The best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the
natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an
involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by
sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.
In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of the subject-matter of it,
next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and afterwards of
its connection with harmony of sound.
Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates to
whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home
to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to
them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be a subject for
poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature
and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for
himself, or for any thing else. It is not a mere frivolous accomplishment,
(as some persons have been led to imagine) the trifling amusement of a few
idle readers or leisure hours--it has been the study and delight of
mankind in all ages. Many people suppose that poetry is something to be
found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables with like
endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as
in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that
"spreads its sweet leaves to the air and dedicates its beauty to the
sun,"--_there_ is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study,
poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are
spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and
unwieldy masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the
world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states,
and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling that can
have entered into the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicate
to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit
subject for poetry. It is not a branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of
which our life is made." The rest is "mere oblivion," a dead letter: for
all that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is
poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt,
jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all
poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies,
refines, raises our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as
beast's." Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the
principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's
_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without knowing it.
The child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or
repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet,
when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the
countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice,
when he gazes after the Lord-Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his
gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who
paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the
tyrant, who fancies himself a god;--the vain, the ambitious, the proud,
the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the
rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their
own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others
think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at
second hand. "There is warrant for it." Poets alone have not "such
seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler
reason" can.
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
The madman. While the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination."
If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is a
fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are,
because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality. Ariosto has
described the loves of Angelica and Medoro; but was not Medoro, who carved
the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as much enamoured of her
charms as he? Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles: but was not the
hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the poets from his Commonwealth,
lest their descriptions of the natural man should spoil his mathematical
man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to
laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by
any thing. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the
brain of the inventor; and Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's
philosophical Republic.
Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the
passions are a part of man's nature. We shape things according to our
wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical
language that can be found for those creations of the mind "which ecstacy
is very cunning in." Neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a
mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible,
constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the heightenings
of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a
reflected light, that while it shows us the object, throws a sparkling
radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the
imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost
recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents
forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms
or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the
universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the
limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but
signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary
impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any object
is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be
contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame
bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred
beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms
of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in
the boldest manner, and by the most striking examples of the same quality
in other instances. Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason "has
something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into
sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul,
instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history
do." It is strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination
is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves,
but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite
variety of shapes and combinations of power. This language is not the less
true to nature, because it is false in point of fact; but so much the more
true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the
influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be
presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear--and the
imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the
likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "Our eyes are
made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the universal law of the
imagination,
"That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy:
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear!"
When Iachimo says of Imogen,
"The flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see the enclosed lights"--
this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord with
the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally with the
poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of shining
gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from novelty and
a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the imagination than
the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower: not that
he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size beyond
what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual size of things of the same
class, produces by contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous
strength than another object of ten times the same dimensions. The
intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects.
Things are equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the
mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love. When
Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, "for they are old like
him," there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime
identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which
could do justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and his despair!
Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the
forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by
blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses the
sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it; exhausts
the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples with
impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us back
upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our being
or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the rapid whirl
of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations
on human life. When Lear says, of Edgar, "Nothing but his unkind daughters
could have brought him to this;" what a bewildered amazement, what a
wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other
cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other
sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all
other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the mad scene, "The little dogs
and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!" it is
passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league
against him, conjuring up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for
and most galling shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart,
and finding out the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the
bottom of his breast, only to torture and kill it! In like manner the "So
I am" of Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving
it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon
it for years. What a fine return of the passion upon itself is that in
Othello--with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the
last traces of departed happiness--when he exclaims,
"Oh now, for ever
Farewel the tranquil mind. Farewel content;
Farewel the plumed troops and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! Oh farewel!
Farewel the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war:
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th' immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewel! Othello's occupation's gone!"
How his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in its
sounding course, when, in answer to the doubts expressed of his returning
love, he says,
"Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont:
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up."--
The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that line,
"But there where I had garner'd up my heart,
To be discarded thence!"--
One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our sympathy
without raising our disgust is, that in proportion as it sharpens the edge
of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the desire of good. It
enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by making us sensible of the
magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion lays bare and shews us the
rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total
of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we
dread, is brought before us by contrast; the action and re-action are
equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intense
aspiration after, and a more intimate participation with the antagonist
world of good; makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs at the
heart-strings; loosens the pressure about them; and calls the springs of
thought and feeling into play with tenfold force.
Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of
our nature, as well as of the sensitive--of the desire to know, the will
to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different
parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The domestic or prose
tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is in this sense the
least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one of these faculties,
our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo, for this reason,
however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a dead weight upon the
mind, a load of misery which it is unable to throw off: the tragedy of
Shakspeare, which is true poetry, stirs our inmost affections; abstracts
evil from itself by combining it with all the forms of imagination, and
with the deepest workings of the heart, and rouses the whole man within
us.
