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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays AEsthetical, by George Calvert
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays AEsthetical
+
+Author: George Calvert
+
+Release Date: July 12, 2004 [EBook #12896]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS AESTHETICAL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS AESTHETICAL
+
+by
+
+GEORGE H. CALVERT
+
+
+1875
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS.
+
+     I. THE BEAUTIFUL
+
+    II. WHAT IS POETRY?
+
+   III. STYLE
+
+    IV. DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS
+
+     V. SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC
+
+    VI. THOMAS CARLYLE
+
+   VII. ERRATA
+
+  VIII. NATIONAL DRAMA
+
+    IX. USEFULNESS OF ART
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS AESTHETICAL.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE BEAUTIFUL.
+
+
+The Beautiful is one of the immortal themes. It cannot die; it grows
+not old. On the same day with the sun was beauty born, and its life
+runs parallel with the path of that great beautifier. As a subject for
+exposition, it is at once easy and difficult: easy, from the affluence
+of its resources; difficult, from the exactions which its own spirit
+makes in the use of them.
+
+Beauty--what is it? To answer this question were to solve more than
+one problem. Shall we attempt what has been so often attempted and
+never fully achieved? Such attempts are profitable. What though we
+reach not the very heart of the mystery, we may get near enough to
+hearken to the throb of its power, and our minds will be nerved by the
+approximation.
+
+To him who has the gift to feel its presence, nature teems with
+beauty. Whithersoever the senses reach, whenever emotion kindles,
+wherever the mind seeks food for its finer appetites, there is beauty.
+It expects us at the dawn; it is about us, "an hourly neighbor,"
+through the day; at night it looks down on us from star-peopled
+immensities. Glittering on green lawns, glowing in sunsets, flashing
+through storm-clouds, gilding our wakeful hours, irradiating sleep, it
+is ever around, within us, eager to sweeten our labors, to purify our
+thoughts. Nature is a vast treasure-house of beauty, whereof the key
+is in the human heart.
+
+But many are the hearts that have never opened far enough to disclose
+the precious key enfolded in their depths. Whole peoples are at this
+moment ignorant that they live amid such wealth. As with them now, so
+in the remote primitive times of our own race, before history was,
+nature was almost speechless to man. The earth was a waste, or but a
+wide hunting ground or pasturage; and human life a round of petty
+animal circles, scarcely sweeping beyond the field of the senses;
+until there gradually grew up the big-eyed Greek and the deep-souled
+Hebrew. Then, through creative thought,--that is, thought quickened
+and exalted by an inward thirst for the beautiful,--one little corner
+of Europe became radiant, and the valley of Tempe and the wooded glens
+of Parnassus shone for the first time on the vision of men; for their
+eyes--opened from long sleep by inward stirring--were become as
+mirrors, and gave back the light of nature:
+
+                              "Auxiliar light
+  Came from their minds, which on the setting sun
+  Bestowed new splendor."[1]
+
+    [1] Wordsworth.
+
+And man, heated by the throbs of his swelling heart, made gods after
+his own image,--forms of such life and power and harmony that the
+fragments of them, spared by time, are still guarded as faultless
+models of manhood. And the vales and groves and streams were peopled
+with beauteous shapes. And the high places were crowned with temples
+which, in their majestic purity, look as though they had been posited
+there from above by heavenly hands. And by the teemful might of
+sculptors and painters and poets the dim past was made resurgent and
+present in glorious transfiguration. And the moral law was grasped at
+by far-reaching philosophies. In this affluence of genial activity so
+much truth was embodied in so much beauty, that by the products of the
+Greek mind even the newer, the deeper, the wiser Christian spirit is
+still instructed, still exalted.
+
+In Asia, too, a chosen people early made a revelation of the
+beautiful. The Hebrews were introspective. At once ardent and
+thoughtful, passionate and spiritual, their vigorous natures were
+charged with fiery materials for inward conflicts. Out of the secret
+chambers of troubled souls their poets and prophets sent forth cries
+of despair and of exultation, of expostulation and self-reproach, that
+ever find an echo in the conscience-smitten, sorrow-laden bosom of
+man. The power and wisdom of God they saw as no other ancient people
+had seen them. In the grandeurs and wonders of creation they could
+behold the being and the might and the goodness of the Creator. The
+strong, rich hearts of their seers yearned for a diviner life, in the
+deep, true consciousness they felt that there can be peace and joy to
+man only through reconcilement with God. And feeling their own
+unworthiness and impurity, as well as that of their people, they
+uttered their spiritual desires, and their aspirations and
+disappointments and indignations and humiliations, in strains that
+make their great writings sound like one long, impassioned, rhythmic
+wail through the bars of a dungeon. Gloomy, wrathful, and intense,
+their utterances are grand and pathetic and sublime; but the beautiful
+plays through them, and gilds their highest points as the white crests
+do the billows of a black, tempestuous sea.
+
+Save these two, no other nations of antiquity, except the Hindoos,
+seem to have had more than a superficial susceptibility to the
+beautiful. The Romans learnt the arts from the Greeks, whom they
+imitated, at a wide distance, in poetry as well as in sculpture and
+architecture. The remnants of art found in the valley of the Nile
+prove the Egyptians to have had the germ without the vitality to
+unfold it. In the literature of the Hindoos there are currents of pure
+poetry and of biblical depth. In passing down from ancient to modern
+times the Persians and the Arabians light the long way with
+scintillations from the beautiful.
+
+The ugly semi-barbarian darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe was
+first broken by the light that shone from the spires of Gothic
+cathedrals in the eleventh century. About the twelfth century the
+German mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary,
+titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later
+appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers
+(love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then
+Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century,
+poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,--and who can have
+no other parentage,--had established themselves in the modern European
+mind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselves
+among Christian nations. To these they are now confined. In the most
+advanced of Mahometan and heathen peoples sensibility to beauty is
+hardly awakened, and among savages it seems scarcely to exist, so
+deeply is it dormant.
+
+Thus to indicate when and by whom the beautiful has been recognized
+will further us in the endeavor to learn wherein consists that which,
+enriching the world of man so widely and plenteously, is deeply
+enjoyed by so few.
+
+Were the beautiful, like size and shape and strength and nimbleness,
+cognizable by intellectual perception, even the Hottentot would get to
+know something of it in the forest, along with the grosser qualities
+of trees and valleys. Were it liable to be seized by the discursive
+and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or
+general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the
+Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not have
+been so barren where the Athenian was so prolific. But beauty is
+_felt_, not intellectually apprehended or logically deduced. Its
+presence is acknowledged by a gush from the soul, by a joyous
+sentimental recognition, not by a discernment of the understanding.
+When we exclaim, How beautiful! there is always emotion, and
+delightful, expansive, purifying emotion. Whence this mysterious
+cleansing thrill? Thence, that the recognition of beauty ever denotes,
+ever springs out of, sympathy with the creative spirit whence all
+things have their being.
+
+The beautiful, then, is not subject to the intellect. We cannot
+demonstrate or coldly discover it; we cannot weigh or measure it.
+Further to illustrate this position: we do not see with our outward
+eye any more than we do with spectacles. The apparent ocular apparatus
+is but the passive, unconscious instrument to transmit images thrown
+through it upon a fine interior fibre, the optic nerve; and even this
+does not take cognizance of the object, but is only another conductor,
+carrying the image still farther inward, to the intellectual nerves of
+the brain; and not until it reaches them do we see the object, not
+until then is its individuality and are its various physical
+qualities, size, shape, etc., apprehended. And now the intellect
+itself becomes a conductor, transmitting still deeper inward to the
+seat of emotion the image of the object; and not until it reaches that
+depth is its beauty recognized.
+
+In all her structures and arrangements Nature is definite, precise,
+and economical. In subdivision of labor she is minute and absolute,
+providing for every duty its special exclusive agent. In the mind
+there is as severe a sundering of functions as in the body, and the
+intellect can no more encroach upon or act for the mental
+sensibilities than the stomach can at need perform the office of the
+heart, or the liver that of the lungs. True, no ripe results in the
+higher provinces of human life can be without intimate alliance
+between the mental sensibilities and the intellect; nevertheless they
+are in essence as distinct from one another as are the solar heat and
+the moisture of the earth, without whose constant cooeperation no grain
+or fruit or flower can sprout or ripen.
+
+We live not merely in a world of material facts, and of objects and
+things cognizable through the senses, but also in a spiritual world.
+We live not only in presence of visible creation, but in presence of
+the invisible Creator. With the creation we are in contact through the
+intellect. Knowledge of all objects and the qualities of objects that
+are within reach of the senses; distance and other material relations;
+the bonds of cause and effect and of analogy, that bind all created
+things in countless multiplicity of subtle relations,--these the
+intellect gathers in its grasp. But with the Creator we are in
+communication only through feeling. The presence, the existence of God
+cannot by pure intellect be demonstrated: it must be felt in order to
+be proved. The mass of objects and relations presented to us in nature
+the intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life that
+incessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looks
+out from every object and every fact,--of the range and pitch of whose
+power we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake,--of
+this divine essence we should not have even an intimation through the
+intellect alone. Not chemists, astronomers, mechanicians have uttered
+the deepest thoughts about God, but prophets and poets: not Davys, but
+Coleridges; not Herschels, but Wordsworths. It is a common belief,
+indeed, that men addicted to the exact sciences are rather wanting
+than otherwise in power to appreciate the invisible, a belief
+pungently embodied by Wordsworth in the lines,--
+
+  "Physician art thou? one all eyes,
+  Philosopher! a fingering slave,
+  One that would peep and botanize
+  Upon his mother's grave?"
+
+
+This is as much under the mark as is above it that saying of some one,
+"An undevout astronomer is mad." A man's being endowed with rare
+mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout.
+His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; and
+nature being seldom profuse upon one individual,--as she was upon
+Pascal and Newton,--the presumption as to an astronomer, of whom we
+know nothing, would be that what may be termed his emotive
+appreciation of stars and stellar systems is probably not so full as
+his intellectual. And no amount or quality of intellectual insight can
+supply or compensate a want of sensibility. No matter how many
+hundreds of millions of miles he may pierce into space, he has still
+to do with the visible and calculable. But religion is the putting of
+the human mind in relation with the invisible, the incalculable. A man
+gets no nearer to God through a telescope than through a microscope,
+and no nearer through either than through the naked eye. Who cannot
+recognize the divine spirit in the hourly phenomena of nature and of
+his own mind will not be helped by the differential calculus, or any
+magnitude or arrangement of telescopic lenses.
+
+That we ever live not only in a material, but also in a spiritual
+world, can be easily apprehended without at all entangling ourselves
+in the web-work of metaphysics. The least of our acts or motions, is
+it not always preceded by a thought, a volition, a something
+intangible, invisible? All that we voluntarily do is, must be, an
+offspring of mind. The waving of the hand is never a simple, it is a
+compound process: mind and body, spirit and matter, concur in it. The
+visible, corporeal movement is but the outward expression of an
+inward, incorporeal movement. And so in all our acts and motions, from
+birth till death; they issue out of the invisible within us; they are
+feelings actualized, thoughts embodied. The embodiment is perishable,
+the source of it imperishable. It is not a recondite, super-subtle,
+metaphysical or psychological postulate, it is a palpable, and may be
+and ought to be a familiar fact, that each one of us is ruled by the
+eternal and invisible within us.
+
+Now, just as our words and deeds and movements stand to our mind, as
+being the utterance and embodiment of that, so do we stand towards
+Deity, being the utterance and embodiment of the divine thought and
+will. As all our doings are but exhibitions of our minds, so ourselves
+are manifestations of God. Through all things shines the eternal soul.
+The more perfect the embodiment, the more translucent is the soul; and
+when this is most transparent, making the body luminous with the
+fullness of its presence, there is beauty, which may be said to be the
+most intense and refined incarnation and exhibition of the divine
+spirit.
+
+Behind and within every form of being is immanent the creative power;
+and thence, in proportion as this power discloses itself, is object,
+act, or emotion beautiful. Thus is beauty always spiritual, a
+revelation more or less clear of the creative spirit. Hence our
+emotion in presence of the truly beautiful, which calms and exalts us.
+Hence evil never is, cannot be, beautiful: the bad is, must be, ugly.
+Evil consists in the deficiency of the divine creative spirit, whose
+fullness gives, is, beauty. Evil is imperfection, unripeness,
+shapelessness, weakness in, or opposition to, the creative spirit.
+Evil is life that is unhealthy, short-coming. Wherever there is full,
+unperverted life, there is, there must be, beauty. The beautiful
+blossoms on every stem of unpoisoned power. The sap of sound life ever
+molds itself into forms of beauty.
+
+But however rich the exhibition of the divine soul, however glowing
+with perfection the form, however noble the act and pure the feeling,
+the richness, the perfection, the nobleness, the purity will be lost
+on us, unless within us there be sympathy with the spirit whence they
+flow. Only by spirit can spirit be greeted.
+
+Thus beauty only becomes visible--I might say only becomes actual--by
+the fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and an
+inward appetite therefor. And it is the flaming of this fire, thus
+kindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, the
+inward and the outward. This fire unlighted, and on the face of nature
+there is darkness, in our own minds there is darkness. For though all
+nature teems with the essence and the outward mold of beauty, to the
+unkindled mind beauty is no more present then was Banquo's ghost to
+the guests of Macbeth. Macbeth's individual conscience made him see
+the ghost; nay, by a creative potency summoned it: and so is beauty
+created there where, without what I may call the aesthetic conscience,
+it no more exists than do the glories of Titian and Claude to the
+affectionate spaniel who follows his master into a picture-gallery. To
+the quadruped, by the organic limitation of his nature, dead forever
+is this painted life. By the organic boundlessness of _his_ nature,
+man can grasp the life of creation in its highest, its finest, its
+grandest manifestations; and from these beauty is indivisible.
