The Function of the Poet and Other Essays / Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891

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THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL


COLLECTED AND EDITED BY
ALBERT MORDELL


KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y.

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET

1920 by Houghton Mifflin Company

Reissued in 1967 by Kennikat Press




PREFACE


The Centenary Celebration of James Russell Lowell last year showed that
he has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet.
Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work rather
than in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of his
life. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame of his youth did
not continue to glow, but he resigned himself to his fate; nevertheless,
it should be remembered that "The Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Biglow
Papers," and "The Commemoration Ode" are enough to make the reputation
of any poet.

The present volume sustains Lowell's right to be considered one of the
great American critics. The literary merit of some of the essays herein
is in many respects nowise inferior to that in some of the volumes he
collected himself. The articles are all exquisitely and carefully
written, and the style of even the book reviews displays that quality
found in his best writings which Ferris Greenslet has appropriately
described as "savory." That such a quantity of good literature by so
able a writer as Lowell should have been allowed to repose buried in the
files of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact that
Lowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute all
the more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews on
ephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in book
form.

The essays herein represent the matured author as they were written in
the latter part of his life, between his thirty-sixth and fifty-seventh
years. The only early essay is the one on Poe. It appeared in _Graham's
Magazine_ for February, 1845, and was reprinted by Griswold in his
edition of Poe. It has also been reprinted in later editions of Poe, but
has never been included in any of Lowell's works. This was no doubt due
to the slight break in the relations between Poe and Lowell, due to
Poe's usual accusations of plagiarism. The essay still remains one of
the best on Poe ever written.

Though Lowell became in later life quite conservative and academic, it
should not be thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberal
ideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, and
had good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first works
of Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men,
indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers will
enjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, the
raps at spiritualism here and there. Moreover, there is a passage in the
first essay showing that Lowell, before Freud, understood the
psychoanalytic theory of genius in its connection with childhood
memories. The passage follows Lowell's narration of the story of little
Montague.

None of the essays in this volume has appeared in book form except a few
fragments from some of the opening five essays which were reported from
Lowell's lectures in the _Boston Advertiser_, in 1855, and were
privately printed some years ago. Charles Eliot Norton performed a
service to the world when he published in the _Century Magazine_ in 1893
and 1894 some lectures from Lowell's manuscripts. These lectures are now
collected and form the first five essays in this book. I have also
retained Professor Norton's introductions and notes. Attention is called
to his remark that "The Function of the Poet" is not unworthy to stand
with Sidney's and Shelley's essays on poetry.

The rest of the essays in this volume appeared in Lowell's lifetime in
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _North American Review_, and the _Nation_.
They were all anonymous, but are assigned to Lowell by George Willis
Cooke in his "Bibliography of James Russell Lowell." Lowell was editor
of the _Atlantic_ from the time of its founding in 1857 to May, 1861. He
was editor of the _North American Review_ from January, 1864, to the
time he left for Europe in 1872. With one exception (that on "Poetry and
Nationalism" which formed the greater part of a review of the poems of
Howells's friend Piatt), all the articles from these two magazines,
reprinted in this volume, appeared during Lowell's editorship. These
articles include reviews of poems by his friends Longfellow and
Whittier. And in his review of "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Lowell
makes effective use of his scholarship to introduce a lengthy and
interesting discourse on the dactylic hexameter.

While we are on the subject of the New England poets a word about the
present misunderstanding and tendency to underrate them may not be out
of place. Because it is growing to be the consensus of opinion that the
two greatest poets America has produced are Whitman and Poe, it does not
follow that the New-Englanders must be relegated to the scrap-heap. Nor
do I see any inconsistency in a man whose taste permits him to enjoy
both the free verse and unpuritanic (if I may coin a word) poems of
Masters and Sandburg, and also Whittier's "Snow-Bound" and Longfellow's
"Courtship of Miles Standish." Though these poems are not profound,
there is something of the universal in them. They have pleasant
school-day memories for all of us and will no doubt have such for our
children.

Lowell's cosmopolitan tastes may be seen in his essays on men so
different as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows that
he even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray to
Dickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree with
him. As a young man he hated Swift, but he gives us a sane study of him.
The review of Plutarch's "Essays" edited by Goodwin, with an
introduction by Emerson, is also of interest.

The last essay in the volume on "A Plea for Freedom from Speech and
Figures of Speech-Makers" shows Lowell's satirical powers at their best.
Ferris Greenslet tells us, in his book on Lowell, that the Philip Vandal
whose eloquence Lowell ridicules is Wendell Phillips. The essay gives
Lowell's humorous comments on various matters, especially on
contemporary types of orators, reformers, and heroes. It represents
Lowell as he is most known to us, the Lowell who is always ready with
fun and who set the world agog with his "Biglow Papers."

Lowell's work as a critic dates from the rare volume "Conversations on
Some of the Old Poets," published in 1844 in his twenty-fifth year,
includes his best-known volumes "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows,"
and most fitly concludes with the "Latest Literary Essays," published in
the year of his death in 1891. My sincere hope is that this book will
not be found to be an unworthy successor to these volumes.

Though some of Lowell's literary opinions are old-fashioned to us (one
author even wrote an entire volume to demolish Lowell's reputation as a
critic), there is much in his work that the world will not let die. He
is highly regarded abroad, and he is one of the few men in our
literature who produced creative criticism.

Thanks and acknowledgments are due the _Century Magazine_ and the
literary representatives of Lowell, for permission to reprint in this
volume the first five essays, which are copyrighted and were published
in the _Century Magazine_.

ALBERT MORDELL

_Philadelphia, January 13, 1920_




CONTENTS


ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
  _Century Magazine_, January, 1894

HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
  _Century Magazine_, November, 1893

THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS (HOMER, DANTE,
CERVANTES, GOETHE, SHAKESPEARE)
  _Century Magazine_, December, 1893

THE IMAGINATION
  _Century Magazine_, March, 1894

CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
  _Century Magazine_, May, 1894
    I. Life in Literature and Language
    II. Style and Manner
    III. Kalevala


REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES

HENRY JAMES: JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES
  _The Nation_, June 24, 1875

LONGFELLOW: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
  _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1859

TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
  _North American Review_, January, 1864

WHITTIER: IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
  _North American Review_, January, 1864

HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
  _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1860

SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
  _North American Review_, April, 1866

POETRY AND NATIONALITY
  _North American Review_, October, 1868

W.D. HOWELLS: VENETIAN LIFE
  _North American Review_, October, 1866

EDGAR A. POE
  _Graham's Magazine_, February, 1845;
  R.W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)

THACKERAY: ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
  _North American Review_, April, 1864


TWO GREAT AUTHORS

SWIFT: FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT
  _The Nation_, April 13 and 20, 1876

PLUTARCH'S MORALS
  _North American Review_, April, 1871


A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
  _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1860




ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET


This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before
the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never
printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions
were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in
composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print.
How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the
broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his
essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and
1867--essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew,
though not treated at large.

But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the
enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths
it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression
of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline
alike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand with
Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm
and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less
than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture
Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."

