poet is not
partaker of the feast he spreads, or that he would kindle or amuse me
with that which does not kindle or amuse him. He must believe in his
poetry. Homer, Milton, Hafiz, Herbert, Swedenborg, Wordsworth, are
heartily enamored of their sweet thoughts. Moreover, they know that this
correspondence of things to thoughts is far deeper than they can
penetrate,--defying adequate expression; that it is elemental, or in the
core of things. Veracity, therefore, is that which we require in
poets,--that they shall say how it was with them, and not what might be
said. And the fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere.
"What news?" asks man of man everywhere. The only teller of news is the
poet. When he sings, the world listens with the assurance that now a
secret of God is to be spoken. The right poetic mood is or makes a more
complete sensibility,--piercing the outward fact to the meaning of the
fact; shows a sharper insight: and the perception creates the strong
expression of it, as the man who sees his way walks in it.
'Tis a rule in eloquence, that the moment the orator loses command of
his audience, the audience commands him. So, in poetry, the master
rushes to deliver his thought, and the words and images fly to him to
express it; whilst colder moods are forced to respect the ways of saying
it, and insinuate, or, as it were, muffle the fact, to suit the poverty
or caprice of their expression, so that they only hint the matter, or
allude to it, being unable to fuse and mould their words and images to
fluid obedience. See how Shakspeare grapples at once with the main
problem of the tragedy, as in "Lear" and "Macbeth," and the opening of
"The Merchant of Venice."
All writings must be in a degree exoteric, written to a human _should_
or _would_, instead of to the fatal _is_: this holds even of the bravest
and sincerest writers. Every writer is a skater, and must go partly
where he would, and partly where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who
can only land where sails can be blown. And yet it is to be added, that
high poetry exceeds the fact, or nature itself, just as skates allow the
good skater far more grace than his best walking would show, or sails
more than riding. The poet writes from a real experience, the amateur
feigns one. Of course, one draws the bow with his fingers, and the other
with the strength of his body; one speaks with his lips, and the other
with a chest voice. Talent amuses, but if your verse has not a necessary
and autobiographic basis, though under whatever gay poetic veils, it
shall not waste my time.
For poetry is faith. To the poet the world is virgin soil: all is
practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is always time to do
right. He is a true re-commencer, or Adam in the garden again. He
affirms the applicability of the ideal law to this moment and the
present knot of affairs. Parties, lawyers, and men of the world will
invariably dispute such an application as romantic and dangerous: they
admit the general truth, but they and their affair always constitute a
case in bar of the statute. Free-trade, they concede, is very well as a
principle, but it is never quite the time for its adoption without
prejudicing actual interests. Chastity, they admit, is very well,--but
then think of Mirabeau's passion and temperament!--Eternal laws are very
well, which admit no violation,--but so extreme were the times and
manners of mankind, that you must admit miracles,--for the times
constituted a case. Of course, we know what you say, that legends are
found in all tribes,--but this legend is different. And so, throughout,
the poet affirms the laws; prose busies itself with exceptions,--with
the local and individual.
I require that the poem should impress me, so that after I have shut the
book, it shall recall me to itself, or that passages should. And
inestimable is the criticism of memory as a corrective to first
impressions. We are dazzled at first by new words and brilliancy of
color, which occupy the fancy and deceive the judgment. But all this is
easily forgotten. Later, the thought, the happy image which expressed
it, and which was a true experience of the poet, recurs to mind, and
sends me back in search of the book. And I wish that the poet should
foresee this habit of readers, and omit all but the important passages.
Shakspeare is made up of important passages, like Damascus steel made up
of old nails. Homer has his own,--
"One omen is good, to die for one's country";
and again,--
"They heal their griefs, for curable are the hearts of the noble."
Write, that I may know you. Style betrays you, as your eyes do. We
detect at once by it whether the writer has a firm grasp on his fact or
thought,--exists at the moment for that alone, or whether he has one eye
apologizing, deprecatory, turned on his reader. In proportion always to
his possession of his thought is his defiance of his readers. There is
no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him
with the best word.
Great design belongs to a poem, and is better than any skill of
execution,--but how rare! I find it in the poems of
Wordsworth,--"Laodamia," and the "Ode to Dion," and the plan of "The
Recluse." We want design, and do not forgive the bards if they have only
the art of enamelling. We want an architect, and they bring us an
upholsterer.
If your subject do not appear to you the flower of the world at this
moment, you have not rightly chosen it. No matter what it is, grand or
gay, national or private, if it has a natural prominence to you, work
away until you come to the heart of it: then it will, though it were a
sparrow or a spider-web, as fully represent the central law, and draw
all tragic or joyful illustration, as if it were the book of Genesis or
the book of Doom. The subject--we must so often say it--is indifferent.
Any word, every word in language, every circumstance, becomes poetic in
the hands of a higher thought.
The test or measure of poetic genius is the power to read the poetry of
affairs,--to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott's antique
superstitions, or Shakspeare's, but to convert those of the nineteenth
century, and of the existing nations, into universal symbols. 'Tis easy
to repaint the mythology of the Greeks, or of the Catholic Church, the
feudal castle, the crusade, the martyrdoms of mediæval Europe; but to
point out where the same creative force is now working in our own houses
and public assemblies, to convert the vivid energies acting at this
hour, in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, into universal symbols,
requires a subtile and commanding thought. 'Tis boyish in Swedenborg to
cumber himself with the dead scurf of Hebrew antiquity, as if the Divine
creative energy had fainted in his own century. American life storms
about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue. This contemporary insight
is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest
symbols; and every man would be a poet, if his intellectual digestion
were perfect. The test of the poet is the power to take the passing day,
with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up
to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to
be related to astronomy and history, and the eternal order of the world.
Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. He is calmed and elevated.