+Wherever the divine energy is most subtle and expressive, there glows
+ever, in its celestial freshness, the beautiful.
+
+Beauty is the happiest marriage between the invisible and the visible.
+It may be termed the joyfullest look of God. Blessed is he who can
+watch and reflect this radiant look. The faculties of such a one
+become fortified by creative influx. Through the exquisite shock of
+the beautiful he reaps an accession of mental magnetism. Thus through
+the beautiful we commune the most directly with the divine; and, other
+things being equal, to the degree that men respond to, are thrilled
+by, this vivacity of divine presence, as announced by the beautiful,
+to that degree are they elevated in the scale of being.
+
+Nature being minute and absolute in subdivision of function, the law
+of severalty and independence--than which there is no law more
+important and instructive--pervades creation. Thence the intellectual,
+the religious, the true, the good, cannot interchange functions. A man
+may be sincerely religious and do little for others, as is seen in
+anchorites, and in many one-sided people, of Christian as well as of
+Mahometan parentage, who are not anchorites. A man may be immensely
+intellectual and not value truth. But neither a man's intellect, nor
+his preference for truth, nor his benevolent nor his religious
+sentiment, can yield its best fruit without the sunshine of the
+beautiful. Sensibility to the beautiful--itself, like the others, an
+independent inward power--stands to each one of them in a relation
+different from that which they hold one to the other. The above and
+other faculties _indirectly_ aid one the other, and to the complete
+man their united action is needed; but feeling for the beautiful
+_directly_ aids each one, aids by stimulating it, by expanding, by
+purifying.
+
+To the action of every other faculty this one gives vividness and
+grace. It indues each with privilege of insight into the _soul_ of the
+object which it is its special office to master. By help of
+sensibility to the beautiful we have inklings of the essence of
+things, we sympathize with the inward life that molds the outward
+form. Hence men highly gifted with this sensibility become creative,
+in whatever province of work they strive; and no man in any province
+is truly creative except through the subtle energy imparted to him by
+this sensibility, this competence to feel the invisible in the
+visible.
+
+The idea is the invisible; the embodiment thereof is the visible.
+Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces,
+represents, with more or less success, the idea out of which springs
+the object it illuminates: it brilliantly enrobes a germinal
+essence. It is thus a sparkling emanation out of the Infinite, and it
+leads us thither whence it has come.
+
+Sensibility to the beautiful is thus the light of the whole mind,
+illuminating its labors. Without it we work in the dark, and therefore
+feebly, defectively. Infer thence the immensity of its function.
+Hereby it becomes the chief educator of men and of man; and where its
+teaching has not been conspicuous, there no elevation has been
+reached. The Greeks and the Hebrews would not have been so deeply, so
+greatly, so feelingly known to us, would not have been the pioneers
+and inspirers of European civilization, would not have lived on
+through thousands of years in the minds of the highest men, had they
+not, along with their other rare endowments, possessed, in superior,
+in unique quality, this priceless gift of sensibility to the
+beautiful. Through this gift Shakespeare is the foremost man of
+England, and through it has done more than any other man to educate
+and elevate England. Because the Italians of the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries were so rich in this gift, therefore it is that
+Italy is still a shrine to which the civilized world makes annual
+pilgrimage.
+
+The supreme function of this sensibility is to develop, to
+educate, to chasten the highest faculties, our vast discourse of
+reason, our unselfish aspiration, our deep instinct of truth, our
+capacious love. To educate these is its cardinal duty, and lacking
+this they remain uneducated. But its beneficent influence is felt
+likewise in the less elevated of our efforts. The man who makes shoes,
+as well as he who makes laws and he who makes poems; the builder of
+houses, with the builder of theologies or cosmogonies; the engineer,
+as well as the artist, all work under the rays of this illuminator;
+and, other things being equal, he excels all others on whose work
+those rays shine with the most sustained and penetrative force.
+
+              "'T is the eternal law,
+  That first in beauty shall be first in might."[2]
+
+    [2] Keats.
+
+In short, whatever the mental gift, in order to get from that gift its
+best fruit, the possessor must be incited, upborne, enlightened,
+inspired by the ideal, which burns as a transfiguring flame in his
+mind, and throws thence its joyful light with every blow of his hand.
+
+All good work is more or less creative, that is, a co-working with the
+eternal mind; and work is good and productive in proportion to
+the intensity of this cooeperation. Why is it that we so prize a
+fragment of Phidias, a few lines traced by Raphael? Because the minds
+of those workers were, more than the minds of most others, in sympathy
+with the Infinite mind. While at work their hands were more distinctly
+guided by the Almighty hand; they felt and embodied more of the spirit
+which makes, which is, life.
+
+Here is a frame of canvas, a block of marble, a pile of stones, a
+vocabulary. Of the canvas you make a screen, you build a dwelling with
+the pile of stones, chisel a door-sill out of the block, with the
+vocabulary you write an essay. And in each case you work well and
+creatively, if your work be in harmony with God's laws, if your screen
+be light, sightly, and protective, your dwelling healthful and
+commodious, your sill lie solid and square, your essay be judicious
+and sound. But if on the canvas you have a Christ's head by Leonardo,
+out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block of
+marble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you
+have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the
+vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the
+works of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so through
+the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative
+principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators,
+that is, poets. And we sacredly guard their creations among our best
+treasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive that
+whenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, they
+spiritualize our thoughts; and this they do because the minds whence
+they issued were radiant centers of ideal power, that is, power to
+conceive the beautiful.
+
+But what is ideal power? the reader may ask. He might likewise ask,
+What is moral power? And unless he has in his own mind some faculty of
+moral estimation, no answer will help him. That which comes to us
+through feeling cannot be intellectually defined, can only be
+appreciated through feeling. By describing its effects and
+accompaniments we approach to a knowledge of what it is. By means of a
+foot-rule you can make clear to every member of a crowd what is the
+height of the Apollo Belvedere, and the exact length of the statue's
+face; and each one can for himself verify the accuracy of your
+statement. But not with a like distinctness and vivacity of assent can
+you get the crowd to go along with you as to the Apollo's beauty.
+Acknowledgment of the beautiful in art implies a degree of culture and
+a native susceptibility not to be found in every accidental gathering.
+Full and sincere assent to your declaration that the statue is very
+beautiful presupposes a high ideal in the mind; that is, a lofty
+pre-attained idea of what is manly beauty. But after all, the want of
+unanimity of assent to a moral or an aesthetic position, does it not
+come from the difficulty and subtlety of the idea to be pre-attained?
+Assent even to an intellectual proposition, does not it too presuppose
+an ideal in the mind of him who assents? When you show by visible
+measurement that the statue is eight feet high, whoever understands
+what you mean must have already in his head the idea of what one foot
+is; that is, he must carry within him an ideal. No tittle of
+information, not the slightest accession of knowledge, will you derive
+from the measurement even of the area of a hall or of the cubic
+contents of a block, unless you bring with you in your mind an idea,
+an ideal, of what is a superficial or a cubic square foot.
+
+Attempts to give a notion of what the beautiful is, by
+enumerating some of the physical conditions that are found to be
+present in artistic figures or persons distinguished for beauty, or
+attempts to produce what shall be beautiful, by complying with these
+conditions, come no nearer to the aim than do compounded mineral
+waters to the briskness and flavor of a fresh draught from the
+original spring. In the analysis there may be no flaw; the ingredients
+are chemically identical in quality and proportion; but the nameless,
+inimitable, inscrutable life is wanting: the mixing has been done by a
+mechanical, not by a creative hand. Haydon says, "The curve of the
+circle is excess, the straight line is deficiency, the ellipsis is the
+degree between, and that curve, added to or united with proportion,
+regulates the form and features of a perfect woman." Mr. D.R. Hay, in
+a series of books, professes to have discovered the principles of
+beauty in the law of harmonic ratio, without, however, "pretending,"
+as he modestly and wisely declares, "to give rules for that kind of
+beauty which genius alone can produce in high art." The discovery of
+Mr. Hay is curious and fascinating, and, like the announcement of
+Haydon, may give practical hints to artists and others. But no
+intellectual process or ingenuity can make up for the absence of
+emotional warmth and refined selection. "Beauty, the foe of excess and
+vacuity, blooms, like genius, in the equilibrium of all the forces,"
+says Jean Paul. "Beauty," says Hemsterhuis, "is the product of the
+greatest number of ideas in the shortest time," which is like the
+Italian definition, _il piu nel uno_, unity in multiplicity, believed
+by Coleridge to contain the principle of beauty. On another page of
+the "Table Talk" Coleridge is made to say, "You are wrong in resolving
+beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed, it
+is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence,
+between which and the beholder _nihil est_. It is always one and
+tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed."
+Hegel, in his "AEsthetic," defines natural beauty to be "the idea as
+immediate unity, in so far as this unity is visible in sensuous
+reality." And a few pages earlier he is more brief and distinct,
+calling the beautiful "the sensuous shining forth of the idea." And
+Schelling, in his profound treatise on "The Relation of the Plastic
+Arts to Nature," says, "The beautiful is beyond form; it is substance,
+the universal; it is the look and expression of the spirit of
+Nature." Were it not better and more precise to say that it is to us
+the look and expression of the spiritual when this is peering through
+choicest embodiments? But we will stop with definitions. After
+endeavoring, by means of sentences and definitions to get a notion of
+the beautiful, one is tempted to say, as Goethe did when "the idea of
+the Divinity" was venturously mentioned to him by Eckermann, "Dear
+child, what know we of the idea of the Divinity? and what can our
+narrow ideas tell of the Highest Being? Should I, like a Turk, name it
+with a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparison
+with the infinite attributes, have said nothing."
+
+We have called the beautiful the light of the mind; but there must be
+mind to be illuminated. If your torch be waved in a chamber set round
+with bits of granite and slate and pudding-stone, you will get no
+luminous reverberation. But brandish it before rubies and emeralds and
+diamonds! The qualities in the mind must be precious, in order that
+the mind become radiant through beauty. To take a broad example.
+
+The Hindoos in their organization have a fine sense of the
+beautiful, but they lack mental breadth and bottom; and hence their
+life and literature are not strong and manifold, although in both
+there are exhibitions of that refinement which only comes of
+sensibility to the beautiful. The Chinese, on the other hand, are
+wanting in this sensibility; hence their prosaic, finite civilization.
+But most noteworthy is the contrast between them in religious
+development. In that of the Hindoos there was expansion, vastness,
+self-merging in infinitude; the Chinese are religiously contracted,
+petty, idolatrous; a contrast which I venture to ascribe, in large
+measure, to the presence in the one case, and the absence in the
+other, of the inspiration of the beautiful.
+
+To the same effect individual examples might be cited innumerable.
+Look at Wordsworth and Byron, both preeminent for sensibility to the
+beautiful; but, from deep diverseness in other leading mental gifts,
+the one, through the light of this vivifying power, became a poet of
+the propensities and the understanding, a poet of passion and wit; the
+other, a poet of the reason, a poet of nature and meditative emotion.
+
+To do their best the moral feelings, too, need the light and inward
+stimulus of the beautiful; but if these feelings are by nature
+weak, no strength or intensity of the sense of beauty will have power
+to get from a mind thus deficient high moral thought or action. If
+there be present the accomplishment of verse, we shall have a Byron;
+or, the other poetic gifts in full measure, with lack of this
+accomplishment, and we may get a Beckford, who builds Fonthill Abbeys,
+and with purity and richness of diction describes palaces, actual or
+feigned, and natural scenery with picturesqueness and genial glow; or,
+the intellectual endowments being mediocre, we shall have merely a man
+of superficial taste; or, the moral regents being ineffective, an
+intellectual sybarite, or a refined voluptuary. Like the sun, the
+beautiful shines on healthful field and poisonous fen; and her warmth
+will even make flowers to bloom in the fen, but it is not in her to
+make them bear refreshing odors or nourishing fruit.
+
+As men have body, intellect, and moral natures, so is there physical,
+intellectual, and spiritual beauty, and each distinct from the others.
+Take first a few examples from the domain of art. The body and limbs
+of the Gladiator in the Louvre may be cited as the exponent of
+corporeal beauty; the face of the Apollo Belvedere as that of
+intellectual and physical; and the Santo Sisto Madonna of Raphael, and
+the Christ of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, for spiritual.
+Through these radiant creations we look into the transcendent minds of
+their artists with a chastened, exalting joy, not unmingled with pride
+in our brotherhood with such beauty-lifted co-workers with God.
+
+Among the higher races, life is affluent in examples of the three
+kinds of beauty, two of them, and even all three, at times united in
+one subject. Children and youth offer the most frequent instances of
+physical beauty. Napoleon's face combined in high degree both physical
+and intellectual, without a trace of moral beauty. Discoveries in
+science, and the higher scientific processes, as likewise broad and
+intense intellectual action, exemplify often intellectual beauty. Of
+moral beauty history preserves examples which are the brightest
+jewels, and the most precious, in the casket of mankind's memory;
+among the most brilliant of which are the trust of Alexander, when he
+drank the draught from the hand of his physician, though warned that
+it was poisoned; the fidelity of the paroled Regulus, returning from
+Rome to the enemy into the jaws of a certain and cruel death;
+Sir Philip Sidney, wounded unto death, taking the cup of water
+untasted from his parched lips, to give it to a dying soldier; Luther
+at the Diet of Worms; the public life of Washington; the life and
+death of Socrates, and especially that last act of washing his body to
+save the women the trouble of washing it a few hours later, when it
+would be a corpse; and, lastly, that most beautiful of lives and most
+sublime of deaths, which live in the heart of Christendom as its
+exemplar and ever fresh ideal.