_Charles Eliot Norton_

       *       *       *       *       *

Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a
great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in
friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels
out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the
development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up
out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest
pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions
that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what
little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
certain outward respects, but essentially the same.

And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer
and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the _epea
pteroenta_, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored
future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise
and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by,
as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is
Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey,"
"whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"--the gift of conferring
good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as
they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the
desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust,
because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the
future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their
ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries
ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have
poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up
by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some
provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for
a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The
historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as
they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave
them.

The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have
a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves
continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older
epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.
Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances;
for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the
generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for
a purposeless moment, and reenter the dark again after they have
performed the nothing they came for.

Gradually, however, the poet as the "seer" became secondary to the
"maker." His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher. But
always something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has now
come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing
is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep,
too. If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral,
that man is Shakespeare. But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which
does not see through his tragic--yes, and his comic--masks awful eyes
that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic
meaning--a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all
human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself
unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness
that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the
errand that was laid upon him:

  Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
  And made myself a motley to the view,
  Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
  Made old offences of affections new;
  Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
  Askance and strangely;

the application of which is made clear by the next sonnet, in which he
distinctly alludes to his profession.

There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets--that, however
in little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes a
great and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bear
themselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language. There
is not a mature play of Shakespeare's in which great ideas do not jut up
in mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces of
thought, and known afar to many kindreds of men.

And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for any
faculty of observation and description, that we value the poet. It is in
proportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not a
juggler with words. It is by means of this that for every generation of
man he plays the part of "namer." Before him, as before Adam, the
creation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then the
world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever a
great imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging the
outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away
in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth
beneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggests
the invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. His
imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his
characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also
perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract
thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.

Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel
something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of
contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change,
he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and
conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with
their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as
utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which
faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.
History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the
world for a village. This life could only become other than
phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something
that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power
unseen--that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits
stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy. In the "Odyssey"
we find pure allegory.

Now, under all these names--praiser, seer, soothsayer--we find the same
idea lurking. The poet is he who can best see and best say what is
ideal--what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he
celebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as it
appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still
clings to him; he is the revealer of Deity. He may be unconscious of his
mission; he may be false to it; but in proportion as he is a great poet,
he rises to the level of it the more often. He does not always directly
rebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel what
delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil, it is with
such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that
the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great
poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to
a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever
learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean
and bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly
on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that
they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead
of speaking the true universal language of imagination. He who
translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
is the reverse of a poet.

The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same
thing--imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him the
power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks
about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace,
which whoso has on understands the language of all created things. And
as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole
of himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said a
thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as
there are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than an
interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between
man and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, the
possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected
treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under
the dusty path of our daily life.

And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,--a thing which
enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,--but
all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the
dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping
news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately
ships,--"the city on the inconstant billows dancing,"--as there is
between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybody
remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to
the chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful
chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a
fair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw
himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and
fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced
together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the
visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to
him again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are
typified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscences
of the stately home of our childhood,--for we are all of us poets and
geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of
every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,--and we all remember
the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there. But
somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty
taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end--till
suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and
of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to our
true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature
that the poet reintroduces us.

But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power
of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank
materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show
its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was
sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or
no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
you so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bone
broken."

And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.

No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with
which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
the same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do we
depend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but upon
observation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternal
promontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lower
system.

But it seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late,
that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and all that is
left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
railroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in Brother
Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But because _he_
is a materialist, shall there be no more poets? When we have said that
we live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant more
than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at any
rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespeare
was richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such a
pair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his to
report it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, who
continues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less
than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he
lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not
sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his
little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more
quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have
drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of
affairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground for
the public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere
piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such
ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick
and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink.
It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespeare
received everything that came along,--of what a _present_ man he
was,--that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought into
England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.

It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for that very
reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation
contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. When the
poet comes, he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the
passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not
to have lived in Homer's day, or Dante's, but to be alive now. To be
alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live
in the past, and men yet unborn that live in the future. We are like
Hans in Luck, forever exchanging the burdensome good we have for
something else, till at last we come home empty-handed.

That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton
whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even
now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and
thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus
that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their
triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy,
looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to
behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted
and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when there
was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.

The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its
costume. And that is what makes it prosaic--that we have not faith
enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented
to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is
that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue
of Sir Robert Peel,--a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding
gracefully to the present,--in which the sculptor had done his best to
travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when
England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of
this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord
Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to
the rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, "Thus sat
Francis Bacon"--not "Cneius Pompeius"--"Viscount Verulam." Those men had
faith even in their own shoe-strings.

After all, how is our poor scapegoat of a nineteenth century to blame?
Why, for not being the seventeenth, to be sure! It is always raining
opportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago who
were intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up. We are like
beggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must be
counterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece of
familiar copper. And so, as we stand in our mendicancy by the wayside,
Time tosses carefully the great golden to-day into our hats, and we turn
it over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised at
finding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes. Till Dante's time
the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings
into but Latin,--and indeed a dead tongue was the best for dead
thoughts,--but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men
bargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of the
world around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang.

In our day, it is said despairingly, the understanding reigns
triumphant: it is the age of common sense. If this be so, the wisest way
would be to accept it manfully. But, after all, what is the meaning of
it? Looking at the matter superficially, one would say that a striking
difference between our science and that of the world's gray fathers is
that there is every day less and less of the element of wonder in it.
What they saw written in light upon the great arch of heaven, and, by a
magnificent reach of sympathy, of which we are incapable, associated
with the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only a
professor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn and
unapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanized
among the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in every
calyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The stars
can no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is a
conjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sends
thither its special reporter with his telescope. Over those arcana of
life where once a mysterious presence brooded, we behold scientific
explorers skipping like so many incarnate notes of interrogation. We pry
into the counsels of the great powers of nature, we keep our ears at the
keyhole, and know everything that is going to happen. There is no longer
any sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, and
life turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needs
no more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" We
have found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription upon
it, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted.

Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in our
cradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples the
day with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimation
of demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material for
thought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, as
sapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathy
with man or nature as a town history with its genealogies of Mr.
Nobody's great-grandparents.

We have utilized everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar
system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a
symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass
through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a
museum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum of
supernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has been
going on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern and
historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of
the death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic
imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus.

Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On those
sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.
It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see
farther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom of
a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all this
is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced
itself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are not
arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set
all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In my
opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful
than the discoveries themselves."

But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if it
would, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination. No two
men have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, that
something more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that a
logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as
every man's _own_ logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a
structure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring
together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one.
When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if a
leaf has fallen. I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in the
pulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have not sometimes
found the popular giant as provokingly insensible. The [sqrt of -x] is
nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower
which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day
of childhood. Demonstration may lead to the very gate of heaven, but
there she makes us a civil bow, and leaves us to make our way back again
to Faith, who has the key. That science which is of the intellect alone
steps with indifferent foot upon the dead body of Belief, if only she
may reach higher or see farther.