The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry, is not anything
peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing. It is not an
anomaly of the imagination. It has its source and ground-work in the
common love of strong excitement. As Mr. Burke observes, people flock to
see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the next street,
the theatre would very soon be empty. It is not then the difference
between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are
satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose: nor do
the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and
executions about the streets, find it necessary to have them turned into
penny ballads, before they can dispose of these interesting and authentic
documents. The grave politician drives a thriving trade of abuse and
calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies for no other
end than that he may live by them. The popular preacher makes less
frequent mention of heaven than of hell. Oaths and nicknames are only a
more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric. We are as fond of indulging our
violent passions as of reading a description of those of others. We are as
prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of
good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will be, Because we
cannot help it. The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as
the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same
despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is as natural to
hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or
contempt, as our love or admiration.
"Masterless passion sways us to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes."
Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and
scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every
refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a
bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of
deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to
grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm
our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to
contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of
passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our
conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or
dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the
image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get
rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought."
This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the
sublime and pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord Mayor's shew,--
"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more!"
when Collins makes Danger, with "limbs of giant mould,"
"Throw him on the steep
Of some loose hanging rock asleep:"
when Lear calls out in extreme anguish,
"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend.
How much more hideous shew'st in a child
Than the sea-monster!"
--the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and of
indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thing
ourselves, and shew it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in spite
of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. The imagination, by thus
embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the
indistinct and importunate cravings of the will.--We do not wish the thing
to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledge is
conscious power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe, though
it may be the victim of vice or folly.
Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the
passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than
the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics,
for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and
reason: for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first and now, was and
is to hold the mirror up to nature," seen through the medium of passion
and imagination, not divested of that medium by means of literal truth or
abstract reason. The painter of history might as well be required to
represent the face of a person who has just trod upon a serpent with the
still-life expression of a common portrait, as the poet to describe the
most striking and vivid impressions which things can be supposed to make
upon the mind, in the language of common conversation. Let who will strip
nature of the colours and the shapes of fancy, the poet is not bound to do
so; the impressions of common sense and strong imagination, that is, of
passion and indifference, cannot be the same, and they must have a
separate language to do justice to either. Objects must strike differently
upon the mind, independently of what they are in themselves, as long as we
have a different interest in them, as we see them in a different point of
view, nearer or at a greater distance (morally or physically speaking)
from novelty, from old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our
fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We
can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all
objects without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their
preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our
curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various
illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not
very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it
home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey
worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when
beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built itself a
palace of emerald light. This is also one part of nature, one appearance
which the glow-worm presents, and that not the least interesting; so
poetry is one part of the history of the human mind, though it is neither
science nor philosophy. It cannot be concealed, however, that the progress
of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of
the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the
imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined: the
understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them
of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical
enthusiasm is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from
the progress of experimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon
that gives birth and scope to the imagination: we can only fancy what we
do not know. As in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill them
with what shapes we please, with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, and
drear enchantments, so, in our ignorance of the world about us, we make
gods or devils of the first object we see, and set no bounds to the wilful
suggestions of our hopes and fears.
"And visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf and cling to every bough."
There can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time, the heavens
have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become averse to
the imagination, nor will they return to us on the squares of the
distances, or on Doctor Chalmers's Discourses. Rembrandt's picture brings
the matter nearer to us.--It is not only the progress of mechanical
knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that are
unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the
preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more
indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of the fabulous
ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we are less exposed
to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or
"bandit fierce," or to the unmitigated fury of the elements. The time has
been that "our fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as
life were in it." But the police spoils all; and we now hardly so much as
dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only tolerated in this country for
the sake of the music; and in the United States of America, where the
philosophical principles of government are carried still farther in theory
and practice, we find that the Beggar's Opera is hooted from the stage.
Society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us safely
and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very comfortable
prose style.
"Obscurity her curtain round them drew,
And siren Sloth a dull quietus sung."
The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead to a
solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting and poetry.
I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem that the argument
which has been sometimes set up, that painting must affect the
imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more
distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much temerity, that
poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or connoisseurs talk
on stilts about the poetry of painting, they shew that they know little
about poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives the object
itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in
itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected
with it. But this last is the proper province of the imagination. Again,
as it relates to passion, painting gives the event, poetry the progress of
events: but it is during the progress, in the interval of expectation and
suspense, while our hopes and fears are strained to the highest pitch of
breathless agony, that the pinch of the interest lies
"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The mortal instruments are then in council;
And the state of man, like to a little kingdom,
Suffers then the nature of an insurrection."
But by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. Faces are the
best part of a picture; but even faces are not what we chiefly remember in
what interests us most.--But it may be asked then, Is there any thing
better than Claude Lorraine's landscapes, than Titian's portraits, than
Raphael's cartoons, or the Greek statues? Of the two first I shall say
nothing, as they are evidently picturesque, rather than imaginative.