The use of "occasional poems" is to give leave to originality. Every one
delights in the felicity frequently shown in our drawing-rooms. In a
game-party or picnic poem each writer is released from the solemn
rhythmic traditions which alarm and suffocate his fancy, and the result
is that one of the partners offers a poem in a new style that hints at a
new literature. Yet the writer holds it cheap, and could do the like all
day. On the stage, the farce is commonly far better given than the
tragedy, as the stock actors understand the farce, and do not understand
the tragedy. The writer in the parlor has more presence of mind, more
wit and fancy, more play of thought, on the incidents that occur at
table, or about the house, than in the politics of Germany or Rome. Many
of the fine poems of Herrick, Jonson, and their contemporaries had this
casual origin.
I know there is entertainment and room for talent in the artist's
selection of ancient or remote subjects; as when the poet goes to India,
or to Rome, or Persia, for his fable. But I believe nobody knows better
than he, that herein he consults his ease, rather than his strength or
his desire. He is very well convinced that the great moments of life are
those in which his own house, his own body, the tritest and nearest ways
and words and things, have been illuminated into prophets and teachers.
What else is it to be a poet? What are his garland and singing robes?
What but a sensibility so keen that the scent of an elder-blow, or the
timber-yard and corporation-works of a nest of pismires is event enough
for him,--all emblems and personal appeals to him. His wreath and robe
is to do what he enjoys; emancipation from other men's questions, and
glad study of his own; escape from the gossip and routine of society,
and the allowed right and practice of making better. He does not give
his hand, but in sign of giving his heart; he is not affable with all,
but silent, uncommitted, or in love, as his heart leads him. There is no
subject that does not belong to him,--politics, economy, manufactures,
and stock-brokerage, as much as sunsets and souls; only, these things,
placed in their true order, are poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen
order, they are unpoetic. Malthus is the right organ of the English
proprietors; but we shall never understand political economy, until
Burns or Béranger or some poet shall teach it in songs, and he will not
teach Malthusianism.
Poetry is the _gai science_. The trait and test of the poet is that he
builds, adds, and affirms. The critic destroys: the poet says nothing
but what helps somebody; let others be distracted with cares, he is
exempt. All their pleasures are tinged with pain. All his pains are
edged with pleasure. The gladness he imparts he shares. As one of the
old Minnesingers sung,--
"Oft have I heard, and now believe it true,
Whom man delights in, God delights in too."
Poetry is the consolation of mortal men. They live cabined, cribbed,
confined, in a narrow and trivial lot,--in wants, pains, anxieties, and
superstitions, in profligate politics, in personal animosities, in mean
employments,--and victims of these; and the nobler powers untried,
unknown. A poet comes, who lifts the veil; gives them glimpses of the
laws of the universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows
that nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and
beautiful,--and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities.
Socrates; the Indian teachers of the Maia; the Bibles of the nations;
Shakspeare, Milton, Hafiz, Ossian, the Welsh Bards,--these all deal with
nature and history as means and symbols, and not as ends. With such
guides they begin to see that what they had called pictures are
realities, and the mean life is pictures. And this is achieved by words;
for it is a few oracles spoken by perceiving men that are the texts on
which religions and states are founded. And this perception has at once
its moral sequence. Ben Jonson said, "The principal end of poetry is to
inform men in the just reason of living."
_Creation._--But there is a third step which poetry takes, and which
seems higher than the others, namely, creation, or ideas taking forms of
their own,--when the poet invents the fable, and invents the language
which his heroes speak. He reads in the word or action of the man its
yet untold results. His inspiration is power to carry out and complete
the metamorphosis, which, in the imperfect kinds, arrested for ages,--in
the perfecter, proceeds rapidly in the same individual. For poetry is
science, and the poet a truer logician. Men in the courts or in the
street think themselves logical, and the poet whimsical. Do they think
there is chance or wilfulness in what he sees and tells? To be sure, we
demand of him what he demands of himself,--veracity, first of all. But
with that, he is the lawgiver, as being an exact reporter of the
essential law. He knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his
thought made him, and made the sun and the stars. Is the solar system
good art and architecture? The same wise achievement is in the human
brain also, can you only wile it from interference and marring. We
cannot look at works of art but they teach us how near man is to
creating. Michel Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and
makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a
mortal man! In him and the like perfecter brains the instinct is
resistless, knows the right way, is melodious, and at all points divine.
The reason we set so high a value on any poetry,--as often on a line or
a phrase as on a poem,--is, that it is a new work of Nature, as a man
is. It must be as new as foam and as old as the rock. But a new verse
comes once in a hundred years; therefore Pindar, Hafiz, Dante, speak so
proudly of what seems to the clown a jingle.
The writer, like the priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His
work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition. In
that prosperity he is sometimes caught up into a perception of means and
materials, of feats and fine arts, of fairy machineries and funds of
power hitherto utterly unknown to him, whereby he can transfer his
visions to mortal canvas, or reduce them into iambic or trochaic, into
lyric or heroic rhyme. These successes are not less admirable and
astonishing to the poet than they are to his audience. He has seen
something which all the mathematics and the best industry could never
bring him unto. Now at this rare elevation above his usual sphere, he
has come into new circulations, the marrow of the world is in his bones,
the opulence of forms begins to pour into his intellect, and he is
permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds,
flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the
ocean, and the eternal sky were painted.
These fine fruits of judgment, poesy, and sentiment, when once their
hour is struck, and the world is ripe for them, know as well as coarser
how to feed and replenish themselves, and maintain their stock alive,
and multiply; for roses and violets renew their race like oaks, and
flights of painted moths are as old as the Alleghanies. The balance of
the world is kept, and dewdrop and haze and the pencil of light are as
long-lived as chaos and darkness.