But we cannot get rid of our wonder--we who have brought down the wild
lightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be our
errand-boy and penny-postman. Wonder is crude imagination; and it is
necessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exact
knowledge is not enough. Do we get nearer the truth or farther from it
that we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit? We
go on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it? The evasive
genius flits into something else, and defies us. The powers of the outer
and inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connection
man is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps
it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was
vainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it
wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man of
science remakes the old spirit. But we seem to have created too many
wonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, when
asked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them. But
nature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best but
scotch it, not kill it. In this day of newspapers and electric
telegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole
continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as
Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!
Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster on
Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblin
is laid at last!"--and while I mused the tables were turning, and the
chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have a
neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed
out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son,
and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with
it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so
brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp.

It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
sort or other. If they cannot get the best they will get some substitute
for it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine's slur that it is wine
of devils. The mind bound down too closely to what is practical either
becomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wilderness
of "isms." The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted some
persons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and found
refreshment in taking a scalp now and then. Nature insists above all
things upon balance. She contrives to maintain a harmony between the
material and spiritual, nor allows the cerebrum an expansion at the cost
of the cerebellum. If the character, for example, run on one side into
religious enthusiasm, it is not unlikely to develop on the other a
counterpoise of worldly prudence. Thus the Shaker and the Moravian are
noted for thrift, and mystics are not always the worst managers. Through
all changes of condition and experience man continues to be a citizen of
the world of idea as well as the world of fact, and the tax-gatherers of
both are punctual.

And these antitheses which we meet with in individual character we
cannot help seeing on the larger stage of the world also, a moral
accompanying a material development. History, the great satirist, brings
together Alexander and the blower of peas to hint to us that the tube of
the one and the sword of the other were equally transitory; but
meanwhile Aristotle was conquering kingdoms out of the unknown, and
establishing a dynasty of thought from whose hand the sceptre has not
yet passed. So there are Charles V, and Luther; the expansion of trade
resulting from the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, and the
Elizabethan literature; the Puritans seeking spiritual El Dorados while
so much valor and thought were spent in finding mineral ones. It seems
to be the purpose of God that a certain amount of genius shall go to
each generation, particular quantities being represented by individuals,
and while no _one_ is complete in himself, all collectively make up a
whole ideal figure of a man. Nature is not like certain varieties of the
apple that cannot bear two years in succession. It is only that her
expansions are uniform in all directions, that in every age she
completes her circle, and like a tree adds a ring to her growth be it
thinner or thicker.

Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, the one trivial and
ordinary, the other sacred and recluse; the one which he carries to the
dinner-table and to his daily work, which grows old with his body and
dies with it, the other that which is made up of the few inspiring
moments of his higher aspiration and attainment, and in which his youth
survives for him, his dreams, his unquenchable longings for something
nobler than success. It is this life which the poets nourish for him,
and sustain with their immortalizing nectar. Through them he feels once
more the white innocence of his youth. His faith in something nobler
than gold and iron and cotton comes back to him, not as an upbraiding
ghost that wrings its pale hands and is gone, but beautiful and
inspiring as a first love that recognizes nothing in him that is not
high and noble. The poets are nature's perpetual pleaders, and protest
with us against what is worldly. Out of their own undying youth they
speak to ours. "Wretched is the man," says Goethe, "who has learned to
despise the dreams of his youth!" It is from this misery that the
imagination and the poets, who are its spokesmen, rescue us. The world
goes to church, kneels to the eternal Purity, and then contrives to
sneer at innocence and ignorance of evil by calling it green. Let every
man thank God for what little there may be left in him of his vernal
sweetness. Let him thank God if he have still the capacity for feeling
an unmarketable enthusiasm, for that will make him worthy of the society
of the noble dead, of the companionship of the poets. And let him love
the poets for keeping youth young, woman womanly, and beauty beautiful.

There is as much poetry as ever in the world if we only knew how to find
it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more
prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped
of material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying
mountain-farm of imagination, which did not appear in the schedule of
his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though he
never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great
poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.

There is no reason why our continent should not sing as well as the
rest. We have had the practical forced upon us by our position. We have
had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we are
descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright
wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the
Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or
they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are
States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.

But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poetical
people. Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men in
visible types. He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap of
invisibility and the purse of Fortunatus. These were once stories for
grown men, and not for the nursery as now. We are apt ignorantly to
wonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction the
absurdity of which any of our primary-school children could demonstrate.
But we forget that the world's gray fathers were children themselves,
and that in their little world, with its circle of the black unknown all
about it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in the
dark. Look at a child's toys, and we shall understand the matter well
enough. Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still),
at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which she
has been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, and
a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.

But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet. In her
railroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness. Fine-Ear herself
could not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listen
in Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans. And what need of
Aladdin's lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill? The
office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these
miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there
is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there
is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed
that fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the
lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul
of poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does not
seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the
"Merchant of Venice" in it. Themes of song are waiting everywhere for
the right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one can
pull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more trouble
than in plucking a violet.

John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford, many years ago,
reckoned the number of whale-ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as
a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that
those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever must
be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity,
but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that a
race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty
Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces.
Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every port
of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies
dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert
only flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot
Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space
occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!
They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible
as the soul.

Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not as the
mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme il
faut_ for a great nation, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy,
for its power of making men better by arousing in them a perception of
their own instincts for what is beautiful, and therefore sacred and
religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not
have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a
people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our
little mother-island sunk beneath the sea, or, worse, were she conquered
by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakespeare would be an immortal England,
and would conquer countries, when the bones of her last sailor had kept
their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched
thunders of her navy.

Old Purchas in his "Pilgrims" tells of a sacred caste in India who, when
they go out into the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world
out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And
it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to
pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever
of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in
the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its
activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty,
if it be bewildered or thwarted by an outward profession of faith
covering up a practical unbelief in anything higher and holier than the
world of sense, it will find vent in such wretched holes and corners as
table-tippings and mediums who sell news from heaven at a quarter of a
dollar the item. Imagination cannot be banished out of the world. She
may be made a kitchen-drudge, a Cinderella, but there are powers that
watch over her. When her two proud sisters, the intellect and
understanding, think her crouching over her ashes, she startles and
charms by her splendid apparition, and Prince Soul will put up with no
other bride.

The practical is a very good thing in its way--if it only be not another
name for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root
which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from
Parthia--which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they
were some great matter till he died.

One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes him
feel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankind
were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism
which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy old
world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany,
talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till
bedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and
beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. But
divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and
messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as
having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of
Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the
sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit
second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of
Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity,
"trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of
sunsets.

No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with every
child. It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon. Every age
says to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I am
like"; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, has
need of seers and will have them. Our time is not an unpoetical one. We
are in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces of
unsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though they
may be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone. It is nothing against us
that we are a commercial people. Athens was a trading community; Dante
and Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was already
commercial when she produced Shakespeare.

This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
the noble, and the true, will never cease out of the world till the God
from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselves
in an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as new
duties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of the
poet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soul
endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while
there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will
still send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hang
their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God with us is
forever the mystical name of the hour that is passing. The lives of the
great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt
most deeply the meaning of the present.




HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE

PREFATORY NOTE


In the winter of 1855, when Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a
course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His
subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive
lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the
imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first
characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the
advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads,"
especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of
real life--the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative
of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8,
Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On
Poetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotistic
imaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Function
and Prospects of Poetry."