Raphael's cartoons are certainly the finest comments that ever were made
on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same if we were not
acquainted with the text? But the New Testament existed before the
cartoons. There is one subject of which there is no cartoon, Christ
washing the feet of the disciples the night before his death. But that
chapter does not need a commentary! It is for want of some such
resting-place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else
than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart. They
have not an informing principle within them. In their faultless excellence
they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they are raised
above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty they are
deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and their
forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no sympathy
with us, and not to want our admiration.
Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined with
passion and fancy. In its mode of conveyance, it combines the ordinary use
of language, with musical expression. There is a question of long standing
in what the essence of poetry consists; or what it is that determines why
one set of ideas should be expressed in prose, another in verse. Milton
has told us his idea of poetry in a single line--
"Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers."
As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the song
and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead
to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change "the words
of Mercury into the songs of Apollo." There is a striking instance of this
adaptation of the movement of sound and rhythm to the subject, in
Spenser's description of the Satyrs accompanying Una to the cave of
Sylvanus.
"So from the ground she fearless doth arise
And walketh forth without suspect of crime.
They, all as glad as birds of joyous prime,
Thence lead her forth, about her dancing round,
Shouting and singing all a shepherd's rhyme:
And with green branches strewing all the ground,
Do worship her as queen with olive garland crown'd.
And all the way their merry pipes they sound,
That all the woods with doubled echo ring;
And with their horned feet do wear the ground,
Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring;
So towards old Sylvanus they her bring,
Who with the noise awaked, cometh out."
_Faery Queen_, b. i. c. vi.
On the contrary, there is nothing either musical or natural in the
ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary and
conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary
signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements in common
speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to
the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with which they are
conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the inequalities, and
harshnesses of prose are fatal to the flow of a poetical imagination, as a
jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs the reverie of an absent man.
But poetry makes these odds all even. It is the music of language,
answering to the music of the mind, untying as it were "the secret soul of
harmony." Wherever any object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us
dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or
kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;--wherever a movement of
imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to
prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord
with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and
continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion, to the sounds
that express it--this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and
continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also.
There is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad
people sing. As often as articulation passes naturally into intonation,
there poetry begins. Where one idea gives a tone and colour to others,
where one feeling melts others into it, there can be no reason why the
same principle should not be extended to the sounds by which the voice
utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into
each other. It is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the
customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the sense,
when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to mingle the tide of
verse, "the golden cadences of poetry," with the tide of feeling, flowing
and murmuring as it flows--in short, to take the language of the
imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where
it may indulge its own impulses--
"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air"--
without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and
petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that poetry was
invented. It is to common language, what springs are to a carriage, or
wings to feet. In ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by the
modulations of voice: in poetry the same thing is done systematically by a
regular collocation of syllables. It has been well observed, that every
one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort
of blank verse or measured prose. The merchant, as described in Chaucer,
went on his way "sounding always the increase of his winning." Every
prose-writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who,
when deprived of the regular mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle
of modulation left in their writings.
An excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner. It is but fair that
the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail itself of
the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of syllables,
that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of images. It is
allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit and shrewdness has
been heard to say, that the only four good lines of poetry are the
well-known ones which tell the number of days in the months of the year.
"Thirty days hath September," etc.
But if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken the
fancy? and there are other things worth having at our fingers' ends,
besides the contents of the almanac.--Pope's versification is tiresome,
from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. Shakspeare's blank verse is
the perfection of dramatic dialogue.
All is not poetry that passes for such: nor does verse make the whole
difference between poetry and prose. The Iliad does not cease to be poetry
in a literal translation; and Addison's Campaign has been very properly
denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from poetry, as
treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar, and irksome
matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary impulse to the imagination, or
else of such difficult and laborious processes of the understanding, as do
not admit of the wayward or violent movements either of the imagination or
the passions.
I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible
without absolutely being so, namely, the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson
Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated
some of the last into English rhyme, but the essence and the power of
poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth,
which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is poetry
in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being "married to
immortal verse." If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fix the
imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of childhood glisten
with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with
indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pass for
poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and reality in the Pilgrim's
Progress was never equalled in any allegory. His pilgrims walk above the
earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what beauty, what truth of fiction!
What deep feeling in the description of Christian's swimming across the
water at last, and in the picture of the Shining Ones within the gates,
with wings at their backs and garlands on their heads, who are to wipe all
tears from his eyes! The writer's genius, though not "dipped in dews of
Castalie," was baptised with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in
this book are no small part of it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in
the island of Lemnos was a subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek
tragedies, what shall we say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of
the Greek hero on leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it
with the reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of
confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever
cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls its
ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his heart
become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he says,
"As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the country,
the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a
sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods,
the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner,
locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an
uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the
greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a
storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes
it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately
sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two
together, and this was still worse to me, for if I could burst out
into tears, or vent myself in words, it would go off, and the grief
having exhausted itself would abate."
