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Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed
to estimate its effects upon society.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls
open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight.
In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors
are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine
and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is
reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty
cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of their union.
Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of
his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as
he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be
impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its
own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by
the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and
softened, yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his
contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements
of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding
civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his
age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses
were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and
Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering
devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal
creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and
enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until
from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified
themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be objected
that these characters are remote from moral perfection, and that they
can by no means be considered as edifying patterns for general
imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified
its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a
semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown
evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet
considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in
which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing
the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage
is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient
armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to
conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal
nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture but that
the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise,
and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn.
A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through
the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest
class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its
naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of
costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary music
for mortal ears.
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon
a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry
has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and
domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate,
and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But
poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the
mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended
combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty
of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not
familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations
clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those
who have once contemplated them as memorials of that gentle and exalted
content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which
it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our
nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which
exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly
good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself
in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures
of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good
is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting
upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination
by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the
power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other
thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for
ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the
organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise
strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own
conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place
and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. By
this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in
which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he
would resign a glory in a participation in the cause. There was little
danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far
misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their
widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is
less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently
affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in
exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to
this purpose.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously
with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical
faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,
philosophy, and we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the
scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which
the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the
habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other period
has so much energy, beauty, and virtue been developed; never was blind
strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the
will of man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the
beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceded the death
of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we
records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity
in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language,
which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the
storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written poetry existed
at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle
inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all,
as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of
succeeding time. We know no more of cause and effect than a constant
conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist with whatever
other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. I appeal
to what has already been established to distinguish between the cause
and the effect.
It was at the period here adverted to that the drama had its birth;
and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those
few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved
to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or
practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For
the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance,
and religious institutions to produce a common effect in the
representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each
division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the
most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion
and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the
elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are
employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music
and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the
fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious
institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our system
of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many expressions
appropriate to his dramatic character might be moulded into one
permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial
and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where
all the attention may be directed to some great master of ideal mimicry.
The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to
great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the
dramatic circle; but the comedy should be, as in _King Lear_, universal,
ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the intervention of this principle
which determines the balance in favour of _King Lear_ against the
_OEdipus Tyrannus_ or the _Agamemnon_, or, if you will, the trilogies
with which they are connected; unless the intense power of the choral
poetry, especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring
the equilibrium. _King Lear_, if it can sustain this comparison, may
be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing
in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was
subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has
prevailed in modern Europe. Calderon, in his religious _Autos_, has
attempted to fulfill some of the high conditions of dramatic
representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a
relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating them
to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still
more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of
the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted
superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human
passion.
But I digress.--The connection of scenic exhibitions with the
improvement or corruption of the manners of men has been universally
recognized; in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its
most perfect and universal form has been found to be connected with
good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been imputed
to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry employed in its
constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the
periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not
corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness
of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which
the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance,
stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one
feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would
become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and
passions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity
of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are
strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted
calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence
of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
willfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure
or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither
the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which
it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry,
is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest
rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity
of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty,
and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of
propagating its like wherever it may fall.
But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with
that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment
of the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak
attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral
truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some
gross vice or weakness with which the author, in common with his
auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical and
domestic drama. Addison's _Cato_ is a specimen of the one; and would
it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such purposes
poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning,
ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are
unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion,
which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and
appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest degradation
of the drama is the reign of Charles II., when all forms in which
poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph
of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating
an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle
pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to
be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit
succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead
of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic
merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever
blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very
veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster
for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new food,
which it devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other,
the connection of poetry and social good is more observable in the
drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the
highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the
highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction
of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of
a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain
the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political
institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should
arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this
is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language,
institution and form, require not only to be produced, but to be
sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the
divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.
Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance, first of
the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of
the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The
bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of
Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious
reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the
tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness;
whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of June,
which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds
a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense
with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic
delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in
statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and
institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor
is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to
which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to
the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the
writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed
sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their
superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of
those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not
in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It
is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which
their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets,
but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility
to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them
as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved.
For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to
pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination
and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a
paralysing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until
all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. At the approach
of such a period, poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which
are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps
of Astraa, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates all the
pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light
of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can
have place in an evil time. It will readily be confessed that those
among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were
delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and
sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly
have destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever
cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely
disjointed, which descending through the minds of many men is attached
to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence
is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life
of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at
once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not circumscribe
the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the
sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived
the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and
isolated portions: those who are more finely organized, or, born in
a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which
all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built
up since the beginning of the world.
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have
been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear
to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the
selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture
anything which might bear a particular relation to their own condition,
whilst it should bear a general one to the universal constitution of
the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps
partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have
been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high
sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are
as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding
truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet
Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the
Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The
institutions also, and the religion of Rome, were less poetical than
those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence
poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection
of political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in
its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic they
contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the
order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus;
the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the
victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with
Hannibal after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a
refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from
such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at
once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination,
beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according
to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward ever-living
fame. These things are not the less poetry, _quia carent vate sacro_.
They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the
memories of men. The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the
theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony.
At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the
circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter
anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors
of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion, who
created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which,
copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the
bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to the present
purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems: except that
we protest, on the ground of the principles already established, that
no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
of this extraordinary person are all instinct with the most vivid
poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a
certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded
upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and
became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is
to be confessed that "Light seems to thicken", and
"The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouse".
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing
itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its
yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music,
unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,
nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
institutions of the Celtic [Footnote: The confusion between Celtic and
Teutonic is constant in the writers of the eighteenth century and the
early part of this.] conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the
darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory,
and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is
an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian
doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil
their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the
poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and
superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had
become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and
yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others:
lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud characterized a race amongst
whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, language, or
institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not
justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected
with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which
could dissolve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who
cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies
have been incorporated into our popular religion.
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