These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period of
delivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, but
they came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues of
familiar studies and long reflection. No such criticism, at once
abundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished by
breadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, had
been heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiastic
audiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as the
ablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as the
foremost of American men of letters.

In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard
University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in
special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of
the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed
Minister of the United States to Spain.

During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses of
lectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they were
given more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject of
these courses was in general the "Study of Literature," treating in
different years of different special topics, from the literature of
Northern to that of Southern Europe, from the Kalevala and the
Niebelungen Lied to the Provencal poets; from Wolfram von Eschenbach to
Rousseau; from the cycle of romances of Charlemagne and his peers to
Dante and Shakespeare. Some of these lectures, or parts of them, were
afterward prepared for publication, with such changes as were required
to give them proper literary form; and the readers of Lowell's prose
works know what gifts of native power, what large and solid acquisitions
of learning, what wide and delightful survey of the field of life and of
letters, are to be found in his essays on Shakespeare, on Dante, on
Dryden, and on many another poet or prose writer. The abundance of his
resources as critic in the highest sense have never been surpassed, at
least in English literature.

But considerable portions of the earlier as well as of the later
lectures remain unprinted, partly, no doubt, because his points of view
changed with the growth of his learning, and the increasing depth as
well as breadth of his vision. There is but little in manuscript which
he would himself, I believe, have been inclined to print without
substantial change. Yet these unprinted remains contain so much that
seems to me to possess permanent value that, after some question and
hesitation, I have come to the conclusion that selections from them
should be published. The fragments must be read with the fact constantly
held in mind that they do not always represent Lowell's mature opinions;
that, in some instances, they give but the first form of thoughts
developed in other connections in one or other of his later essays; that
they have not received his last revision; that they have the form of
discourse addressed to the ear, rather than that of literary work
finished for the eye.

If so read, I trust that the reader, while he may find little in them to
increase Lowell's well-established reputation, may find much in them to
confirm a high estimate of his position as one of the rare masters of
English prose as well as one of the most capable of critics; much to
interest him alike in their intrinsic character, and in their
illustration of the life and thought of the writer; and much to make him
feel a keen regret that they are the final contributions of their author
to the treasures of English literature.

_Charles Eliot Norton_

       *       *       *       *       *

Hippel, the German satirist, divides the life of man into five periods,
according to the ruling desires which successively displace each other
in the human soul. Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, the
second for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourth
for money, and the fifth for a "place" in the country. I think he has
overlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point of
time--the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master of
a chamber to one's self.

How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that
independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!
How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small
chamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor pores
over the "Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks," his longing heightened
as the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney.
There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties his
pockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of the
housemaid. There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment of
Schwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel the
cool shadow of the discoverer's laurel. There the antiquary begins his
collections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistles
of Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late the
property of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate,
who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to make
his children the ornaments of society. There the potential Dibdin or
Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf--more fair to him
than the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe," and
"Gulliver," perhaps "Gil Blas," Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and
Rome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds," the "Parent's Assistant," and
(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," with other narratives
of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.
With these are admitted also "Viri Romae," Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and
even the Latin grammar, because they _count_, playing here upon these
mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators,
a role in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated
volumes--the "books without which no gentleman's library can be
complete."

I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery
of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was
first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of
that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my
unmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adorn
it. The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints
which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather's study,
but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story
till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther. These
were heads of ancient worthies[1]--Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca,
and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortly
banished again with a _quousque tandem!_ Besides those I have mentioned,
there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the
slave of tradition, I called Heraclitus--an error which my excellent
schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by
the judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded the
birth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree of
knowledge, whose advantages could Adam have enjoyed during early life,
he had known better than to have yielded to the temptation of any other.

[Footnote 1: Some readers may recall the reference to these "heads of
ancient wise men" in "An Interview with Miles Standish."--C.E.N.]

Well, over my chimney hung those two antithetical philosophers--the one
showing his teeth in an eternal laugh, while the tears on the cheek of
the other forever ran, and yet, like the leaves on Keats's Grecian urn,
could never be shed. I used to wonder at them sometimes, believing, as I
did firmly, that to weep and laugh had been respectively the sole
business of their lives. I was puzzled to think which had the harder
time of it, and whether it were more painful to be under contract for
the delivery of so many tears _per diem_, or to compel that [Greek:
anerithmon gelasma][1] I confess, I pitied them both; for if it be
difficult to produce on demand what Laura Matilda would call the "tender
dew of sympathy," he is also deserving of compassion who is expected to
be funny whether he will or no. As I grew older, and learned to look on
the two heads as types, they gave rise to many reflections, raising a
question perhaps impossible to solve: whether the vices and follies of
men were to be washed away, or exploded by a broadside of honest
laughter. I believe it is Southwell who says that Mary Magdalene went to
Heaven by water, and it is certain that the tears that people shed for
themselves are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved
by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers
should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber
enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while
on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves
of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits
they can upon their fat.

[Footnote 1: Countless--_i.e._, perpetual--smile.]

On the other hand, man has a wholesome dread of laughter, as he is the
only animal capable of that phenomenon--for the laugh of the hyena is
pronounced by those who have heard it to be no joke, and to be classed
with those [Greek: gelasmata agelasta] which are said to come from the
other side of the mouth. Whether, as Shaftesbury will have it, ridicule
be absolutely the test of truth or no, we may admit it to be relatively
so, inasmuch as by the _reductio ad absurdum_ it often shows that
abstract truth may become falsehood, if applied to the practical affairs
of life, because its relation to other truths equally important, or to
human nature, has been overlooked. For men approach truth from the
circumference, and, acquiring a knowledge at most of one or two points
of that circle of which God is the centre, are apt to assume that the
fixed point from which it is described is that where they stand.
Moreover, "Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat?"

I side rather with your merry fellow than with Dr. Young when he says:

  Laughter, though never censured yet as sin,
       *       *       *       *       *
  Is half immoral, be it much indulged;
  By venting spleen, or dissipating thought,
  It shows a scorner, or it makes a fool;
  And sins, as hurting others or ourselves.
       *       *       *       *       *
  Yet would'st thou laugh (but at thine own expense),
  This counsel strange should I presume to give--
  "Retire, and read thy Bible, to be gay."

With shame I confess it, Dr. Young's "Night Thoughts" have given me as
many hearty laughs as any humorous book I ever read.

Men of one idea,--that is, who have one idea at a time,--men who
accomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, are
inevitably destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be
great and noble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversity
of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a
single idea, and that a small and rickety one--some seven months' child
of thought--that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to
the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no
satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if
Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For
example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy
to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two
hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick
Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great
antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in
Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person
who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm,
the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine
to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm
likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would
have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the
spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an
epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"
exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's
axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable
satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I
have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks,
Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never
succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the
collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus
unconsciously by our passive enthusiast?

I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see
certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of
the comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without
laughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the _haruspex haruspicem_)
and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secret
I will keep yours." In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be
implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body
and soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm
would lead us an endless dance.