The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey, it is
true; but the relator had the true genius of a poet. It has been made a
question whether Richardson's romances are poetry; and the answer perhaps
is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance. The interest
is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an infinite number
of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the attention, by a
repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The sympathy excited is
not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is unforced and
spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The story does not
"give an echo to the seat where love is throned." The heart does not
answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does not run on before
the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along with an
infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the Lilliputians
dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.--Sir Charles Grandison is a
coxcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem,
by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting
by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers,
her aunts and uncles--she is interesting in all that is uninteresting.
Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not
conductors to the imagination. There is infinite truth and feeling in
Richardson; but it is extracted from a _caput mortuum_ of circumstances;
it does not evaporate of itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel
confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out.
Shakspeare says--
"Our poesy is as a gum
Which issues whence 'tis nourished, our gentle flame
Provokes itself, and like the current flies
Each bound it chafes."[142]
I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of the
principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of
history--Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. In Homer, the
principle of action or life is predominant; in the Bible, the principle of
faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a personification of blind
will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life, and the lag end of the
world. Homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full of life and action: it is
bright as the day, strong as a river. In the vigour of his intellect, he
grapples with all the objects of nature, and enters into all the relations
of social life. He saw many countries, and the manners of many men; and he
has brought them all together in his poem. He describes his heroes going
to battle with a prodigality of life, arising from an exuberance of animal
spirits: we see them before us, their number, and their order of battle,
poured out upon the plain, "all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly
bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and
gorgeous as the sun at midsummer," covered with glittering armour, with
dust and blood; while the Gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or
mingle in the fray; and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy rise up
with reverence as Helen passes by them. The multitude of things in Homer
is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force, and variety. His
poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form: he describes
the bodies as well as the souls of men.
The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is
abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not
of multitude, but of immensity, it does not divide into many, but
aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It is
not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in
the world with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the
sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in
a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the
universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and a
scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense as it became
more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing: "If we fly
into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the
east or the west, we cannot escape from it." Man is thus aggrandised in
the image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is of this kind;
they are founders of the chosen race of people, the inheritors of the
earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. Their
poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and
infinite; a vision is upon it--an invisible hand is suspended over it. The
spirit of the Christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be
revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation, Providence took an immediate
share in the affairs of this life. Jacob's dream arose out of this
intimate communion between heaven and earth: it was this that let down, in
the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the
earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon
the lonely place, which can never pass away. The story of Ruth, again, is
as if all the depth of natural affection in the human race was involved in
her breast. There are descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal of
imagery, more intense in passion, than anything in Homer, as that of the
state of his prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night.
The metaphors in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative. Things were
collected more into masses, and gave a greater _momentum_ to the
imagination.
Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a place
in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic darkness
and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it to burst the thraldom in
which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every page. He
stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the
ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of antiquity dawning
through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its passage to the
other world. He was lost in wonder at what had been done before him, and
he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been indebted to the Bible for
the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for the prophetic fury which
exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is utterly unlike Homer. His genius
is not a sparkling flame, but the sullen heat of a furnace. He is power,
passion, self-will personified. In all that relates to the descriptive or
fanciful part of poetry, he bears no comparison to many who had gone
before, or who have come after him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in
his conceptions, which lies like a dead weight upon the mind; a benumbing
stupor, a breathless awe, from the intensity of the impression; a terrible
obscurity, like that which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of
interest, which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all
things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul,--that make
amends for all other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to
the mind are not much in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, and
order; but they become every thing by the force of the character he
impresses upon them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it
contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even
of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination
peoples the shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the
severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite
to the flowery and glittering; who relies most on his own power, and the
sense of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his
readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by
exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed.
He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been
created; but he seizes on the attention, by shewing us the effect they
produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same
thrilling and overwhelming sensation, which is caught by gazing on the
face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability of
the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are excessive: but
the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness of the author's
mind. Dante's great power is in combining internal feelings with external
objects. Thus the gate of hell, on which that withering inscription is
written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter
its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. This author
habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest
wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of
the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, "I am the
tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth": and half the personages whom he has
crowded into the Inferno are his own acquaintance. All this, perhaps,
tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and by
an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the
reader. He affords few subjects for picture. There is, indeed, one
gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a
bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted.
Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade
myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a
feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his
readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihed, Ossian is the decay
and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of the
past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all
other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of
friends, of good name, of country--he is even without God in the world. He
converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the motionless and
silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head; the
fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves its beard to the
wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as
the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the
dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of
the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the
substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things as in a mock
embrace, is here perfect. In this way, the lamentation of Selma for the
loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it were indeed possible to shew
that this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of
mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another
confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain, "Roll on,
ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian!"