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It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry
of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves.
The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in
his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the materials
of pleasure and of power produced by the common skill and labour of
human beings ought to be distributed among them. The limitations of
this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility
of each, or the utility to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines
of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system
of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the
future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal
truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its
abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric
doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of
the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed
upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and
institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all
the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no
nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into
itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal
and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part
of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences
of these events.
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political
hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom
of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion,
the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues
of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had
walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled by
the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and
proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was
created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is
poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument
of their art: _Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse_. The Provencal
Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells,
which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is
in the grief of love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming
a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to
explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with
these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and
wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of
self. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than
Petrarch. His _Vita Nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of
sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period,
and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His
apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love
and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have
ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious
imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed
the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the
_Divine Drama_, in the measure of the admiration which they accord to
the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of
everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of
all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest
writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns
of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age,
have celebrated the dominion of love, planting, as it were, trophies
in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force.
The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human
kind is distributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error
which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two
sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institutions
of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which
chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the
stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The distorted
notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have
idealized are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets
walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult
question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction
which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and
that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full
extent of it by placing Rhipaus, whom Virgil calls _justissimus unus_,
in Paradise, [Footnote: _Paradiso, xx_. 68.] and observing a most
heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And
Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of
that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has
been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and
magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in _Paradise Lost_.
It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for
the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning,
and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish
on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave,
are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that
ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours
his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far
superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has
conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one
who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible
revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him
to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of
exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated
the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to
have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil.
And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive
proof of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He mingled, as it were, the
elements of human nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged
them in the composition of his great picture according to the laws of
epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by which
a series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and
ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding
generations of mankind. The _Divina Commedia_ and _Paradise Lost_ have
conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and
time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which
have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly
employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not
utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity
of genius.
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second
poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible
relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in
which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself
in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the
wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and
Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the
fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied;
and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet,
Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or
Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth.
Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic in its highest
sense be refused to the _Aneid_ still less can it be conceded to the
_Orlando Furioso_, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the _Lusiad, or the
_Fairy Queen_.
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion
of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably
in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship
of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other followed the
Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious
reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony
than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation. Dante was
the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, in
itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms.
He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the
resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in
the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a
heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are
instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of
inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of
their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no
conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which
contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and
the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is
a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight;
and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence
which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet
another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of
an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio
was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the superstructure of English
literature is based upon the materials of Italian invention.
But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of
poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed out
the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon
their own and all succeeding times.
But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
and mechanists on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of
the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of
reason is more useful. Let us examine, as the grounds of this
distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a
general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces. There
are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal, and permanent; the
other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the means
of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense, whatever
strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and
adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower meaning may be assigned
to the word utility, confining it to express that which banishes the
importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men
with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of
superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance
among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage.
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their
appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets, and
copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life.
They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest
value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns
of the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the
superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions,
let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced,
the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst
the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour,
let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence
with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not
tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes
of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, "To him that
hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that
he hath shall be taken away". The rich have become richer, and the
poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between
the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects
which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating
faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition
involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable
defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the
inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior
portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are
often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.
Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy
delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from
the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than
the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the saying, "It is better
to go to the house of mourning than to the house of mirth". Not that
this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. The
delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature,
the joy of the perception, and still more of the creation of poetry,
is often wholly unalloyed.
The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
poetical philosophers.
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau [Footnote:
Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet.
The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.], and their disciples,
in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the
gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral
and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited had
they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for
a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt
as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each
other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all
imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of
the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and
Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never
been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had
never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed
down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had
been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never,
except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened
to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of
analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now
attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and
creative faculty itself.
We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how
to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the
produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought
is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in
morals, government, and political economy, or, at least, what is wiser
and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let "_I dare
not_ wait upon _I would_, like the poor cat in the adage". We want the
creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous
impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our
calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can
digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the
limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of
the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal
world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree
disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the
basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention
for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the
inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the
discoveries which should have lightened have added a weight to the
curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which
money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates
new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it
engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and
the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than
at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating
principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceeds
the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws
of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which
animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time
the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from
which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of
life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things;
it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the
elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty
to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love,
patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful universe
which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the
grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not
ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the
owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not
like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination
of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry". The greatest
poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal,
which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour
of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach
or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original
purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the
results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the
decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated
to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions
of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day whether
it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are
produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by
critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful
observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of
the spaces between their suggestions by the intermixture of conventional
expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical
faculty itself: for Milton conceived the _Paradise Lost_ as a whole
before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for
the muse having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song". And let
this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various
readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_. Compositions so
produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and
intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the
plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the
power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind
which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to
itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be
pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is,
as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own;
but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the
coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled
sands which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and
the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them
is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions;
and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe.
Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most
refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with
the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord,
and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the
sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes
immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests
the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and
veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind,
bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters
abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns
of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry
redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity
and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable
things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within
the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an
incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns
to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through
life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare
the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the
percipient. "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven
of hell, a hell of heaven." But poetry defeats the curse which binds
us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And
whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark
veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being
within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the
familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which
we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight
the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.
It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which
we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated
in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso _--Non merita nome di
creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta._
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure,
virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best,
the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time
be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of
human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the
happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally
incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless
virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into
the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the
exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in
a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confine
rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the
arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own
persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and
executioner, let us decide, without trial, testimony, or form, that
certain motives of those who are "there sitting where we dare not
soar", are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard,
that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was
a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine,
that Spenser was a poet-laureate. It is inconsistent with this division
of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample
justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been
weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins "were
as scarlet, they are now white as snow"; they have been washed in the
blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous
chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused
in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how
little is, as it appears--or appears, as it is; look to your own
motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
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