The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of one
idea--for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two. He is the
universal disenchanter. He makes himself quite as much the subject of
ironical study as his neighbor. Is he inclined to fancy himself a great
poet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sit
down because a certain part of him was made of glass, and muses
smilingly, "There are many forms of hypochondria." This duality in his
mind which constitutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of his
character. He is futile in action because in every path he is confronted
by the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusion
that nothing is very much worth the while. If he be independent of
exertion, his life commonly runs to waste. If he turn author, it is
commonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and "Don Quixote" was
the fruit of a debtors' prison.

It seems to be an instinct of human nature to analyze, to define, and to
classify. We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away in
the mind, and feel as if we knew them better when we have named them.
And so to a certain extent we do. The mere naming of things by their
appearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom;
and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combines
appearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the senses
by impression, is poetry. A great part of criticism is scientific, but
as the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possible
in this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far as
that, at some kind of classification that may help us toward that
excellent property--compactness of mind.

Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodness
produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say that
this was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is there
in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne,
Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic of
all of them. Ben Jonson says that

  When some one peculiar quality
  Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
  All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
  In their constructions all to run one way,
  This may be truly said to be a humor.

But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,--of a good
subject for the humorist,--such as Don Quixote, for example.

Humor--taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous,
and to give it expression--seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.
Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused
through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great
comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their
faces, or before they have spoken a word.

The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the
understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the
English, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let us
not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take
the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.
Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which
arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the
impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great
humorist, defines it thus:

    Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to
    set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it
    beside the great--that it may annihilate both, because in the
    presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal,
    only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality,
    the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance
    of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of
    little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the
    Scoffer.

We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor,
while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of
lightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without our
being able to put our finger on any passage, and say, "It is here." Wit
must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wise
deacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of human
natur' in man," he might have added that there was a good deal more in
some men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may be
humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence
of mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase,
this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be
instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and its
impression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. As Galiani said of
Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes
every time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime
oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art of
saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where
it is forbidden to say anything." Wit must also have the quality of
unexpectedness. "Sometimes," says Barrow, "an affected simplicity,
sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it rises
only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty
wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one
knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are
unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless
rovings of fancy and windings of language."

That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected
likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at
what is called a _conceit_, which has all the qualities of wit--except
wit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long
poem called "Albion's England," which had an immense contemporary
popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of
language. In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.
Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,

  Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
  Soft were those lips that bled.[1]

[Footnote 1: This, and one or two of the following illustrations, were
used again by Mr. Lowell in his "Shakespeare Once More": _Works_
(Riverside edition), III, 53.]

This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good
as a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a
pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have
been,--to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,--it
should read:

  Hard was the _hand_ that gave the blow,
  Soft were those lips that bled,

for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word "hard" as
applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper
logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which
belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:

  Her heart and morning broke together
  In tears,

which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might
almost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionally
violated in the word _broke_, and the sentence becomes absurd, though
not funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of
the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it,
though here, again, there would be no true wit:

  His heart and Biddle broke together
  On 'change.

Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of
"Hudibras," certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose
wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost
rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a
contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject. Butler says of loyalty
that it is

  True as the dial to the sun
  Although it be not shined upon.

Now what is the difference between this and the examples from Warner and
Morris which I have just quoted? Simply that the comparison turning upon
the word _true_, the mind is satisfied, because the analogy between the
word as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave no
gap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over. But it is precisely this
jolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discompose
our thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the object
of a pun to give us. Wit of this kind treats logic with every possible
outward demonstration of respect--"keeps the word of promise to the ear,
and breaks it to the sense." Dean Swift's famous question to the man
carrying the hare, "Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?" is
perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an
equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood
abounds in examples of this sort of fun--only that his analogies are of
a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old sailor he
says,

  His head was turned, and so he chewed
  His pigtail till he died.

This is inimitable, like all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is
perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind
is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical _non sequiturs_. And
yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in
the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of his
ear-trumpet:

  I don't pretend with horns of mine,
  Like some in the advertising line,
  To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales
  That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale's.

  There was Mrs. F. so very deaf
  That she might have worn a percussion cap
  And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
  Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
  She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.

Again, his definition of deafness:

  Deaf as the dog's ears in Enfield's "Speaker."

So, in his description of the hardships of the wild beasts in the
menagerie,

  Who could not even prey
  In their own way,

and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning
with the lion; but

  Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
  When Nero bolted him.

In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit
always suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostling
together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.
Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down in
a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but
once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn,
they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. In
the droll complaint of the lover,

  Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
  But why did you kick me down-stairs?

the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the
word "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking
downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.
Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole
sentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment of
Huon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that
makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.

Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as
distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so
full is it of quaint fancy:

  Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
  As but the offscouring of the British sand,
  And so much earth as was contributed
  By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
  Or what by ocean's slow alluvium fell
  Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
  This indigestful vomit of the sea
  Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

  Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore
  They, with mad labor, fished their land to shore,
  And dived as desperately for each piece
  Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese
  Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
  Less than what building swallows bear away,
  Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll.
  Transfusing into them their sordid soul.

  How did they rivet with gigantic piles
  Thorough the centre their new-catched miles,
  And to the stake a struggling country bound,
  Where barking waves still bait the forced ground!

  Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid.
  And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played,
  As if on purpose it on land had come
  To show them what's their _mare liberum_;
  The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
  And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest;
  And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs tan
  Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban,
  And, as they over the new level ranged,
  For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.
  Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
  Something like government among them brings;
  And as among the blind the blinkard reigns
  So rules among the drowned he that drains;
  Who best could know to pump on earth a leak,
  Him they their lord and Country's Father speak.
  To make a bank was a great plot of state,
  Invent a shovel and be a magistrate;
  Hence some small dykegrave, unperceived, invades
  The power, and grows, as 't were, a king of spades.

I have cited this long passage not only because Marvell (both in his
serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is
as good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off
into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that
constitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny,
hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an
epigram of two lines:

  Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
  May man undam you and God damn you all.

Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the
most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus," and
wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a
place "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat," and this
hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is
certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the
Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and
disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But
commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him
rather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an example
from the "Day of Judgment":

  With a whirl of thought oppressed
  I sank from reverie to rest,
  A horrid vision seized my head,
  I saw the graves give up their dead!
  Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
  And thunder roars, and lightning flies!
  Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
  The world stands trembling at his throne!
  While each pale sinner hung his head,
  Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said:
  "Offending race of human kind;
  By nature, reason, learning, blind,
  You who through frailty stepped aside.
  And you who never fell through pride,
  You who in different sects were shammed,
  And come to see each other damned
  (So some folks told you--but they knew
  No more of Jove's designs than you)--
  The world's mad business now is o'er,
  And I resent these pranks no more--
  I to such blockheads set my wit!
  I damn such fools! Go, go! you're bit!"

The unexpectedness of the conclusion here, after the somewhat solemn
preface, is entirely of the essence of wit. So, too, is the sudden flirt
of the scorpion's tail to sting you. It is almost the opposite of humor
in one respect--namely, that it would make us think the solemnest things
in life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humor
delights in exposing. This further difference is also true: that wit
makes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none of
its point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and droller
the oftener we read it. If we cannot safely deny that Swift was a
humorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gone
through the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid. We should
never forget that he died mad. Satirists of this kind, while they have
this quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower,
differ from their nobler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is always
to the disadvantage of the higher. They purposely disenchant us--while
the others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted at
all.

