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In the application of these principles to purposes of practical
criticism as employed in the appraisal of works more or less imperfect,
I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which
may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as
distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by
accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the
inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation,
I could not, I thought, do better than keep before me the earliest
work of the greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced,
our myriad-minded Shakespeare. I mean the _Venus and Adonis_, and the
_Lucrece_; works which give at once strong promises of the strength,
and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these
I abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic
genius in general.
I. In the _Venus and Adonis_ the first and obvious excellence is the
perfect sweetness of the versification, its adaptation to the subject,
and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without
passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by
the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of
melody predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound,
even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the
result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable
promise in the compositions of a young man. "The man that hath not
music in his soul" can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery (even
taken from nature, much more when transplanted from books, as travels,
voyages, and works of natural history), affecting incidents, just
thoughts, interesting personal or domestic feelings, and with these
the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem,
may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talents
and much reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an
intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius; the
love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But
the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a
gift of imagination; and this, together with the power of reducing
multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by
some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved,
but can never be learnt. It is in these that _Poeta nascitur non fit_.
2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote
from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself.
At least I have found that where the subject is taken immediately from
the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of
a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious
pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of
the statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs
of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but
indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's
praises, modestly acknowledged that she herself had been his constant
model. In the _Venus and Adonis_ this proof of poetic power exists
even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit, more
intuitive, more intimately conscious even than the characters
themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux
and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were
placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating
in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement which
had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit, in so vividly
exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I
think I should have conjectured from these poems that even then the
great instinct which impelled the poet to the drama was secretly working
in him, prompting him by a series and never-broken chain of imagery,
always vivid, and because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort
of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps
than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted; to
provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant
intervention and running comment by tone, look, and gesture, which,
in his dramatic works, he was entitled to expect from the players. His
Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole
representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You
seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is
that from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of
the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful
nature of the thoughts and images; and, above all, from the alienation,
and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the
poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and
the analyst; that, though the very subject cannot but detract from the
pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a
moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more
offensively, Wieland has done; instead of degrading and deforming
passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of
concupiscence, Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse
itself so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the
reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful,
now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery;
or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent
witty or profound reflections which the poet's ever active mind has
deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The
reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely
passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened
be brooded on by mean and instinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can
creep upon the surface of a lake while a strong gale is driving it
onward in waves and billows.
3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though
faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words,
do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of
original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant
passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion;
or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or
succession to an instant; or, lastly, when a human and intellectual
life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit,
Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.
In the two following lines, for instance, there is nothing
objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their
proper place, part of a descriptive poem:
Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd
Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.
But with the small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally
in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The
same image will rise into a semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:
Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,
By twilight-glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee
From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
Streaming before them.
I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of
that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which
Shakespeare, even in his earliest as in his latest works, surpasses
all other poets. It is by this that he still gives a dignity and a
passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous
excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
_Flatter_ the mountain-tops with sovereign eye.
--_Sonnet_ 33.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage:
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh: and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
--_Sonnet_ 107.
As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic
genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to
the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the
mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence the reader's own
memory will refer him to the _Lear, Othello,_ in short, to which not
of the _'great, ever living, dead man's'_ dramatic works? _Inopem me
copia fecit_. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed
in the instance of love in
_Sonnet_ 98:
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April drest in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were, but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still and, you away,
_As with your shadow I with these did play!_
Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark
[Greek text, transliterated]
Gonzmou men Poihtou----------
----------ostis rhma gennaion lakoi,
will the imagery supply when, with more than the power of the painter,
the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling
of simultaneousness!
With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace
Of those fair arms, that bound him to her breast,
And homeward through the dark laund runs apace:
_Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky!
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye._
--_Venus and Adonis_, 1. 811.
4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but
little, except as taken conjointly with the former; yet without which
the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were
possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric
power;--its depth and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great
poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry
is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts,
human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's Poems the creative
power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each
in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the
other. At length, in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each
with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid
streams that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks,
mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in
tumult, but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores,
blend and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The
_Venus and Adonis_ did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper
passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand,
their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare's management
of the tale neither pathos nor any other dramatic quality. There is
the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the
same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought,
and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative
and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet
wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same
perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language.
What, then, shall we say? even this, that Shakespeare, no mere child
of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration
possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently,
meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual
and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length
gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with
no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him
on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with
Milton as his compeer, not rival. While the former darts himself forth,
and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one
Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and
things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and
modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while
Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. O what
great men hast thou not produced, England, my country! Truly, indeed,
Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue,
Which Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold,
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
WILLIAM HAZLITT.