+
+There is no province of honorable human endeavor, no clean inlet
+opened by the senses or the intellect or the feelings, into which from
+that vast, deep, oceanic spring, the human soul, the beautiful does
+not send its fructifying tides. There is no height in history but is
+illuminated by its gleam. Only through the beautiful can truth attain
+its full stature; only through the beautiful can the heart be
+perfectly purified; only with vision purged by the beautiful can
+anything be seen in its totality. All other faculties it makes
+prolific; it is the mental generator. It helps to unveil, and then
+welds, the link between the visible and the invisible. It inspires
+feeling (which is ever the source of deepest insight) to discover
+excellence; it quickens the mind to creative activity; it is
+forever striving upward. Without the spiritual fervor of the
+beautiful, your religion is narrow and superstitious, your science
+cramped and mortal, your life unripened. In the mind it kindles a
+flame that discloses the divinity there is in all things. Lightning
+bares to the awed vision the night-shrouded earth; more vivid than
+lightning, the flash of the beautiful reveals to the soul the presence
+of God.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+WHAT IS POETRY?
+
+
+The better to meet the question, _What_ is poetry? we begin by putting
+before it another, and ask, _Where_ is poetry? Poetry is in the mind.
+Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the
+stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no
+appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining
+intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught
+but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal
+life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in
+the best and deepest part of that life.
+
+The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world of
+his inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another or
+be started and modified by what is without them, all this--that is,
+all human life, in its endless forms, varieties, degrees, all that can
+come within the scope of man--is the domain of poetry; only, to
+enjoy, to behold, to move about in, even to enter this domain, the
+individual man must bear within him a light that shall transfigure
+whatever it falls on, a light of such subtle quality, of such
+spiritual virtue, that wherever it strikes it reveals something of the
+very mystery of being.
+
+In many men, in whole tribes, this light is so feebly nourished that
+it gives no illumination. To them the two vast worlds, the inner and
+the outer, are made up of opaque facts, cognizable, available, by the
+understanding, and by it handled grossly and directly. Things,
+conditions, impressions, feelings, are not taken lovingly into the
+mind, to be made there prolific through higher contacts. They are not
+dandled joyfully in the arms of the imagination. Imagination! Before
+proceeding a step further,--nay, in order that we be able to proceed
+safely,--we must make clear to ourselves what means this great word,
+imagination.
+
+The simplest intellectual work is to perceive physical objects. Having
+perceived an object several times, the intellect lifts itself to a
+higher process, and knows it when it sees it again, remembers it.
+_Perception_ is the first, the simplest, the initiatory intellectual
+process, _memory_ is the second. Higher than they, and rising
+out of them, is a third process, the one whereby are modified and
+transmuted the mental impressions of what is perceived or remembered.
+A mother, just parted from her child, recalls his form and face,
+summons before _her mind's eye_ an image of him; and this image is
+modified by her feelings, she seeing him in attitudes and relations in
+which she had never seen him before, cheerful or sad according to her
+mood. This she could not do by aid of memory alone; she could not vary
+the impress of her boy left on the brain; she could not vividly
+reproduce it in shifting, rapidly successive conditions; she could not
+modify and diversify that impress; in a word, she could not liberate
+it. Memory could only re-give her, with single, passive fidelity, what
+she had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture of
+her boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase above
+memory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes a
+changeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights and
+shadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plastic
+power, varying the image in position and expression, obedient
+to the demands of the feelings, of which it is ever the ready
+instrument. This third process is _imagination_.
+
+Through this mode of intellectual action the materials gathered in the
+mind are endlessly combined and modified. In all intellectual
+activity, beyond bare perception and memory, imagination in some
+degree is and must be present. It is in fact the mind handling its
+materials, and in no sphere, above the simplest, can the mind move
+without this power of firmly holding and molding facts and relations,
+phenomena and interior promptings and suggestions. To the forensic
+reasoner, to the practical master-worker in whatever sphere, such a
+power is essential not less than to the ideal artist or to the weaver
+of fictions. Imagination is thus the abstract action, that is, the
+most intense action, of the intellect.
+
+When I run over in my mind, and in the order of their service, the
+first seven presidents of the United States, Washington, Adams,
+Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, I exert only memory. The
+moment I begin to compare or contrast one with another, or to give the
+character of any of them, I put into play the higher, the imaginative
+action; for, to draw an historical character, the facts collected by
+memory must be shaped and colored and organized, the details
+gathered must be combined into a whole by the intellect, which being a
+mere tool, the success of the result (the tool being of a temper to do
+the work laid on it) will depend on the quality of the powers that
+handle it, that is, on the writer's gifts of sympathy.
+
+The degree and fullness wherewith the imaginative power shall be
+called upon depending thus on faculties of feeling, thence it is that
+the word _imagination_ has come to be appropriated to the highest
+exercise of the power, that, namely, which is accomplished by those
+few who, having more than usual emotive capacity in combination with
+sensibility to the beautiful, are hereby stimulated to mold and shape
+into fresh forms the stores gathered by perception and memory, or the
+material originated within the mind through its creative fruitfulness.
+In strictness, this exaltation of intellectual action should be called
+_poetic_ imagination.
+
+To imagine is, etymologically speaking, _with_ the mind to form _in_
+the mind an image; that is, by inward power to produce an interior
+form, a something substantial made out of what we term the
+unsubstantial. To imagine is thus always, in a certain sense, to
+create; and even men of dullest mentality have this power in
+_kind_. The _degree_ in which men have it makes one of the chief
+differences among them. The power is inherent, is implied in the very
+existence of the human mind. When it is most lively the mind creates
+out of all it feels and hears and sees, taking a simple sight or hint
+or impression or incident, and working out images, making much out of
+little, a world out of an atom. Akin herein to the supreme creative
+might, the man of highest imagination, the poet, unrolls out of his
+brain, through vivid energy, new worlds, peopled with thought,
+throbbing with humanity.
+
+When we imagine, therefore, we hold an image in the mind, grasping it
+with spiritual fingers, just as by our corporeal fingers a physical
+substance is grasped. Now the poetic mind in handling the image tosses
+it with what might be called a sportive earnest delight, and through
+this power and freedom of _play_ elicits by sympathetic fervor, from
+its very core, electric rays, wherein the subject glows like the
+sculpture on an inwardly illuminated urn; rare insights being thus
+vouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision,--insights gained never but
+through sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirations
+after, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellect
+being used as an obedient cheerful servant.
+
+The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses,
+revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole might
+seeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearer
+than others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is ever
+plying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing,
+according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholding
+everywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting nature
+and humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in those
+richer, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetrating
+insight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are than
+minds less creatively endowed.
+
+Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all
+intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a
+power without which the daily business of life even could not go on,
+being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, its
+materials. In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellect
+stimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling;
+and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged by
+emotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation.
+
+Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and the
+intellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with the
+effective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings or
+conditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in the
+production of poetry?
+
+Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare's
+plays. What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then run
+over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how
+rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you
+shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic,
+comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought,
+accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide
+provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion
+so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most
+precious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on the
+morning when the paper was moist with the ink wherewith they were
+first written? Because they have in them more fullness and fineness
+and fidelity than any others. The poet has more life in him
+than other men, and Shakespeare has in him more life than any other
+poet, life manifested through power of intellect exalted through union
+with power of sympathy, the embodiments whereof are rounded, enlarged,
+refined, made translucent by that gift of _sensibility to the fair and
+perfect_[3] whereby, according to its degree, we are put in more
+loving relation to the work of God, and gain the clearest insights
+into his doings and purposes; a gift without which in richest measure
+Shakespeare might have been a notable historian or novelist or
+philosopher, but never the supreme poet he is.
+
+    [3] See preceding Essay.
+
+When Coriolanus, having led the Volscians to Rome, encamps under its
+walls, and the Romans, in their peril and terror, send to him a
+deputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies,--the
+foremost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends of
+Coriolanus,--having "declared their business in a very modest and
+humble manner," he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere,
+answering them with "much bitterness and high resentment of the
+injuries done him." What was the temper as well as the power of
+Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of
+Plutarch. But the task of the poet is more than this. To our
+imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy
+to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to
+fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that
+momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us
+to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and
+warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur
+of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so
+mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. This vast history, to be
+for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to
+quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial
+metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensions
+must he be, this Roman! Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirer
+of Coriolanus, depict him. Having described, in those compressed
+sinewy phrases which Shakespeare has at command, the change in his
+nature, he adds, "When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the
+ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a
+corselet with his eye; he talks like a knell, and his hum is a
+battery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What he
+bids be done is finished with his bidding: he wants nothing of a god
+but eternity and a heaven to throne in."
+
+Hear how a mother's heart, about to break, from the loss of her son,
+utters its grief when it has the privilege of using a voice quivering
+with poetic fervor. The French king bids Lady Constance be comforted:
+she answers,--
+
+  "No, I defy all counsel, all redress,
+  But that which ends all counsel, true redress,
+  Death, death. O amiable lovely death!
+  Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness!
+  Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
+  Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
+  And I will kiss thy detestable bones;
+  And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows;
+  And ring these fingers with thy household worms;
+  And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,
+  And be a carrion monster like thyself:
+  Come, grin on me; and I will think thou smil'st:
+  And buss thee as thy wife! Misery's love,
+  O, come to me!"
+
+In these two passages from "Coriolanus" and "King John" what
+magnificence of hyperbole! The imagination of the reader, swept on
+from image to image, is strained to follow that of the poet.
+And yet, to the capable, how the pile of amplification lifts out the
+naked truth. Read these passages to a score of well-clad auditors,
+taken by chance from the thoroughfare of a wealthy city, or from the
+benches of a popular lecture-room. To the expanded mold wherein the
+passages are wrought, a few--five or six, perhaps, of the
+twenty--would be able to fit their minds, zestfully climbing the
+poet's climax. To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensive
+extravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by,
+the poetically imaginative light. And to some they would be grossly
+unintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming to
+them unnatural or affected.
+
+Now, the enjoyment of the few appreciators, what is its source? By
+these passages certain feelings in them are made to vibrate and are
+pitched to a high key. A very comprehensive word is feelings. What is
+the nature of those feelings thus wrought upon?
+
+The elementary feelings of our nature, when in healthful function, are
+capable of emitting spiritual light; and, when exalted to their purest
+action, do and must emit such, the inward fire sending forth clear
+flame unmixed with smoke. To perceive this light, and, still
+more, to have your path illuminated thereby, implies the present
+activity of some of the higher human sensibilities; and to be so
+organized as to be able to embody in words, after having imagined,
+personages, conditions, and conjunctions whence this light shall flash
+on and ignite the sensibilities of others, implies, besides vivid
+sympathies and delight in the beautiful, a susceptibility to the
+manifestations of moral and intellectual life which is enjoyed only by
+him in whom the nobler elements of being are present in such
+intensity, proportions, and quality, and are so commingled, that he
+can reproduce life itself with translucent truthfulness, he becoming,
+through this exalting susceptibility, poet or maker.
+
+What constitutes the wealth of human life? Is it not fullness and
+richness of feeling? To refine this fullness, to purify this richness,
+to distill the essence out of this wealth, to educate the feelings by
+revealing their subtle possibilities, by bringing to light the
+divinity there is within and behind them, this is the poet's part; and
+this, his great part, he can only do by being blest with more than
+common sympathy with the spirit of the Almighty Creator, and thence
+clearer insight into his work and will. Merely to embody in
+verse the feelings, thoughts, deeds, scenes of human life, is not the
+poet's office; but to exhibit these as having attained, or as capable
+of attaining, the power and beauty and spirituality possible to each.
+The glorifier of humanity the poet is, not its mere reporter; that is
+the historian's function. The poet's business is not with facts as
+such, or with inferences, but with truth of feeling, and the very
+spirit of truth. His function is ideal; that is, from the prosaic, the
+individual, the limited, he is to lift us up to the universal, the
+generic, the boundless. In compassing this noble end he may, if such
+be his bent, use the facts and feelings and individualities of daily
+life; and, by illuminating and ennobling them he will approve his
+human insight, as well as his poetic gift.
+
+The generic in sentiment, the universal, the infinite, can only be
+reached and recognized through the higher feelings, through those
+whose activity causes emotion. The simple impulses, the elementary
+loves, are in themselves bounded in their action near and direct; but
+growing round the very fountain of life, having their roots
+in the core of being, they are liable to strike beyond their
+individual limits, and this they do with power when under their sway
+the whole being is roused and expanded. When by their movement the
+better nature is urged to heroism and self-sacrifice, as in the story
+of Damon and Pythias, the reader or beholder is lifted into the
+atmosphere of finest emotion; for then the impulse has reached its
+acme of function, and playing in the noonday of the beautiful, the
+contemplation of it purges and dilates us. We are upraised to the
+disinterested mood, the poetical, in which mood there is ever
+imaginative activity refined by spiritual necessities. It is not
+extravagant to affirm that when act or thought reaches the beautiful,
+it resounds through the whole being, tuning it like a high strain of
+sweetest music. Thus in the poetical (and there is no poetry until the
+sphere of the beautiful is entered) there is always a reverberation
+from the emotional nature. Reverberation implies space, an ample vault
+of roof or of heaven. In a tight, small chamber there can be none. If
+feeling is shut within itself, there is no reecho. Its explosion must
+rebound from the roomy dome of sentiment, in order that it become
+musical.
+
+The moment you enter the circle of the beautiful, into which
+you can only be ushered by a light within yourself, a light kindled
+through livelier recognition of the divine spirit,--the moment you
+draw breath in this circle you find yourself enlarged, spiritualized,
+buoyed above the self. No matter how surrounded, or implicated, or
+enthralled, while you are there, be it but for a few moments, you are
+liberated.