Ben Jonson, who had in respect of sturdy good sense very much the same
sort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose "Discoveries," as he
calls them, are well worth reading for the sound criticism they contain,
says:

    The parts of a comedy are the same with [those of] a tragedy, and
    the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach: the
    comics are called _didaskaloi_[1] of the Greeks, no less than the
    tragics. Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy;
    that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling.
    For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in
    comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's
    nature without a disease. As a wry face moves laughter, or a
    deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using
    her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made
    the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise
    man. So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in
    the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly
    stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And
    therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests
    upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and
    sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did
    move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and
    scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands
    the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.

[Footnote 1: Teachers.]

He then goes on to say of Aristophanes that

    he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous,
    oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be
    corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter
    with that beast the multitude. They love nothing that is right and
    proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them
    the better it is.

In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a
little bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructed
according to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault
in comedy. I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniably
true, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon the
stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the
writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than
as movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the
greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in
limbo, qualifies him with the title of _satiro_.

But if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?
Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor? Yes; but, as it
appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree,
from any other ancient. I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies
not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends,
but for the fun of the thing. I am so poor a Grecian that I have no
doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. But
even through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out
more or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was a
master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands--puts forth
buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it
feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.
Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps
we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts
as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent
being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems
too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the
definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true
flavor of Falstaff in him--"a million a minute and your expenses paid."
As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file." Now
they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come
tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the
circus, with a "Here we are!" I can think of nothing like it but
Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the _go_
out of words. They do not merely play with words; they romp with them,
tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.

I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in "The Clouds" or "The
Birds," but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs," nor does
the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of
humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he
has nothing like the scene in "The Frogs," where Bacchus is terrified
with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries,
and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor
tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess,
the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the
ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been
degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within
the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those
hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet
saw in Tartary?

Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on
the same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, the
greatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not,--and I am inclined
to believe he did,--he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his
esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human
character--the imagination and understanding. There is a great deal more
than this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book is
often little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested. The
plot is of the meagrest. A country gentleman of La Mancha, living very
much by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances of
chivalry, becomes at last the victim of a monomania on this one subject,
and resolves to revive the order of chivalry in his own proper person.
He persuades a somewhat prosaic neighbor of his to accompany him as
squire. They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which
they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting.
Now if this were all of "Don Quixote," it would be simply broad farce,
as it becomes in Butler's parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far
as mere external characteristics are concerned. The latter knight and
his squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficient
reason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that they
furnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom. They
represent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing.

I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfect
character ever drawn. As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense,
always a gentleman,--that is, as he is guilty of no crime that is
technically held to operate in defeasance of his title to that name as a
man of the world,--so is Don Quixote, in everything that does not
concern his monomania, a perfect gentleman and a good Christian besides.
He is not the merely technical gentleman of three descents--but the
_true_ gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness,
generosity, and fear of God can make. And with what consummate skill are
the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just
so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill
event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from
his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's
treatment of him in the second part--which followed the other after an
interval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they delude
themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides
shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castle
are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.

Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooner
or later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal good
by material means. Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is the
type of the man with common sense. He always sees things in the daylight
of reason. He is never taken in by his master's theory of
enchanters,--although superstitious enough to believe such things
possible,--but he _does_ believe, despite all reverses, in his promises
of material prosperity and advancement. The island that has been
promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before
Macbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And,
fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island
of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate--because statesmanship
depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on
precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.




THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS

(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)


The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result
in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of
ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such
men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light
upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as
the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an
accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the
scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth
only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to
know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were
contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting
with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from
the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the
New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise
and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy
and cumbrous--the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men;
generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space,
mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of
something better than provincial scholarship.

But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier
moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can
say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long
steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the
carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts.
What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vast
combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up
to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with all
large mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the first
solid result of thought, however small--the nucleus of speculation. The
true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and
sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of
science.

It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it
democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy
of thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it has
taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it
has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of
reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had few
books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it
over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.
Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and
precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would
hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of
Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books;
for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift.
When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three
hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently
survived until our day.

In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we
admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those
better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon
that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is
deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is
forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual
progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his
dethroned gods.

There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very
few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I
should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so
universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally
true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European
branch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and there
needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than
this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the "Iliad" and the
"Odyssey." The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work
of one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so
nobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I should
place the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, in which the history of the
spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of
outline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same
universal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural man
set before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squire
Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature--the
imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. This
is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly
independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural
history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the
projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable
result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only
ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally
represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral
significance there may be in certain episodes of the "Odyssey," the man
of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the
understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive.
There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is
nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry,
than that passage in the eleventh book of the "Odyssey," where the shade
of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest
shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades
of Hades. Dante's poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man
from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral
conversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the great
camp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so
representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all
men. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction
between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the
transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect;
and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual
culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness,
and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, but
human, and record certain phases of man's nature, certain stages of his
moral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It will
remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it
remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and
harmonious development.

I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a
different category. Though they mark the very highest level of human
genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the
individual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life
as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain
definite conditions. We all of us _may_ be in the position of Macbeth or
Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds
potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of
our common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books I
have mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us grow
up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time,
sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape
our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with
Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and
with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the
intellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do not
mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them,
in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and
perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts
for their permanence, and insures their immortality.




THE IMAGINATION[1]


[Footnote 1: A small portion of this lecture appeared at the time of its
delivery, in January, 1855, in a report printed in the _Boston Daily
Advertiser_.]

Imagination is the wings of the mind; the understanding, its feet. With
these it may climb high, but can never soar into that ampler ether and
diviner air whence the eye dominates so uncontrolled a prospect on every
hand. Through imagination alone is something like a creative power
possible to man. It is the same in Aeschylus as in Shakespeare, though
the form of its manifestation varies in some outward respects from age
to age. Being the faculty of vision, it is the essential part of
expression also, which is the office of all art.

But in comparing ancient with modern imaginative literature, certain
changes especially strike us, and chief among them a stronger infusion
of sentiment and what we call the picturesque. I shall endeavor to
illustrate this by a few examples. But first let us discuss imagination
itself, and give some instances of its working.

"Art," says Lord Verulam, "is man added to Nature" (_homo additus
naturae_); and we may modernize his statement, and adapt it to the
demands of aesthetics, if we define art to be Nature infused with and
shaped by the imaginative faculty of man; thus, as Bacon says elsewhere,
"conforming the shows of things to the desires of the mind." Art always
platonizes: it results from a certain finer instinct for form, order,
proportion, a certain keener sense of the rhythm there is in the eternal
flow of the world about us, and its products take shape around some idea
preexistent in the mind, are quickened into life by it, and strive
always (cramped and hampered as they are by the limitations and
conditions of human nature, of individual temperament, and outward
circumstances) toward ideal perfection--toward what Michelangelo called

  Ideal form, the universal mould.