(1778-1830.)
V. ON POETRY IN GENERAL.
This was the first of a series of lectures on English poets, delivered
in 1818, and published in the same year. It has been reprinted in the
collected edition of Hazlitt's works (Bohn). It is a striking sample
of Hazlitt's brilliance as a writer; and it is free from the faults
of temper, and consequent errors of judgment, which, especially when
he is dealing with modern authors, must be held in some degree to mar
his greatness as a critic. It has been chosen partly for these reasons;
partly also for those assigned in the Introduction. There is perhaps
no other passage in the long roll of his writings that so clearly marks
his place in the development of English criticism.
The best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the
natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting
an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by
sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.
In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of the subject-matter of
it, next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and
afterwards of its connection with harmony of sound. Poetry is the
language of the imagination and the passions. It relates to whatever
gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to
the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home
to them in the most general and intelligible shape can be a subject
for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds
with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have
much respect for himself, or for anything else. It is not a mere
frivolous accomplishment (as some persons have been led to imagine),
the trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours: it has
been the study and delight of mankind in all ages. Many people suppose
that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines
of ten syllables with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of
beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea,
in the growth of a flower that "spreads its sweet leaves to the air,
and dedicates its beauty to the sun",--_there_ is poetry, in its birth.
If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its
materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the
most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldy masses of things, the empty
cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads
of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century:
but there is no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind
of man, which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which
they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry.
It is not a branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of which our life
is made". The rest is "mere oblivion", a dead letter: for all that is
worth remembering in life is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope
is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy,
remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry.
Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines,
raises our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as beast's".
Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the
principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's
_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without knowing
it. The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at Hide-and-seek,
or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a
poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the
countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice,
when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his
gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who
paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant; or the
tyrant, who fancies himself a god; the vain, the ambitious, the proud,
the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king,
the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of
their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the
others think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and
madness at second hand. "There is warrant for it." Poets alone have
not "such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more
than cooler reason" can.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination.
If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is
a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they
are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality.
Ariosto has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro: but was not
Medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as
much enamoured of her charms as he? Homer has celebrated the anger of
Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the
poets from his Commonwealth, lest their descriptions of the natural
man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions
and affections--who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor
anger, to be cast down nor elated by anything. This was a chimera,
however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and
Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic.
Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the
passions are a part of man's nature. We shape things according to our
wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical
language that can be found for those creations of the mind "which
ecstasy is very cunning in". Neither a mere description of natural
objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct
or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without
the heightenings of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only
a direct but also a reflected light, that while it shows us the object,
throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions,
communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of
lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole
being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms:
feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit
of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not
the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyse the
distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the
imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or
feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite
sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself, that
is impatient of all limit, that (as flame bends to flame) strives to
link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur, to
enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to
relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest
manner, and by the most striking examples of the same quality in other
instances. Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason "has
something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into
sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the
soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and
history do". It is strictly the language of the imagination; and the
imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are
in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings,
into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power. This
language is not the less true to nature, because it is false in point
of fact; but so much the more true and natural, if it conveys the
impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on
the mind. Let an object, for instance, be presented to the senses in
a state of agitation or fear, and the imagination will distort or
magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is
most proper to encourage the fear. "Our eyes are made the fools" of
our other faculties. This is the universal law of the imagination:
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy:
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy is each bush suppos'd a bear!
When Iachimo says of Imogen:
---The flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see the enclosed lights--
This passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame, to accord
with the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally
with the poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks
of shining gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has,
from novelty and a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect
to the imagination than the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic
stature to a tower: not that he is anything like so large, but because
the excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the
usual size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a greater
feeling of magnitude and ponderous strength than another object of ten
times the same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for
the disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination,
which have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of
terror, admiration, delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens
to avenge his cause, "for they are old like him", there is nothing
extravagant or impious in this sublime identification of his age with
theirs; for there is no other image which could do justice to the
agonizing sense of his wrongs and his despair!
Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with
the forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain,
by blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast: loses
the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it:
exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it: grapples
with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint: throws
us back upon the past, forward into the future: brings every moment
of our being or object of nature in startling review before us: and
in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the
highest contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, "Nothing
but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this", what a
bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot
be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which
has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow,
like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when
he exclaims in the mad scene, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche,
and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!" it is passion lending occasion
to imagination to make every creature in league against him, conjuring
up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling
shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out
the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his
breast, only to torture and kill it! In like manner, the "So I am" of
Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it
of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed
upon it for years. What a fine return of the passion upon itself is
that in Othello--with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he
clings to the last traces of departed happiness, when he exclaims:
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