+
+  "No more--no more--oh! never more on me
+  The freshness of the heart can fall like dew,
+  Which out of all the lovely things we see
+  Extracts emotions beautiful and new,
+  Hived in our bosoms like the bag o' the bee.
+  Think'st thou the honey with those objects grew?
+  Alas! 't was not in them, but in thy power
+  To double even the sweetness of a flower."
+
+                "All who joy would win
+  Must share it; happiness was born a twin."
+
+  "He entered in the house,--his home no more,
+  For without hearts there is no home--and felt
+  The solitude of passing his own door
+  Without a welcome; _there_ he long had dwelt,
+  There his few peaceful days Time had swept o'er,
+  There his worn, bosom and keen eye would melt
+  Over the innocence of that sweet child,
+  His only shrine of feelings undefiled."
+
+These three passages are from a poem in which there is more wit than
+poetry, and more cynicism than either; a poem in spirit unsanctified,
+Mephistophelian, written by a man of the world, a terrible
+egotist, _blase_ already in early manhood, in whose life, through
+organization, inherited temperament, and miseducation, humanity was so
+cramped, distorted, envenomed, that the best of it was in the fiery
+sway of the more urgent passions, his inmost life being, as it must
+always be with poets, inwoven into his verse. From the expiring
+volcano in his bosom his genius, in this poem, casts upon the world a
+lurid flame, making life look pale or fever-flushed. With unslumbering
+vivacity, human nature is exhibited in that misleading light made by
+the bursting of half-truths that relate to its lower side, a light the
+more deceptions from the sparkling accompaniment of satire and wit.
+
+Above the pungent secularities, the nimble intellectualities, the
+specious animalism, the derisive skepticism, the snapping
+personalities, the witty worldliness, that interlace and constitute
+the successive cantos of "Don Juan," the passages just quoted and
+similar ones (they are not many) rise, as above the desires and the
+discontents, the plots and contentions, the shrewd self-seekings of a
+heated, noisy city rises a Gothic spire, aspiring, beautiful, drawing
+most of its beauty from its aspiration, on whose pinnacle, calmly
+glistening in the upper air, plays the coming and the parting day,
+while shadows fill the streets below, and whose beauty throws over the
+town a halo that beckons men from afar. The spire, in its steadfast
+tranquillity and its beauty, so unlike the restless wrangling
+dissonance below it, grew nevertheless out of the same hearts that
+make the dissonance, and, typifying what is spiritual and eternal in
+them, tends by its ideal presence to enlarge and uplift those by whose
+eyes it is sought. These upshootings in "Don Juan" irradiate the
+cantos, giving an attractiveness which draws to them eyes that
+otherwise would not have known them; and if too pure in their light
+and too remote to mingle directly with the flare and flash that dazzle
+without illuminating, silently they shine and steadily, an unconscious
+heavenly influence, above these coruscations of earthly
+thoughts,--thoughts telling from their lively numerousness, but
+neither grand nor deep.
+
+From the same solar center fall frequently single rays that make lines
+and stanzas glisten, and but for which this poem, lacking their
+perfusive light, would soon pass into oblivion; for from the
+beautiful it is that the satire, the wit, the voluptuousness get their
+sparkle and their sheen. If passages morally censurable are hereby
+made more captivating, we are not content with saying that God's sun
+fructifies and beautifies poison-oak and hemlock; but we affirm that
+the beautiful, being by its nature necessarily pure, communicates of
+its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure
+counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad,
+deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting
+or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being
+therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is
+completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be made
+captivating through the beautiful. Iago and Edmund are poetical as
+parts of a whole; and when in speech they approach the upper region of
+thought, it is because the details allotted to them have to be highly
+wrought for the sake of the general plot and effect, and further,
+because humanity and truth speak at times through strange organs.
+Besides, the ideal may be used to show more glaringly the hideousness
+of evil, and thence Iago and Edmund, as ideal villains, through the
+very darkness in which only poetic art could have enveloped them, help
+us by indirection to see and value the lights that surround the noble
+and the good.
+
+In healthy function all the feelings are pure and moral, those whose
+action is most earthly and animal and selfish uniting themselves at
+their highest with the spiritual, for performance whose compass
+reaches beyond an individual, momentary good. A burglar or a murderer
+may exhibit courage; but here, a manly quality backing baseness and
+brutality for selfish, short-sighted ends, there is an introverted and
+bounded action, no expansive upward tendency, and thence no poetry.
+But courage, when it is the servant of principle for large, unselfish
+ends, becomes poetical, exhibiting the moral beautiful, as in the
+fable of Curtius and the fact (or fable) of Winkelried. In the
+poetical there is always enlargement, exaltation, purification; animal
+feeling, self-seeking propensity, becoming so combined with the higher
+nature as to rise above themselves, above the self.
+
+The lioness, pursuing the robber of her cub, if in her rage she
+scarcely heed that he (to stay her steps) has dropped the cub in her
+path, but, casting at it a glance of recognition, bounds with a
+wilder howl after the robber, the incident is purely bestial, an
+exhibition of sheer brute fury, and as such repulsive and most
+unpoetical. But let her, instantly drawing her fiery eye from the
+robber, stop, and for the infuriated roar utter a growl of leonine
+tenderness over her recovered cub, and our sympathy leaps towards her.
+Through the red glare of rage there shines suddenly a stream of white
+light, gushing from one of the purest fountains: wrathful fury is
+suddenly subdued by love. A moment before she was possessed with
+savage fierceness, her blood boiling with hate and revenge; now it
+glows with a mother's joy. Her nature rises to the highest whereof it
+is capable. It is the poetry of animalism.
+
+In the poetical, thought is amplified and ripened, while purified, in
+the calm warmth of emotion. From being emotive, poetry draws in more
+of the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose. The poetical has,
+must have, rotundity. No poet ever had a square head. Prose, in its
+naked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving,
+flesh-and-spirit-endowed body. From the skeleton you can learn
+osteology, but neither aesthetics nor human nature. Imaginative prose
+partakes of the spiritual character of poetry. When a page is
+changed from poetry into prose it is flattened, deadened; when from
+prose into poetry it is uplifted, enlivened. You get a something else
+and a something more. Reduced to plain prose, the famous passage from
+the mouth of Viola in "Twelfth Night" would read somewhat thus: "My
+father had a daughter who loved a man and would let no one know of her
+love, but concealed it, until her cheek grew pale with grief,
+patiently bearing within her bosom the misery of an untold
+attachment." Now hear the poet:--
+
+                        "She never told her love,
+  But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
+  Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought:
+  And with a green and yellow melancholy
+  She sat like patience on a monument,
+  Smiling at grief."
+
+What has been done with the prose statement? Instead of a bare fact we
+have a picture, a twofold picture; and this, in its compact, fresh,
+rose-tinted vividness, carries the whole into our hearts with a
+tenfold success. Through emotional joy we apprehend, as by the light
+of an instantaneous ignition, the state of the sufferer. The
+prose-report is a smoldering fire on the hearth, through whose sleepy
+smoke there comes a partial heat; the poetic is the flame in
+full fervor, springing upward, illuminating, warming the heart,
+delighting the intellect. The imagination of the reader, quickened by
+illustrations so apt and original, is by their beauty tuned to its
+most melodious key, while by the rare play of intellectual vitality
+his mind is dilated. He has become mentally a richer man, enriched
+through the refining and enlarging of his higher sensibilities, and
+the activity imparted to his intellect.
+
+To say of a man that he is without imagination were to say he is an
+idiot; that is, one lacking the inward force and the inward
+instruments to grasp and handle the materials collected from without
+by perception and memory, and from within by consciousness. To say of
+a poet that he is without poetic imagination were to say he is no
+poet. What is poetic imagination? This, for our theme, is a vital
+question. Can there be given to it an approximate answer?
+
+Figure to yourself a company of men and women in presence of a
+September sunset near the sea, the eye taking in at once ocean and a
+variegated landscape. The company must not be a score of tawny
+American aborigines, nor of European peasants, nor of individuals
+whose life of monotonous labor, whether for necessaries or
+luxuries, has no opportunity or no will for the finer mental culture;
+but, to give aptness to our illustration, should consist of persons
+whose being has been unfolded to the tissue of susceptibility to the
+wonders and beauties of nature, and whose intellect has been tilled
+sufficiently to receive and nourish any fresh seed of thought that may
+be thrown upon it; in short, a score of cultivated adults. The
+impression made by such a scene on such a company is heightened by a
+rare atmospheric calm. The heart of each gazer fills with emotion, at
+first unutterable except by indefinite exclamation; when one of the
+company says,--
+
+  "A fairer face of evening cannot be."
+
+These words, making a smooth iambic line, give some utterance, and
+therefore some relief, to the feeling of all. Then another adds,--
+
+  "The holy time is quiet as a nun
+  Breathless with adoration."
+
+Instantly the whole scene, steeped in the beams of the sinking sun, is
+flooded with a light that illuminates the sunlight, a spiritual light.
+The scene is transfigured before their eyes: it is as if the heavens
+had opened, and inundated all its features with a celestial
+subtilizing aura. How has this been accomplished? The first line has
+little of the quality of poetic imagination.
+
+  "A fairer face of evening cannot be."
+
+is simple and appropriate, but in it there is no fresh glow, no
+mysterious throb. Above the level of this line rise suddenly the first
+three words of the second, "the holy time." The presence of a scene
+where sky, earth, and ocean combine for the delight of the beholders
+puts them in a mood which crowns the landscape with a religious halo.
+That the time is holy they all feel; and now, to make its tranquillity
+appreciable by filling the heart with it, the poet adds--"is quiet as
+a nun breathless with adoration." By this master-stroke of poetic
+power the atmospheric earthly calm is vivified with, is changed into,
+super-earthly calm. By a fresh burst of spiritual light the mind is
+set aesthetically aglow, as by the beams of the setting sun the
+landscape is physically. By an exceptionally empowered hand the soul
+is strung to a high key. Fullness and range of sensibility open to the
+poet[4] a wide field of illustration; its exacting fineness reveals
+the one that carries his thought into the depths of the
+reader's mind, bringing him that exquisite joy caused by keen
+intellectual power in the service of pure emotion.
+
+    [4] Wordsworth.
+
+Take now other samples from the treasury of choicest poetry. Here is
+one from Coleridge:--
+
+      "And winter, slumbering in the open air,
+  Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring."
+
+Here again the intellect is urged to its highest action, the abstract
+or imaginative action, to do the hests of a sensibility so finely
+wrought by the inward impulsion to seek for the most exquisite that
+nature can furnish, that it yields similitudes most delicate, most
+apt, most expressive.
+
+Milton thus opens the fifth book of "Paradise Lost:"--
+
+  "Now morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
+  Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl."
+
+Shakespeare makes Romeo describe daybreak:--
+
+                        "And jocund day
+  Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops."
+
+Keats begins "Hyperion" with these lines:
+
+  "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
+  Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn."
+
+In the Monody on Keats, Shelley, describing the lamentation of
+nature at his death, concludes a stanza as follows:--
+
+                      "Morning sought
+    Her eastern watch-tower, and, her hair unbound,
+    Wet with the tears that should adorn the ground,
+    Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
+    Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
+    Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
+  And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay."
+
+Such passages are the very flower of poetry, thought exquisitely dyed
+in sentiment, laying suddenly bare a picture with so much light in it
+that each passage irradiates its page and the reader's mind. By their
+happiness the similitudes emphasize and enforce the thought; and they
+do a higher service than this; for, being a breath from the inner life
+of genius, they blow power into the reader. To translate these
+passages into prose were like trying to translate a lily into the mold
+out of which it springs, or a bar of Beethoven into the sounds of the
+forum, or the sparkle of stars into the warmth of a coal fire.
+
+The best poetry has a far background; it comes out of deeps within the
+poet, unfathomed by himself, unfathomable. He feels more than he can
+express. Hence the imaginative poet always suggests, revealing enough
+to inspirit the reader's higher faculties to strive for more;
+not because, with artistic design, he leaves much untold, which he
+often does, but because through imaginative susceptibility he at times
+grasps at and partly apprehends much that cannot be embodied. He feels
+his subject more largely and deeply than he can see or represent it.
+To you his work is suggestive because to him the subject suggested
+more than he could give utterance to. Every subject, especially every
+subject of poetic capability, having infinite relations, he who most
+apprehends this boundlessness--and indeed because he does apprehend
+it--can do or say what will open it to you or me; and the degree of
+his genius is measured by the extent to which he can present or expose
+it. The unimaginative gives surface-work, and, suggesting nothing, is
+at once exhausted.
+
+The poetic imagination shows itself in the epithets the poet has at
+his command, creative insight drawing an epithet out of the heart of
+an object; whence, there is beneath such an epithet a depth that keeps
+feeding it with significance, bringing out its aptness the longer we
+look. Sometimes epithets are brighter than their object; the
+unimaginative thus futilely striving to impart power instead of
+deriving it. To be lasting, the light of the epithet must be struck by
+the imagination out of its object. The inspired poet finds a word so
+sympathetic with the thought that it caresses and hugs it.
+
+Depth and breadth of nature are implied in the full poetic
+imagination. The love of the beautiful, wielding a keen intellect,
+needs furthermore rich material to mold, and only out of the poet's
+individual resources can this be drawn. To make a high artist, you
+must have very much of a man. Behind "Paradise Lost" and "Samson
+Agonistes" is a big Miltonic man. The poet has to put a great deal of
+himself, and the best of him, into his work; thence, for high poetry,
+there must be a great deal of high self to put in. He must coin his
+soul, and have a large soul to coin; the best work cannot be made out
+of materials gathered by memory and fancy. His stream of thought must
+flow from springs, not from reservoirs. Hence the universal
+biographical interest in such men; they have necessarily a rich
+personality.