Shakespeare, whose careless generalizations have often the exactness of
scientific definitions, tells us that

  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
  Are of imagination all compact;

that

              as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name.

And a little before he had told us that

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
  More than cool reason ever comprehends.

Plato had said before him (in his "Ion") that the poet is possessed by a
spirit not his own, and that he cannot poetize while he has a particle
of understanding left. Again he says that the bacchantes, possessed by
the god, drink milk and honey from the rivers, and cannot believe, _till
they recover their senses_, that they have been drinking mere water.
Empedocles said that "the mind could only conceive of fire by being
fire."

All these definitions imply in the imaginative faculty the capabilities
of ecstasy and possession, that is, of projecting itself into the very
consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by
the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the
tone, the color, and the temperature thereof. Shakespeare is the highest
example of this--for example, the parting of Romeo and Juliet. There the
poet is so possessed by the situation, has so mingled his own
consciousness with that of the lovers, that all nature is infected too,
and is full of partings:

  Look, love, what envious streaks
  Do lace the _severing_ clouds in yonder east.

In Shelley's "Cenci," on the other hand, we have an instance of the
poet's imagination giving away its own consciousness to the object
contemplated, in this case an inanimate one.

  Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
  Crosses a deep ravine; 't is rough and narrow,
  And winds with short turns down the precipice;
  And in its depth there is a mighty rock
  Which has, from unimaginable years,
  Sustained itself with terror and with toil
  Over a gulf, and with the agony
  With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
  Even as a wretched soul hour after hour
  Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
  And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
  In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag,
  Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
  The melancholy mountain yawns.

The hint of this Shelley took from a passage in the second act of
Calderon's "Purgatorio de San Patricio."

  No ves ese penasco que parece
  Que se esta sustentando con trabajo,
  Y con el ansia misma que padece
  Ha tantos siglos que se viene abajo?

which, retaining the measure of the original, may be thus paraphrased:

  Do you not see that rock there which appeareth
  To hold itself up with a throe appalling,
  And, through the very pang of what it feareth,
  So many ages hath been falling, falling?

You will observe that in the last instance quoted the poet substitutes
his own _impression_ of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his
own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all
sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose
excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the
main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its
excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and
healthy expression. Thus Shakespeare in his ninety-seventh sonnet:

  How like a winter hath my absence been
  From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
  What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
  What old December's bareness everywhere!
  And yet this time remov'd was summer's time.

It is only when it becomes a habit, instead of a mood of the mind, that
it is a token of disease. Then it is properly dyspepsia,
liver-complaint--what you will, but certainly not imagination as the
handmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: one
as the _plastic_ or _shaping_ faculty, which gives form and proportion,
and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unity
foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as
the _realizing_ energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts,
not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and
coherence.

We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, in
the one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intense
sympathy--a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as a
Cordelia, a Caliban as a Prospero. There is a passage in Chaucer's
"House of Fame" which very prettily illustrates this latter function:

  Whan any speche yeomen ys
  Up to the paleys, anon ryght
  Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
  Which that the worde in erthe spak,
  Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
  And so were hys lykenesse,
  And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
  That it the same body be,
  Man or woman, he or she.

We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind
of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive,
sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of
body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "the
dull substance of his flesh were thought." It is not in mere intensity
of phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, or
the situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witness
of itself in expression. I know nothing more profoundly imaginative
therefore in its bald simplicity than a line in Webster's "Duchess of
Malfy." Ferdinand has procured the murder of his sister the duchess.
When her dead body is shown to him he stammers out:

  Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

The difference between subjective and objective in poetry would seem to
be that the aim of the former is to express a mood of the mind, often
something in itself accidental and transitory, while that of the latter
is to convey the impression made upon the mind by something outside of
it, but taken up into the mind and idealized (that is, stripped of all
unessential particulars) by it. The one would fain set forth your view
of the thing (modified, perhaps, by your breakfast), the other would set
forth the very thing itself in its most concise individuality.
Subjective poetry may be profound and imaginative if it deal with the
primary emotions of our nature, with the soul's inquiries into its own
being and doing, as was true of Wordsworth; but in the very proportion
that it is profound, its range is limited. Great poetry should have
breadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere on
the open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on their
occasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploring
expeditions among the crypts of metaphysics.

But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengage
what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse
the vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things are
gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. It
is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that
can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to
itself. That the power of abstraction has something to do with the
imagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is a
dramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep.
His acquaintances walk and talk before him on the stage of dream
precisely as in life. When he wakes, his genius has flown away with his
sleep. It was indeed nothing more than that his mind was not distracted
by the multiplicity of details which the senses force upon it by day. He
thinks of Smith, and it is no longer a mere name on a doorplate or in a
directory; but Smith himself is there, with those marvellous
commonplaces of his which, could you only hit them off when you were
awake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too,
that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforced
his remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the corner
of the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a week
of newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination
_bodies forth_? It is indeed the _verbum caro factum_--the word made
flesh and blood.

I said that the imagination always idealizes, that in its highest
exercise, for example, as in the representation of character, it goes
behind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types of
human nature, as in Don Quixote and Hamlet, Antigone and Cordelia,
Alcestis and Amelia. By this I mean that those features are most
constantly insisted upon, not in which they differ from other men but
from other kinds of men. For example, Don Quixote is never set before us
as a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when you
analyze it, of a very noble kind--nothing less, indeed, than devotion to
an unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginative
men for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats and
disillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice at
intervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one of
Beethoven's symphonies, a kind of clue to guide us through those
intricacies of harmony. So in Lear, one of Shakespeare's profoundest
psychological studies, the weakness of the man is emphasized, as it
were, and forced upon our attention by his outbreaks of impotent
violence; so in Macbeth, that imaginative bias which lays him open to
the temptation of the weird sisters is suggested from time to time
through the whole tragedy, and at last unmans him, and brings about his
catastrophe in his combat with Macduff. This is what I call ideal and
imaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries of
character, not by arbitrary lines drawn at this angle or that, according
to the whim of the tracer, but by those mountain-ranges of human nature
which divide man from man and temperament from temperament. And as the
imagination of the reader must reinforce that of the poet, reducing the
generic again to the specific, and defining it into sharper
individuality by a comparison with the experiences of actual life, so,
on the other hand, the popular imagination is always poetic, investing
each new figure that comes before it with all the qualities that belong
to the genus; Thus Hamlet, in some one or other of his characteristics
has been the familiar of us all, and so from an ideal and remote figure
is reduced to the standard of real and contemporary existence; while
Bismarck, who, if we knew him, would probably turn out to be a
comparatively simple character, is invested with all the qualities which
have ever been attributed to the typical statesman, and is clearly as
imaginative a personage as the Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's "Don
Carlos." We are ready to accept any _coup de theatre_ of him. Now, this
prepossession is precisely that for which the imagination of the poet
makes us ready by working on our own.