+
+The passages I have cited are all pictures of outward nature, natural
+scenes mirrored on the mind, or rather refracted through it, and in
+the act transfigured, spiritualized; for such scenes, having
+the fortune to fall on the minds of poets, are reproduced with joyful
+revelation of their inmost being, as sunbeams are through a crystal
+prism. Exhibiting material nature spiritualized, well do these
+passages show the uplifting character of poetic imagination. But this
+displays a higher, and its highest power when, striking like a
+thunderbolt into the core of things, it lays bare mysteries of God and
+of the heart which mere prosaic reason cannot solve or approach,
+cannot indeed alone even dimly apprehend.
+
+I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet are
+opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in
+single or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamond
+are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of
+fossil carbon.
+
+When, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost," Milton narrates the
+arrival on the battle-field of the Son,--
+
+  "Attended by ten thousand thousand saints,"
+
+and then adds:--
+
+  "Far off his coming shone,"
+
+in these five short words is a sudden glare of grandeur that dilates
+the capable mind with light, and, as the sublime always does, with
+awe.
+
+When Ferdinand, in "The Tempest," leaps "with hair up-staring"
+into the sea, crying,--
+
+              "Hell is empty,
+  And all the devils are here,"
+
+the mind is suddenly filled with an image of the tumult and flaming
+rage of a thunder-storm at sea, such as words have never elsewhere
+carried. What a reach in the imaginative stroke! In the first scene of
+"Faust," the earth-spirit, whom Faust has evoked, concludes the
+whirling, dazzling, brief, but gigantic sketch of his function with
+these words, the majesty of which translation cannot entirely
+subdue:--
+
+  "I ply the resounding great loom of old Time,
+  And work at the Godhead's live vesture sublime."
+
+How ennobling is the idea the mind harbors of humanity, after taking
+in these lines from Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of
+Immortality:"--
+
+  "But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+  From God, who is our home."
+
+With a single epithet, coined for the occasion, Keats flashes upon our
+imagination the dethroned Saturn and the immensity of his fall:
+
+                  "Upon the sodden ground
+  His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
+  Unsceptered; and his _realmless_ eyes were closed."
+
+The "Hyperion" of this transcendent genius, written in his
+twenty-fourth year, the year before he died, is as great poetry as has
+ever been treasured in words. In it he lavishes poetic wealth as
+though gold were with him as plenty as silver; and so on the next page
+he exceeds, if possible, the sublimity of the above lines, making Thea
+write in the catalogue of Saturn's colossal deprivations,--
+
+                  "And all the air
+  Is emptied of thine hoary majesty."
+
+These passages vividly exemplify poetic imagination, which is the
+illumining of a capable material by a spiritual light, a light thrown
+into it from the glow kindled in the poet's mind with richest
+sensibilities, that are refined and sublimated by an exacting, subtle
+inward demand for the best they can render. A single flash of new
+thrilling light irradiates a continent of thought. This is the work of
+genius, and genius is ever marked by a deeper sympathy with and
+recognition of the creative spirit and the divine action, a sympathy
+and recognition so sensitive that the spirit and action of the writer
+are permeated by the divine effluence, he becoming thereby the
+interpreter of divine law, the exhibitor of divine beauty.
+
+In these passages the thought of the poet is thrust up through
+the overlaying crust of the common, by a warming, expanding, inward
+motion, which is sped by a vitality so urgent and irresistible that,
+to make passage for the new thought, lightly is lifted a load which,
+but for this spiritual efficacy, could not be stirred, just as heavy
+stones are raised by delicate growing plants. To exert this power the
+poet is always moved at the instance of feeling. Poetry having its
+birth in feeling, no man can enjoy or value it but through feeling.
+But what moves him to embody and shape his feeling is that ravishing
+sentiment which will have the best there is in the feeling, the
+sentiment which seeks satisfaction through contemplation or
+entertainment of the most divine and most perfect, and ever rises to
+the top of the refined joy which such contemplation educes.
+
+The poetic imagination is the Ariel of the poet,--his spiritual
+messenger and Mercury. A clear look into the above passages would show
+that the source of their power is in the farther scope or exquisite
+range the imagination opens to us, often by a word. For further
+illustration I will take a few other examples, scrutinizing them more
+minutely. Had Lorenzo opened the famous passage in "The
+Merchant of Venice" thus,--
+
+  "How _calm_ the moonlight _lies_ upon this bank,"
+
+and continued to the end of the dozen lines in the same key, saying,--
+
+  "There's not the _tiniest star_ that _can be seen_
+  But in its _revolution_ it doth _hum_,
+  Aye _chanting_ to the _heavenly_ cherubins,"
+
+his words would not have become celebrated and quotable. But Lorenzo
+has the privilege of being one of the mouth-pieces of Shakespeare, and
+so he begins,--
+
+  "How _sweet_ the moonlight _sleeps_ upon this bank."
+
+Two words, _sweet_ and _sleep_, put in the place of _calm_ and _lies_,
+lift the line out of prose into poetry. A log _lies_ on a bank; so
+does a dead dog, and the more dead a thing is the more it lies; but
+only what is alive _sleeps_, and thus the word, besides an image of
+extreme stillness, brings with it what strengthens the image, the idea
+of change from liveliness to quiet; for that which was awake now
+sleeps; and the more full the picture of stillness, the more awake is
+the mind of the reader, awakened by the fitness and felicity of the
+image. The substitution of _sweet_ for _calm_ is, in a less degree,
+similarly enlivening; for, used in such conjunction, _sweet_ is more
+individual and subtle, and imports more life, and thus helps the
+distinctness and vividness of the picture. How does the poetic Lorenzo
+word the other three lines?
+
+  "There's not the _smallest orb_ which _thou behold'st_,
+  But in _his motion like an angel sings_,
+  Still _quiring_ to the _young-eyed_ cherubins."
+
+The words or phrases italicized carry a larger, or a deeper or a finer
+meaning than the corresponding ones in the substituted lines. To
+_behold_ is more than to _see_: it is to see contemplatively. The
+figure _prosopopoeia_ is often but an impotent straining to impart
+poetic life; but the personification in _in his motion_ is apt and
+effective. _Quiring_ is an amplification of the immediately preceding
+_sings_, and, signifying to sing in company with others, enlarges,
+while making more specific, the thought. And what an image of the
+freshness of heaven and of youthful immortality is conveyed by the
+epithet _young-eyed_! At every step the thought is expanded and
+beautiful, reaching at the end of the third line a climax on which the
+poetically excited mind is left poised in delight.
+
+But the passage transformed, and, as we might say, degraded, is still
+poetical. There is so much poetry in the thought that the flattening
+of the phraseology cannot smother it, the lines still remaining
+poetically alive, their poetry shining through the plainer and less
+figurative words. And the thought is poetical because it is the result
+of a flight of intellect made by aid of imagination's wings, these
+being moved by the soaring demands of the beautiful, and beating an
+atmosphere exhaled from sensibility. As Joubert says,--herein uttering
+a cardinal aesthetic principle,--"It is, above all, in the spirituality
+of ideas that poetry consists." Thought that is poetic will glisten
+through the plainest words; whereas, if the thought be prosaic or
+trite, all the gilded epithets in the dictionary will not give it the
+poetic sheen. Perdita wishes for
+
+                            "Daffodils
+  That come before the swallow dares, and take
+  The winds of March with beauty."
+
+Note the poetic potency in the simple word _dares_; how much it
+carries: the cold which the swallow has not the courage to confront; a
+mental action, I might almost call it, in the swallow, who, after
+making a recognizance of the season, determines that it would be rash
+to venture so far north: all this is in the single word. For _dares_
+write _does_, and the effect would be like that of cutting a
+gash in a rising balloon: you would let the line suddenly down,
+because you take the life out of the thought.
+
+                    "And take
+  The winds of March with beauty."
+
+Every one is taken at some time or other with the beauty of person or
+thing, and the thought is common; but that the winds of March be taken
+with the beauty of daffodils, this was a delicate secret which those
+winds would confide only to one so sympathetic as Shakespeare. This is
+poetic imagination, the intellect sent on far errands by a sensibility
+which is at once generous and bold, and fastidious through the
+promptings and the exactions of the beautiful.
+
+In the opening of "Il Penseroso" Milton describes the shapes that in
+sprightly moods possess the fancy,
+
+                "As thick and numberless
+  As the gay motes that _people_ the sunbeams."
+
+Put _shine in_ the sunbeams, for _people_, and, notwithstanding the
+luminousness of the word substituted, you take the sparkle out of the
+line, which sparkle is imparted by mental activity, and the poetic
+dash that has the delightful audacity to personify such atomies.
+
+The poetical is the flush on the face of things in the
+unconscious triumph of their purest life, cognizable by being beheld
+at the moment when the higher faculties are at their fullest flood,
+buoyed up on the joy of being and emotional sympathy. The most and the
+highest of this joy is possessed by him whose imagination is most
+capable of being poetically agitated; for by such agitation light is
+engendered within him, whereby objects and sensations that before were
+dim and opaque grow luminous and pellucid, like great statuary in
+twilight or moonlight, standing vague and unvalued until a torch is
+waved over it.
+
+When we begin to speak of poetry, the higher qualities of the mind
+come up for judgment. No genuine poet is without one or more of these,
+and a great poet must have most of them. Thence the thought of the
+poet is pitched on a high key, and even in poets of power the poetry
+of a page is sometimes shown merely by the sustained tone of the
+sentiment, giving out no jets of fire, having no passages salient with
+golden embossings. Through sympathy and sense of beauty, the poet gets
+nearer to the absolute nature of things; and thence, with little of
+imagery, or coloring, or passion, through this holy influence
+he becomes poetic, depicting by re-creating the object or feeling or
+condition, and rising naturally into rhythmic lines and sentences, the
+best substance asking for, and readily obtaining, the most suitable
+form of words. Yet a poet of inward resources can seldom write a page
+without there being heard a note or bar or passage of the finer
+melody.
+
+But men wanting this inward wealth, that is, wanting depth and breadth
+of emotional capacity, have not, whatever their other gifts, the soil
+needed for highly imaginative poetry. With broad emphasis this
+aesthetic law is exemplified in the verse of Voltaire, especially in
+his dramas, and in the verse of one who was deeper and higher than he
+as thinker and critic, of Lessing. Skillful versifiers, by help of
+fancy and a certain plastic aptitude and laborious culture, are
+enabled to give to smooth verse a flavor of poetry and to achieve a
+temporary reputation. But of such uninspired workmanship the gilding
+after a while wears off, the externally imparted perfume surely
+evaporates.
+
+Often the most suitable form of words is made of plainest, commonest
+parts of speech, and the fewest of them. The more intense and deep
+the feeling, the greater is the need of briefest, simplest
+utterance. When in one of those pauses of frantic wrath,--like the
+sudden rifts that momentarily let the calm stars through a whirling
+canopy of storm,--Lear utters imploringly that appeal to Heaven, the
+words are the familiar words of hourly use; but what divine tenderness
+and what sweep of power in three lines!
+
+                                "O heavens,
+  If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
+  Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
+  Make it your cause; send down and take my part!"
+
+The thirty-third canto of the "Inferno" supremely exemplifies the
+sustaining energy of poetic imagination, that by its sublimating light
+it can forever hold before the mind, in tearful, irresistible beauty,
+one of the most woful forms of human suffering, death by starvation.
+In that terrific picture, in front of which all the generations of men
+that come after Dante are to weep purifying tears, the most exquisite
+stroke is given in five monosyllables; but in those five little words
+what depth of pathos, what concentration of meaning! On the fourth day
+one of Ugolino's dying sons throws himself at his father's feet,
+crying,--
+
+  "Father, why dost not help me?"
+
+Here let me remark that it is not by witnessing, through
+poetically imaginative representation, scenes of suffering and agony,
+as in this case and the tragic drama, that the sensibilities are
+"purged," according to the famous saying of Aristotle; but it is
+because such scenes are witnessed by the light of the beautiful. The
+beautiful always purifies and exalts.
+
+In either of these two passages any piling up of words, any hyperbole
+of phrase, or boldness or even grandeur of figurative speech, would
+have proved a hindrance instead of a conductor to the feeling,
+smothering and not facilitating expression. But when, turned out of
+doors in "a wild night," by those "unnatural hags," his daughters,
+Lear, baring his brow to the storm, invokes the thunder to
+
+  "Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world,"
+
+there is no tenderness, no folding of the sore heart upon itself;
+there is the expansion of defiance, outburst of the mighty wrath of an
+outraged father and wronged and crownless king: and so we have a gush
+of the grandest diction, of the most tempestuous rhythm, the storm in
+Lear's mind marrying itself with a ghastly joy to the storm of the
+elements, the sublime tumult above echoed in the crashing splendor of
+the verse:--
+
+  "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
+  You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
+  Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
+  You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
+  Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving-thunderbolts,
+  Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
+  Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
+  Crack nature's moulds, all germins spill at once,
+  That make ingrateful man!"
+
+I know of no other single passage that exhibits so clearly the
+colossal dimensions of Shakespeare. Here is attained, with almost
+unique effect, what according to Schiller is the aim of poetry, "no
+other than to give to humanity its fullest possible expression, its
+most complete utterance."
+
+The best poetry, like the best music, soars towards the upper light.
+The genuinely poetical always lifts up the thought on the swell of
+emotion. The thought moves free and strong because there is a deep,
+bubbling head of feeling behind it. Feeling, at its best, has an
+ascending movement, reaching up towards that high sphere where,
+through their conjunction, the earthly and the spiritual play in
+freedom in the sunshine of the beautiful. The surest test of the
+presence of poetry is buoyancy, springiness, which comes from the
+union, the divine union, of the spiritual and the beautiful. However
+weighty it may be with thought, the poetical passage floats,
+thus giving certain sign of life, of a soul irrepressible.
+
+But as in the forest there cannot be height of stem without strength
+and breadth of root, the highest poetry is the most solid, the firmest
+set in reality, in truth. The higher a poet is, the closer hold he has
+of the roots of his subject. He looks at it with a peering, deeply
+sympathetic insight. The roots, in fact, are in himself; they are in
+the depths of his soul. Hence a cardinal question about a poem is, How
+much of it does the poet draw out of himself? Is it his by projection
+from his inward resources, by injection with his own juices; or is it
+his only by adoption and adaptation, by dress and adjustment?
+
+Flight of poetic imagination there cannot be unless the wings have
+been feathered in the heart. Loftiness or grandeur of imagination
+there cannot be, except there be first innate richness and breadth of
+feeling. Imagination being simply the tensest action of intellect, is
+ever, like intellect in all its phases, an instrument of feeling, a
+mere tool. Height implies inward depth. The gift to touch the vitals
+of a subject is the test-gift of literary faculty; it is the
+soul-gift, the gift of fuller, livelier sympathy. Compare Wordsworth
+with Southey to learn the difference between inward and outward gifts.
+
+Poetry being in the mind, the man who has little poetry within him
+will find little in nature or in the world or in Shakespeare. The man
+who has no music in his soul will hear none at the Conservatoire in
+Paris. Wordsworth sees with the inward eye, Southey too exclusively
+with the outward. The true poet projects visions and rhythms out from
+his brain, and gazes at and hearkens to them. The degree of the
+truthfulness to nature and the vividness of these projections is the
+measure of his poetic genius and capacity. Only through this intense
+inwardness can he attain to great visions and rhythmic raptures, and
+make you see and hear them. What illimitable inward sight must Keats
+have dwelt in ere, to depict the effect on him of looking into
+Chapman's Homer, he could write,--
+
+  "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
+    When a new planet swims into his ken;
+  Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
+    He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
+  Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
+    Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
+
+Here is a brilliant example of poetic imagination, the
+intellect urged to its finest action to satisfy the feeling which
+delights in the grand, the select, the beautiful.
+
+  "Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
+
+What an outlook! What a solemn, mysterious, elevating inward moment it
+creates in us! To ascend to that peak, to carry the reader thither
+with him, that is the flight of a great poet, of one who has been--as
+in that choice poem, "The Prelude," Wordsworth, with an electric
+stroke of poetic imagination, says of Newton--
+
+  "Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone."
+
+This vigor of flight in the poet, bearing on his wing the reader, whom
+he ushers to new, sudden vistas, is a test of poetic genius. Some
+poets never carry you to heights, but rather make you feel while
+reading them as if you were moving through shut-in valleys: their
+verse wants sky. They are not poetically imaginative, are not strung
+for those leaps which the great poet at times finds it impossible not
+to make. They have more poetic fancy than poetic imagination. Poetic
+fancy is a thin flame kindled deliberately with gathered materials;
+poetic imagination is an intense flash born unexpectedly of
+internal collisions. Fancy is superficial and comparatively
+short-sighted; imagination is penetrative and far-sighted, bringing
+together things widely sundered, apparently diverse and opposite.
+Fancy divides, individualizes; imagination compounds, builds, globes.
+Fancy is not so broad or so keen or so warm or so bounding as
+imagination; is comparatively tame and cold and quiet. Imagination is
+synthetical. Large exhibitions of poetic imagination are rare even in
+the greatest poets. At its best it strikes deep into the nature of
+things, has a celestial quality which invests it with awe. Spenser
+shows great resources of fancy, but little imagination. The arc of
+imagination is in him too near its center. Hence there is no reach in
+his thoughts. He has no exhaustless depths within. He is not,
+as Coleridge says Shakespeare is, an example of "endless
+self-reproduction." Cowley, says the same great critic, "is a fanciful
+writer, Milton an imaginative poet."
+
+As I have already said, the power of imagining, of forming in the mind
+images, conceptions, is a purely intellectual power, and imagination
+becomes poetical only when this intellectual power is an agent
+obeying that emotional power which ardently seeks, intensely longs
+for, the better, the more perfect, the purer, in one word, the
+beautiful in each province of multiform life. The willing agent,
+intellect, is sent out on excursions of discovery, and unexpectedly
+falls in with and captures all kinds of sparkling booty.
+
+Writers weak in poetic imagination are not visited by those beaming
+thoughts that come unsummoned out of the invisible, like new stars
+which, out of the unfathomable deeps of the sky, dart suddenly upon
+the vision of the heaven-watcher. Such writers deal with the known,
+with the best commonplace, not the common merely; and under the glance
+of genius the common grows strange and profound.
+
+Some poets, not weak in poetic imagination, yet use it chiefly for
+secondary purposes, that is, for beautifying the dress, the externals
+of poetry. Minds with some breadth but with little depth are not
+thoroughly original. Their sense of the beautiful busies itself
+necessarily with that for which they have the readiest gifts; and
+their readiest gifts being words more than ideas, versification more
+than thought, form more than substance, they turn out verse,
+chiefly narrative, which captivates through its easy flow, its smooth
+sensuousness of diction, its gloss. Take a poet so celebrated, in some
+respects so admirable, as Tennyson. Tennyson's verse is apt to be too
+richly dressed, too perfumed. The clothing is costlier than the
+thoughts can pay for. Hence at every re-reading of him he parts with
+some of his strength, so that after three or four repetitions he has
+little left for you. From a similar cause this is the case too with
+Byron, through whose pen to common sentiment and opinion a glow is
+imparted by the animal heat of the man, heightened by poetic tints
+from a keen sense of the beautiful. But this is not the case with
+Keats or Shelley or Coleridge or Wordsworth, and of course therefore
+not with Milton or Shakespeare. All these keep fresh, at every contact
+giving you strength and losing none. As freely and freshly as the
+sun's beams through a transparent, upspringing Gothic spire, intellect
+and feeling play, ever undimmed, through Shelley's "Sky-Lark." Not so
+through Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women." After a time these
+mellifluous stanzas droop, and cling to the paper: they have not
+enough flame-like motion. The nicest word-choosing will not
+supply the place of choice in thought, a choice prompted by fresh
+feeling; nor, where there is no new impulse from the heart, will the
+most gorgeous diction give to a line the poetic carnation. There can
+be no freshness of expression without freshness of thought; the
+sparkle on the skin comes from new blood in the heart.
+
+Tennyson's poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches,
+and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots.
+There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion to
+keep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant. Wordsworth's poetry has for
+the most part roots deeply hidden.
+
+Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to a
+body. This is the method with even some writers of good gifts and
+deserved name. Compared with Goethe, who, sensuous as he is, but
+healthily sensuous, writes always from within outward, Schiller is
+chargeable with this kind of externality. To try to make the fancy do
+the work of feeling is a vain effort. And so much verse is of the
+memory and fancy more than of the heart and imagination. Inward
+impulse not being dominant, the words, however shiny, are touched with
+coldness. Under the inward dominance (supposing always that the
+intellectual tool be of due temper and sharpness) the poet mounts
+springily on a ladder self-wrought out of the brain as he ascends; and
+thus there is a prompt continuity and progressiveness, a forward and
+upward movement towards the climax which ever awaits you in a subject
+that has a poem in it. In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration and
+not mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbing
+over phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links of
+association. This gives sure note of the presence of the matrix out of
+which poetry molds itself, that is, sensibility warm and deep,
+penetrating sympathy. Where evolution and upward movement are not, it
+is a sign that the spring lacks depth and is too much fed by surface
+streams from without.
+
+Through a poem should run a thread of emotional thought, strong enough
+to bind the parts together so vividly as to hold attention close to
+the substance. Many a so-called poem is but a string of elaborate
+stanzas, mostly of four lines each, too slightly connected to
+cooperate as members of an organic whole. There is not heat enough in
+the originating impulse to fuse the parts into unity. There is
+too much manufacture and not enough growth. Coleridge says, "The
+difference between manufactured poems and works of genius is not less
+than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look
+alike."
+
+Men without depth of sensibility or breadth of nature, but with enough
+sense of beauty to modulate their thoughts, using with skill the
+floating capital of sentiment and the current diction and molds of
+verse, for a generation are esteemed poets of more genius than they
+have, their pages being elaborate verse flavored with poetry, rather
+than poems. In much verse are found old thoughts re-dressed in the
+scoured garments of an ambitious fancy. The remark being made to
+Goethe in his latter days, that scarce one of the younger German poets
+had given an example of good prose, he rejoined, "That is very
+natural; he who would write prose must have something to say; but he
+who has nothing to say can make verses and rhymes; for one word gives
+the other, till at last you have before you what in fact is nothing,
+yet looks as though it were something." There is much good-looking
+verse which does not fulfill any one of Milton's primary conditions
+for poetry, being artificial instead of "simple," and having
+neither soul enough to be "passionate," nor body enough to be
+"sensuous." By passionate Milton means imbued with feeling.
+
+The poetical mood is always a visionary mood; so much so, that even
+when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it
+with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward.
+Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold,
+presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image
+thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a
+lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle
+and its glistening counterpart. In the best poetry there is vivid
+picture-making: reality is made more visible by being presented as a
+beautiful show. It is the power to present the beautiful show which
+constitutes the poet. To conceive a scene or person with such
+liveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception to
+paper with a distinctness and palpitation that shall make the reader
+behold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual--this implies a
+subtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test of poetic
+faculty. To stand this test there must be an inward sea of thought and
+sensibility, dipping into which the poet is enabled to hold up his
+conception or invention all adrip with sparkling freshness. The poetic
+mind, with a firm, and at the same time free, easy hold, holds a
+subject at arm's length, where it can be turned round in the light;
+the prosaic mind grasps and hugs what it handles so close that there
+is no room for play of light or motion.
+
+Contemplating synthetically the highest and choicest and purest, and
+at the same time actively endeavoring to embody it, the genuine poet
+has in his best work joy as exalted as the mind can here attain to;
+and in the reader who can attune himself to the high pitch, he
+enkindles the same kind of joyful exaltation. There is current a
+detestable phrase or definition, which even Coleridge allows himself
+to countenance, namely, that poetry is something which gives pleasure.
+Pleasure! Do we speak of the pleasure of beholding the sun rise out of
+the Atlantic or from the top of Mount Washington, or the pleasure of
+standing beside Niagara, or of reading about the self-sacrifice of
+Regulus or Winkelried? Pleasure is a word limited to the animal or to
+the lighter feelings. "Let me have the pleasure of taking wine
+with you." A good dinner gives great pleasure to a circle of gourmets.
+Even enjoyment, a higher word than pleasure, should, when applied to
+poetry, be conjoined with some elevating qualification; for all the
+feelings impart enjoyment through their simple healthy function, and
+there are people who enjoy a cock-pit, or a bull-fight, or an
+execution. But poetry causes that refined, super-sensuous delight
+which follows the apprehension of any thought, sentiment, act, or
+scene, which rises towards the best and purest possible in the range
+of that thought, sentiment, act, or scene. In the poetical there
+always is exaltation, a reaching towards perfection, a subtle,
+blooming spirituality. The end of poetry is not pleasure,--this were
+to speak too grossly,--but refined enjoyment through emotion.
+
+To him who has the finer sensibility to become aware of its presence,
+the poetical is everywhere. The beautiful is a kiss which man gives to
+Nature, who returns it; to get the kiss from her he must first give
+it. Wordsworth says, "Poetry is the breath and fine spirit of all
+knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the
+countenance of all science." It might be called the aromatic
+essence of all life.
+
+A poem is the incarnation of this aroma, the condensation of it into
+form. A drop of dew symbolizes a poem; for a true poem should be oval,
+without angles, transparent, compact, complete in itself, graceful
+from inward quality and fullness. It may be of a few lines, or of
+hundreds or thousands; but there must be no superfluous line or word.
+A poem drops out of the brain a fragrant distillation. A poem must be
+a spiritual whole; that is, not only with the parts organized into
+proportioned unity, but with the whole and the parts springing out of
+the idea, the sentiment, form obedient to substance, body to soul, the
+sensuous life to the inward. For enduring, ruddy incarnation, the
+subject, whether it be incident, scene, sentiment, or action, must
+have within its core this essential aroma. The poet (and the test of
+his poetic capacity is his gift to draw the fragrance out of such a
+core) keeps his conception distinctly and vividly before him. The
+conception or ideal prefigurement of his theme precedes him, like the
+pillar of fire in the night, drawing him onward surely and rapidly.
+Otherwise he lags and flags and stumbles. The spring into poetry is on
+a flash, which not only lights up the thought on which it springs, but
+renews, recreates it.
+
+A man's chief aim in life should be to better himself, to keep
+bettering himself; and in this high duty the poet helps him. Poetry is
+the great educator of the feelings. By seizing and holding up to view
+the noblest and cleanest and best there is in human life, poetry
+elevates and refines the feelings. It reveals and strengthens the
+spirituality of our nature. Poetry tunes the mind. Faculty of
+admiration is one of our super-animal privileges. Poetry purges and
+guides admiration; and the sounder and higher our admirations, the
+more admirable ourselves become.
+
+The best poetry turns the mind inward upon itself, and sweetens its
+imaginations. Our imaginations, that is, our inward thoughts, plans,
+shaping our silent, interior doings, these are the chief part of us;
+for out of these come most of our outward acts, and all of their
+color. As is the preponderance of the man, will be this inward brood.