But there are also lower levels on which this idealization plays its
tricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may be
called the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to
delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from the
associations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroic
stature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar face
in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the
countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful
reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most
penetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ of
expression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor were
wrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at any
rate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual and
trivial. Their stage showed nothing that could be met in the streets. We
barbarians, on the other hand, take delight precisely in that. We admire
the novels of Trollope and the groups of Rogers because, as we say, they
are so _real_, while it is only because they are so matter-of-fact, so
exactly on the level with our own trivial and prosaic apprehensions.
When Dante lingers to hear the dispute between Sinon and Master Adam,
Virgil, type of the higher reason and the ideal poet, rebukes him, and
even angrily.

  E fa ragion ch'io ti sia sempre allato
  Si piu avvien che fortuna t' accoglia
  Ove sien genti in simigliante piato;
  Che voler cio udire e bassa voglia.

  Remember, _I_ am always at thy side,
  If ever fortune bring thee once again
  Where there are people in dispute like this,
  For wishing to hear that is vulgar wish.

Verse is another of these expedients for producing that frame of mind,
that prepossession, on the part of hearer or reader which is essential
to the purpose of the poet, who has lost much of his advantage by the
invention of printing, which obliges him to appeal to the eye rather
than the ear. The rhythm is no arbitrary and artificial contrivance. It
was suggested by an instinct natural to man. It is taught him by the
beating of his heart, by his breathing, hastened or retarded by the
emotion of the moment. Nay, it may be detected by what seems the most
monotonous of motions, the flow of water, in which, if you listen
intently, you will discover a beat as regular as that of the metronome.
With the natural presumption of all self-taught men, I thought I had
made a discovery in this secret confided to me by Beaver Brook, till
Professor Peirce told me it was always allowed for in the building of
dams. Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not only
metre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outward
nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray
out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to
spray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands
an embodied ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of proportion, number,
and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen the
blue river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been ravished by the
visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and
downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
vault below? At least there can be no doubt that metre, by its
systematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes the
senses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself in
sympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predisposition
to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose
of the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right
way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own
sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The right
reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary
condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mind
both in poet and hearer. The imagination must be sensitized ere it will
take the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced and
fixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun. Then
that becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of the
brain. Your own passion must penetrate and mingle with that of the
artist that you may interpret him aright. You must, I say, be
prepossessed, for it is the mind which shapes and colors the reports of
the senses. Suppose you were expecting the bell to toll for the burial
of some beloved person and the church-clock should begin to strike. The
first lingering blow of the hammer would beat upon your very heart, and
thence the shock would run to all the senses at once; but after a few
strokes you would be undeceived, and the sound would become commonplace
again. On the other hand, suppose that at a certain hour you knew that a
criminal was to be executed; then the ordinary striking of the clock
would have the sullen clang of a funeral bell. So in Shakespeare's
instance of the lover, does he not suddenly find himself sensible of a
beauty in the world about him before undreamed of, because his passion
has somehow got into whatever he sees and hears? Will not the rustle of
silk across a counter stop his pulse because it brings back to his sense
the odorous whisper of Parthenissa's robe? Is not the beat of the
horse's hoofs as rapid to Angelica pursued as the throbs of her own
heart huddling upon one another in terror, while it is slow to Sister
Anne, as the pulse that pauses between hope and fear, as she listens on
the tower for rescue, and would have the rider "spur, though mounted on
the wind"?

Dr. Johnson tells us that that only is good poetry which may be
translated into sensible prose. I greatly doubt whether any very
profound emotion can be so rendered. Man is a metrical animal, and it is
not in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joy
over the new centre of hope and terror that is sucking life from her
breast. Translate passion into sensible prose and it becomes absurd,
because subdued to workaday associations, to that level of common sense
and convention where to betray intense feeling is ridiculous and
unmannerly. Shall I ask Shakespeare to translate me his love "still
climbing trees in the Hesperides"? Shall I ask Marlowe how Helen could
"make him immortal with a kiss," or how, in the name of all the Monsieur
Jourdains, at once her face could "launch a thousand ships and burn the
topless towers of Ilion"? Could Aeschylus, if put upon the stand, defend
his making Prometheus cry out,

  O divine ether and swift-winged winds,
  Ye springs of rivers, and of ocean waves
  The innumerable smile, all mother Earth,
  And Helios' all-beholding round, I call:
  Behold what I, a god, from gods endure!

Or could Lear justify his

  I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
  I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you children!

No; precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain
any more than we can describe a perfume. There is a little quatrain of
Gongora's quoted by Calderon in his "Alcalde of Zalamea" which has an
inexplicable charm for me:

  Las flores del romero,
    Nina Isabel,
  Hoy son flores azules,
    Y manana seran miel.

If I translate it, 't is nonsense, yet I understand it perfectly, and it
will, I dare say, outlive much wiser things in my memory. It is the very
function of poetry to free us from that witch's circle of common sense
which holds us fast in its narrow enchantment. In this disenthralment,
language and verse have their share, and we may say that language also
is capable of a certain idealization. Here is a passage from the XXXth
song of Drayton's "Poly-Olbion":

  Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every Hill
  Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring valleys fill;
  Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
  From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
  From whose stone-trophied head, it on to Wendrosse went,
  Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent,
  That Broadwater therewith within her banks astound,
  In sailing to the sea, told it in Egremound.

This gave a hint to Wordsworth, who, in one of his "Poems on the Naming
of Places," thus prolongs the echo of it:

  Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
  That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
  The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
  Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again;
  The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
  Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
  And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
  A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
  And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
  Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
  Carried the Lady's voice,--old Skiddaw blew
  His speaking-trumpet;--back out of the clouds
  Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
  And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.

Now, this passage of Wordsworth I should call the
idealization of that of Drayton, who becomes poetical
only in the "stone-trophied head of Dunbalrase";
and yet the thought of both poets is the same.

Even what is essentially vulgar may be idealized by seizing and dwelling
on the generic characteristics. In "Antony and Cleopatra" Shakespeare
makes Lepidus tipsy, and nothing can be droller than the drunken gravity
with which he persists in proving himself capable of bearing his part in
the conversation. We seem to feel the whirl in his head when we find his
mind revolving round a certain fixed point to which he clings as to a
post. Antony is telling stories of Egypt to Octavius, and Lepidus, drawn
into an eddy of the talk, interrupts him:

  _Lepidus_: You gave strange serpents there.

  _Antony_ [_trying to shake him off_]: Ay, Lepidus.

  _Lepidus_: Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud
  by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.

  _Antony_ [_thinking to get rid of him_]: They are so.

Presently Lepidus has revolved again, and continues, as if he had been
contradicted:

  Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies' pyramises
  are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard
  that.

And then, after another pause, still intent on proving himself sober, he
asks, coming round to the crocodile again:

  What manner o' thing is your crocodile?

Antony answers gravely:

  It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath
  breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own
  organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements
  once out of it, it transmigrates.

  _Lepidus_: What color is it of?

  _Antony_: Of its own color, too.

  _Lepidus_ [_meditatively_]: 'T is a strange serpent.

The ideal in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades
embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the
dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic
sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though
these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this
that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was
supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and
something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg
encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas
the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the
mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this
was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and
personification with that typical expression which is the true function
of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.

        Revenge impatient rose;
  He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
        And, with a withering look,
      The war-denouncing trumpet took,
      And blew a blast so loud and dread,
    Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of