+The timid man will imagine dangers, the anxious man troubles, the
+hopeful man successes, the avaricious man accumulations, the ambitious
+possession of power; and the poetic man will imagine all sorts
+of perfections, be ever yearning for a better and higher, be ever
+building beautiful air-castles, earthy or moral, material or ethereal,
+according as the sensuous or the spiritual predominates in his nature.
+Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vast
+wealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzled
+his contemporaries with Fonthill Abbey. Not only are Fonthill Abbeys
+and all beautiful buildings achieved through the warm action of the
+poetic faculty, but all improvements are brought about by its virtue.
+Out of this deep, inward, creative power issue all theories and
+practice for the bettering of human conditions. All original founders
+and discoverers are poets: the most poetic French mind I know is that
+of Fourier.
+
+When a mind, having the texture and expansibility to become surcharged
+with magnetic effluence, has moreover that aesthetic gift of rhythmic
+expression which involves a sense of the beautiful, that is, of the
+high and exquisite possibilities of created things,--when such a mind,
+under the pressure of inward needs, betakes it to embodying in verse
+its imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. _Poetry is
+thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in
+musical cadence._ And when we consider that thought is the gathering
+of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative
+sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its
+tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is
+heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some
+sound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuine
+poem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind,
+and involves in its production a beatific visionariness.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+STYLE.
+
+
+Thought, act, and speech are of one substance. Where the best things
+have been done, the best things have been said. The history of Attica
+is richer and more significant than that of her sister-states of old
+Greece, and among them her literature is supreme. So of England in
+modern Europe. And where good thoughts have been uttered the form of
+those will be finest which carry the choicest life. The tree gets its
+texture from the quality of its sap. Were I asked what author is the
+most profitable to the student of English on account of style, I
+should answer, study Shakespeare.
+
+Have something to say, and say it in the best and fewest words, were a
+good recipe for style. In this brief precept there are more
+ingredients than at first view appear. To have something to say
+implies that a man must write out of himself, and not chiefly out of
+his memory; and so to write involves much more than many people
+are aware of; in order that his style have freshness, which is a
+primary need of a good style, the writer's thought must be fresh.
+Then, to say his thought in the best and fewest words implies faculty
+of choice in words, and faculty of getting rid of all verbal
+superfluity; and these two faculties betoken proficiencies and some of
+the finer aesthetic forces.
+
+Style itself is a gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts),
+not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to one
+with inharmonious or defective natural powers, you might as well
+attempt to teach a thrush to sing the songs of the nightingale. To be
+sure, like the poetical, or the scientific, or any mental gift, it
+requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most,
+as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get from
+others--whether through study of the best masters or through direct
+rhetorical instruction--is in the mechanical portion of the art; that
+is, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses,
+how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and
+awkwardness, and thus make most presentable and accessible what he has
+to give out. Even in these superficial lessons success imports
+something more than a superficial capacity. These lessons learnt, and
+you have still to go behind them for style, whose cradle is within
+you. _Le style c'est l'homme meme_ (a man's style is his very self),
+is the oft-quoted profound sentence of Buffon. Style comes out of the
+interior: beneath a genuinely good style are secret springs which give
+to the surface its movement and sparkle. Mostly when people talk of
+style 't is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath. In
+popularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springs
+beneath; in Tom Moore's, for example, or Southey's.
+
+Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than others
+in presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shaping
+their utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plastic
+faculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style. Tact
+and craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some other
+writers of more substance; still, they are only capable of so doing by
+means of qualities which, however secondary, are interior and fervent,
+and the skill imparted by which cannot be acquired except through the
+presence of these qualities. This superiority of skill in form
+is illustrated by the literature of France in comparison with the
+literature of Germany, and even with that of England. The French
+follow a precept thus embodied by Beranger: "Perfection of style
+should be sought by all those who believe themselves called to diffuse
+useful thoughts. Style, which is only the form appropriated to a
+subject by art and reflection, is the passport of which every thought
+has need in order to circulate, expand, and lodge itself in people's
+brains. To neglect style is not to show sufficient love for the ideas
+one wishes to make others adopt." And so effective is the following of
+such a precept that, through careful devices and manipulating
+cleverness, a brilliant success, though transitory is achieved by some
+writers who range lightly over surfaces, their thoughts dipping no
+deeper than a flat stone thrown to skim along the water, which it
+keeps ruffling, making a momentary sprightly splash at each contact,
+until, its force being soon spent, it disappears and is seen no more.
+
+The possession of certain mental gifts constitutes a talent for
+writing, gifts which, with reference to the great primary powers of
+the mind, are secondary. Sainte-Beuve says of the Abbe Gerbet
+that he "had naturally the flowers of speech, movement and rhythm of
+phrase, measure and choice of expression, even figurative language,
+what, in short, makes a talent for writing." The possessor of these
+qualifications may, nevertheless, rise only a little above mediocrity.
+Of the styles of many, even clever, accomplished writers, one gets a
+clear notion from the remark made of a certain polished actress, that
+she always played well, never better.
+
+When Sainte-Beuve says _Rien ne vit que par le style_, he asserts in
+fact the exclusive privilege of original thought to give permanence to
+literary work; for nothing but an interior source can give life to
+expression. The inward flow will shape itself adequately and
+harmoniously in proportion as it has at full command the auxiliary,
+what I have called the plastic literary qualities; but shape itself it
+will, effectively and with living force, without the fullest command,
+while the readiest mastery over these qualities can never give
+vitality to style when are wanting primary resources. Literary
+substance which does not shape itself successfully (it may not be with
+the fullest success) is internally defective, is insufficient;
+for if it throb with life, it will mold a form for its embodiment,
+albeit that form, from lack of complete command of the secondary
+agents, will not be so graceful or rich as with such command it would
+have been. Wordsworth has made to English literature a permanent
+addition which is of the highest worth, in spite of notable plastic
+deficiencies. A conception that has a soul in it will find itself a
+body, and if not a literary body, one furnished by some other of the
+fine arts; or, wanting that, in practical enterprise or invention. And
+the body or form will be stamped with the inward lineaments of the
+man. Style issues from within, and if it does not, it is not style,
+but manner. Words get all their force from the thoughts and feelings
+behind them. They are necessary media, created, molded, and combined
+by mental wants. Picking and polishing words and phrases is
+ineffectual without the picking and polishing of the thoughts: below
+the surface of words lies that which controls and vivifies style. And
+then between the substance, the mental material, and the executive
+faculties there must be lively harmony. The executive power is a
+purely intellectual composite instrument; the force that
+wields it is feeling. For the best style the wielding force must be
+fine as well as rich and strong, and the shaping, harmonizing
+instrument of superfine temper and smiling willingness.
+
+Style, in writing, is the art of putting into words what you think or
+feel, in such a way as to make the best of it--presupposed, that what
+you think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are men
+who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong
+understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their
+contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity,
+will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in
+most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a
+style which for their purposes is effective. Of this class Jeffrey,
+Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not winged
+minds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into
+an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent,
+illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finer
+insight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even when
+most vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, by
+imaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not by
+freshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius,
+creativeness. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers had
+appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," Brougham, one of its founders and
+controllers, protested that if that man were permitted to write any
+more he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of the
+Review were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitrary
+proceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying the
+instinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius.
+
+Not less than men of talent men of genius need to cultivate style;
+nay, from the copiousness and variousness of their material, and from
+its very inwardness, the molds into which it is to be thrown need the
+finest care. Coleridge, rich and incomparable as he is, would have
+made many of his prose pages still more effective by a studious
+supervision; and De Quincey tells us what labor his periods sometimes
+cost him. The following advice, given in a letter from Maurice de
+Guerin to his sister, may be addressed to all literary aspirants:
+"Form for yourself a style which shall be the expression of
+yourself. Study our French language by attentive reading, making it
+your care to mark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies of
+style, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In the
+works of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use it
+each in our own fashion."
+
+One of the first constituents of a good style is what Coleridge calls
+"progressive transition," which implies a dynamic force, a propulsive
+movement, behind the pen. Hazlitt, for example, somewhat lacked this
+force, and hence De Quincey is justified to speak of his solitary
+flashes of thought, his "brilliancy, seen chiefly in separate
+splinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreous
+scintillation for a moment." One of the charms, in a high sense, of
+Coleridge's page is that in him this dynamic force was present in
+liveliest action. His intellect, ever enkindled by his emotions,
+exacted logical sequence, and thus a rapid forward movement is
+overspread by a glow of generous feeling, which, being refined by his
+poetic sensibility made his style luminous and flowing.
+
+De Quincey, treating of aphoristic writing, says, "Any man [he of
+course means any man with good things in him] as he walks
+through the streets may contrive to jot down an independent thought, a
+short-hand memorandum of a great truth; but the labor of composition
+begins when you have to put your separate threads of thought into a
+loom; to weave them into a continuous whole; to connect, to introduce
+them; to blow them out or expand them; to carry them to a close."
+Buffon attached the greatest importance to sequence, to close
+dependence, to continuous enchainment. He detested a chopped, jerky
+style, that into which the French are prone to fall. Certain it is,
+and from obvious causes, that much of the secret of style lies in
+aptness of sequence, thought and word, through an irresistible
+impulsion and pertinence, leaping forth nimbly, each taking its place
+promptly, because naturally and necessarily. Through fusion and close
+coherency and dependence, the flow is at once smooth and lively. The
+grace as well as the strength of the living physical body depends
+much, nay primarily, on the joints. So with the body of a good
+writer's thoughts, that is, his mode of utterance. To the linking of
+sentences and paragraphs (the links being self-wrought out of inward
+sap) is due much of the buoyancy and force of style. The
+springiness of the joints depends, in the body, on the quality of its
+nervous life; in style, much on the marrow and validity of the
+thoughts. By a sprightly stream of thought, fed from a full spring of
+feeling, the current of words is kept lively and graceful. Words,
+sentences, paragraphs, cannot be held closely, symmetrically,
+attractively together, without the unction invisibly distilled from
+brisk mental movement, movement starting from sentiment fresh and
+true. Soul is the source of style. Not sensibility alone is a
+prerequisite for style: the sensibility must be _active_, made active
+by the fine aspiring urgency which ever demands the best. A good style
+will have the sheen communicated by lubrication from within, not the
+gloss of outward rubbing.
+
+That style varies in pitch and tone according to the subject treated
+ought to be self-evident. In every page of "The Merry Wives of
+Windsor" we recognize Shakespeare not less palpably than in "King
+Lear." In his "Recollections of Charles Lamb" De Quincey writes, "Far
+be it from me to say one word in praise of those--people of how narrow
+a sensibility--who imagine that a simple (that is, according to many
+tastes, an unelevated and _unrhythmical_) style--take, for
+instance, an Addisonian or a Swiftian style--is _unconditionally_
+good. Not so: all depends upon the subject; and there is a style,
+transcending these and all other modes of simplicity, by infinite
+degrees, and, in the same proportion, impossible to most men, the
+rhythmical, the continuous--what in French is called the
+_soutenu_--which, to humbler styles stands in the relation of an organ
+to a shepherd's pipe. This also finds its justification in its
+subject; and the subject which _can_ justify it must be of a
+corresponding quality--loftier--and therefore, rare."
+
+I quote De Quincey because he has written more, and more profoundly as
+well as more copiously, on style than any writer I know. To this
+point,--the adaption of style to subject,--he returns, laying down
+with clearness and truth the law which should here govern. In a paper
+on Schlosser's "Literary History of the Eighteenth Century" he
+reaffirms--what cannot be too strongly insisted on--the falsity of the
+common opinion that Swift's style is, for all writers, a model of
+excellence, showing how it is only fitted to the kind of subjects on
+which Swift wrote, and concluding with this characteristic passage:
+"That nearly all the blockheads with whom I have at any time had the
+pleasure of conversing upon the subject of style (and pardon me for
+saying that men of the most sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz.,
+poetry and style, to talk _most_ like blockheads) have invariably
+regarded Swift's style not as if _relatively_, (i.e., _given_ a proper
+subject), but as if _absolutely_ good--good unconditionally, no matter
+what the subject. Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the dean had
+been required to write a pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh's immortal
+apostrophe to Death, or to many passages in Sir Thomas Brown's
+'Religio Medici' and his 'Urn-Burial,' or to Jeremy Taylor's inaugural
+sections of his 'Holy Living and Dying,' do you know what would have
+happened? Are you aware what sort of a ridiculous figure your poor
+bald Jonathan would have cut? About the same that would be cut by a
+forlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if
+suddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival of
+Belshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords."
+
+That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of high
+excellence ought to be a truism. Through a certain equilibrium among
+his faculties, and assiduous literary culture, such a one may
+excel colleagues who move on the same bounded plane; but that is all.
+From the shallowest utterance, where, thoughts and feelings lying just
+below the surface, there can be no strong lights and shadows, no
+splendid play in the exposition, styles range, with the men who make
+them, through all degrees of liveliness and significance and power, up
+to that simple grandeur which conceals a vast volume of thought, and
+implies a divine ruling of multiplicity.
+
+In a good style, on whatever degree it stands, there must be a full
+marriage between word and thought, so clean an adjustment of
+expression to material as to leave no rough edges or nodes. The words
+must not be too big or too shiny for the thought; they must not stand
+out from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter. A style can
+hardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, was
+sometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting.
+
+A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer be
+one; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a free
+sympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; his
+subject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject. That he be
+sincere is not enough; he must be cordial; then he will be magnetic,
+attractive. You must love your work to do it well.
+
+A good style is a stream, and a lively stream: it flows ever onward
+actively. The worst vice a style can have is languor. With some
+writers a full stop is a double full stop: the reader does not get
+forward. Much writing consists of little more than sluggish eddies. In
+many minds there is not leap enough for a style. Excellence in style
+demands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve a
+somewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy and
+poetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolable
+sequence.
+
+Writers there are who get to be partially self-enslaved by a routine
+of phrases and words under the repetition of which thought is hardened
+by its molds. Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness,
+even when there is a current of intellectual activity. Writers most
+liable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves to
+set opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow,--a sad
+condition for man or writer.
+
+Hypocrites in writing, as in talking and doing, end badly. A
+writer who through his style aims to seem better or other than himself
+is soon found out. The desire so to seem argues a literary incapacity;
+it looks as though the very self--which will shine through the
+style--lacked confidence in its own substance. And after all, in
+writing as in doing and talking, a man must be himself, will be
+himself in spite of himself. One cannot put on his neighbor's style
+any more than he can put on his neighbor's limbs.
+
+Not only has prose its melody as well as verse, but there is no
+_style_ unless sentences are pervaded, I might say animated, by
+rhythm; lacking appropriate movement, they are inelastic, inert,
+drowsy. Rhythm implies a soul behind it and in it. The best style will
+have a certain rotundity imparted by the ceaseless rocking of thought
+in the deep ocean of sentiment. Without some music in them sentences
+were torpid, impracticable. To put thoughts and words so together that
+there shall be a charm in the presentation of them, there needs a
+lively harmony among certain faculties, a rhythm in the mind. Hence
+Cicero said that to write prose well, one must be able to write verse.
+The utterance of music in song or tune, in artful melody or choral
+harmony, is but the consummation of a power which is ever a sweetener
+in life's healthily active exhibitions, the power of sound. Nature is
+alive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life.
+On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes
+in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a
+broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray
+clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of
+bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from
+unseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing,
+unseen, and ever rhythmical.
+
+The heartier and deeper the thought, the more melody will there be in
+its fit expression, and thence the higher range of style is only
+reached by poets, or by men who, though poetically minded, yet lack
+"the accomplishment of verse." The sudden electric injection of light
+into a thought or object or sentiment--in this consists the gift
+poetical, a gift which implies a sensibility so keen and select as to
+kindle the light, and an intellect fine and firm enough to hold and
+transmit it. A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardly
+rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will
+understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is
+utterly devoid of the faculty of style (_denue de la faculte du
+style_). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great
+Moliere. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in
+prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and
+audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too,
+some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers,
+have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities,
+with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the
+exclusive property of the poetic idiom."
+
+A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to the
+better, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy in
+presence of the defective or the incomplete. This endowment implies a
+mind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements of
+thought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes the
+writer exacting towards himself. Hence only he attains to a genuine
+correctness; he was correct by instinct before he was so by
+discipline. In the whole as well as the parts he requires finish and
+proportion. Within him there is a momentum which fills out his thought
+and its worded envelope to warm convexity. Only he has the fine tact
+and discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses. The
+best style is organic in its details as well as its structure; it
+shows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy and
+plastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor. Goethe says that
+only poets and artists have method, because they require to see a
+thing before them in a completed, rounded form. Writing is a fine art,
+and one of the finest; and he who would be a master in this art must
+unite genial gifts with conscientious culture.
+
+Of style the highest examples, therefore, are to be found in the verse
+of the great poets, of the deep rhythmic souls who make a sure, agile
+intellect their willing Ariel; and no prose writer gets to be a master
+in style but through kindred endowment. The compact, symmetrical
+combination of gifts and acquirements, of genius with talent, demanded
+for the putting forth of a fresh, priceless poem, this he need not
+have; but his perceptions must be brightened by the light
+whose fountain is the inward enjoyment of the more perfect in form,
+deed, and sentiment, and his best thoughts suffused with that
+fragrance whose only source is the ravishment of the beautiful.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS.[5]
+
+    [5] Putnam's Magazine, 1868.
+
+
+"Ghosts and witches are the best machinery for a modern epic." So said
+Charles Fox, who fed his imagination on verse of this aspiring class.
+Fox was no literary oracle, and his opinion is here cited only as
+evidence that the superearthly is an acknowledged element in the
+epopee. The term "machinery" implies ignorance of the import of the
+super-earthly in epic poetry, an ignorance attendant on materialism
+and a virtual unbelief. No poet who should accept the term could write
+an epic, with or without the "machinery." Such acceptance would
+betoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a want
+of faith in the invisible supervisive energies.
+
+A genuine epic, of the first class, is a world-poem, a poem of depth
+and height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation of
+a race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare the
+method of the divine intervention in the momentous work. The epic
+poet, worthy of the lofty task, has such large sympathies, together
+with such consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpret
+and incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some of
+them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the
+senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are
+what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls--
+
+  "Light half-believers in our casual creeds."
+
+Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, active
+presence on the earth of the god Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Had
+they not, there would have been no "Iliad," no "Paradise Lost."
+
+Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and
+an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine
+judgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision
+through hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he
+lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought
+them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of
+Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of
+Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of
+his time, fantastic, unfashioned--all this was his material. But all
+this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame.
+The true material of a poem is the poet's own nature and thoughts, his
+sentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations,
+his veriest self, the whole of him, especially the best of him.
+
+Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, which
+were so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day,--and
+literature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious,--no more
+broad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as all
+poets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed,
+moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes for
+its play. The present teeming world to be transfigured into the world
+to come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to a
+manly, powerful nature, passionate, creative, descriptive, to a
+stirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the Italian
+scene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads of
+Italian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict;
+and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy,
+while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to
+tune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, passionate, and baffled,
+the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directly
+woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times,
+contemporaneous history tyrannized over him.
+
+Dante's high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noble
+character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his
+personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the
+theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as
+molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous
+initiator, the august father of modern poetry--all this has combined
+to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six
+centuries. But even all this would not have made him one of the three
+or four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath of
+universal European translation. What gave his rare qualities their
+most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar
+superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that
+he is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven--of the world to
+come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured
+more or less ever since--the word-painter of that visionary, awful
+hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.
+
+Those imaginations as to future being--to the Middle Ages so vivid as
+to become soul-realities--Dante, with his transcendent pictorial
+mastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine of
+popular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperial
+superscription. Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future,
+the reverse of poetical. Hunger will give you tormenting imaginations
+of breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with pictures
+of gains that are to be. But imaginations of the life beyond the
+grave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality. The having them
+with any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritual
+prepossessions: men must be self-possessed with their higher self,
+with their spirit. The very attempt to figure your disembodied state
+is an attempt poetical. To succeed with any distinctness denotes some
+power of creative projection: without wings, this domain cannot be
+entered. In Dante's time these attempts were common. Through his
+preeminent qualifications, crowned with the poetic faculty, the
+faculty of sympathy with ideal excellence, his attempt was a great, a
+unique success.
+
+To accompany Dante through his vast triple trans-terrestrial world,
+would seem to demand in the reader a sustained effort of imagination.
+But Dante is so graphic, and, we might add, corporeal in his pictures,
+puts such a pulse into his figures, that the artistic illusion
+wherewith we set out is exchanged for, or rather overborne by, an
+illusion of the reality of what is represented. Yet from the opening
+of the first canto he is ever in the super-earthly world, and every
+line of the fourteen thousand has the benefit of a super-earthly, that
+is, a poetic atmosphere, which lightens it, transfigures it, floats
+it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every
+scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is
+presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness,
+which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader
+finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is
+mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the spiritual
+imagination.
+
+Dante had it in him,--this hell, purgatory, and heaven--so full and
+warm and large was his nature. Within his own breast he had felt, with
+the keen intensity of the poetic temperament, the loves and hates, the
+griefs and delights of life. Through his wealth of heart he had a
+fellow-feeling for all the joys and sorrows of his brother-men, and,
+added to this, an artist's will and want to reproduce them, and _to_
+reproduce them a clear, outwelling, intellectual vivacity. He need
+scarcely have told us that his poem, though treating of spirits,
+relates to the passions and doings of men in the flesh. He chose a
+theme that at once seized the attention of his readers, and gave to
+himself a boundless scope. His field was all past history, around the
+altitudes of which are clustered biographical traits and sketches of
+famous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and,
+along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, with
+its tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, its
+wraths and triumphs.
+
+Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but,
+besides that many of them were ready to his hand, this kind of
+inventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is the
+necessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility and
+abundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; and
+yet the "Vicar of Wakefield" (not to go so high as "Tristram Shandy"
+and "Don Quixote") is worth all their hundred volumes of tales put
+together. What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement,
+and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception,
+does the framework of incident support and display? That is the
+aesthetic question. The novels of every day bristle with this material
+inventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event and
+sensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build.
+The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditions
+of the "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso," is not admirable for
+their mere exuberance and diversity,--for that might have come from a
+comparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds then
+were, with the passionate mediaeval beliefs,--but for the heart there
+is in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and
+thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift
+poetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as
+regards the epic quality of Dante's poem, an important consequence, is
+that there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the reader
+are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and
+reacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention.
+Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, each
+one awakening a new interest. Hereby the mind is distracted, the
+attention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figure
+or group. We pass through a gallery of pictures and portraits,
+classed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, and
+separated by the projection of as many different frames. We are on a
+weird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, however
+attractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet. We go from person to
+person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey,
+although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has
+effaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every
+limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally
+reared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a great
+unity, the "Divina Commedia," as an organic, artistic whole, is
+inferior to the "Iliad" and "Paradise Lost," and to the Grecian and
+Shakespearean tragedies.
+
+The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and,
+with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to his
+page--fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination. Among
+the many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, most
+active is that of form. Goethe says of him, "The great intellectual
+and moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shall
+be furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view that
+just in his life-time--Giotto being his contemporary--was the re-birth
+of plastic art in all its natural strength. By this sensuous,
+form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante,
+too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized
+objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline.
+Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it
+were, after nature." In recognition of the same characteristic,
+Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets,
+ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any
+other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of
+the 'Divina Commedia.'"
+
+Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his
+strongest side: he is preeminently a poet of form. In his mind and in
+his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poet
+of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but
+more a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still his
+intellect is more specific than generic. His subject--chosen by the
+concurrence of his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual needs--admits
+of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected
+delineations. The personages of his poem are independent one of the
+other, and are thence the more easily drawn. Nor does Dante abound in
+transferable passages, sentences of universal application, from being
+saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it with
+diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance,
+more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and
+profound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider:
+he rivets us through distant grand association, by great suggestion.
+Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says,--
+
+          "As when the sun new risen
+  Looks through the horizontal misty air,
+  Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon,
+  In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
+  On half the nations,"
+
+Setting aside the epithets "horizontal" and "disastrous," which are
+poetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen through
+a mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids us
+to see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate,--not
+involving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merely
+between physical, not between subtle, relations,--that Dante chiefly
+deals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet,
+but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination.
+The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when the
+intellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance with
+aspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to the
+utmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought or
+image which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to the
+reader a new delight. Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, there
+is a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes the
+passage--
+
+      "and with fear of change
+  Perplexes monarchs."
+
+This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire;
+this gives its greatness to the passage.
+
+Dante, by the distinctness of his outline, addresses himself more to
+the reader's senses and perception; Milton rouses his higher
+imaginative capacity. In the whole "Inferno," is there a sentence so
+aglow as this line and a half of "Paradise Lost"?
+
+      "And the torrid clime
+  Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire."
+
+Or is there in Dante any sound so loud and terrible as that shout of
+Milton's demon-host--
+
+      "That tore Hell's concave, and beyond
+  Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night"?
+
+Here the unity of his theme stands Milton in stead for grandeur and
+breadth.
+
+Dante is copious in similes. Such copiousness by no means proves
+poetic genius; and a superior poet may have less command of similes
+than one inferior to him. Wordsworth has much less of this command
+than Moore. But when a poet does use similes, he will be likely often
+to put of his best into them, for they are captivating instruments and
+facilities for poetic expansion. When a poet is in warm sympathy with
+the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his
+similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition.
+In citing some of the most prominent in the "Divina Commedia," we at
+once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest
+translators, using the version of Dr. Parsons for extracts from the
+"Inferno," that of Mr. Dayman for those from the "Purgatorio," and
+that of Mr. Longfellow for those from the "Paradiso."
+
+  "As well-filled sails, which in the tempest swell,
+    Drop, with folds flapping, if the mast be rent;
+  So to the earth that cruel monster fell,
+    And straightway down to Hell's Fourth Pit he went."
+                        _Inferno_: Canto VII.
+
+  "Swept now amain those turbid waters o'er
+    A tumult of a dread portentous kind,
+  Which rocked with sudden spasms each trembling shore,
+    Like the mad rushing of a rapid wind;
+  As when, made furious by opposing heats,
+    Wild through the wood the unbridled tempest scours,
+  Dusty and proud, the cringing forest beats,
+    And scatters far the broken limbs and flowers;
+  Then fly the herds,--the swains to shelter scud.
+    Freeing mine eyes, 'Thy sight,' he said, 'direct
+  O'er the long-standing scum of yonder flood,
+    Where, most condense, its acrid streams collect.'"
+                        _Inferno_: Canto IX.
+
+  "When, lo! there met us, close beside our track,
+    A troop of spirits. Each amid the band
+  Eyed us, as men at eve a passer-by
+    'Neath a new moon; as closely us they scanned,
+  As an old tailor doth a needle's eye."
+                        _Inferno_: Canto XV.
+
+  "And just as frogs that stand, with noses out
+    On a pool's margin, but beneath it hide
+  Their feet and all their bodies but the snout,
+    So stood the sinners there on every side."
+                        _Inferno_: Canto XXII.
+
+  "A cooper's vessel, that by chance hath been
+    Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft,
+  Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin
+    I noticed lengthwise through his carcass cleft."
+                        _Inferno_: Canto XXVIII.
+
+  "We tarried yet the ocean's brink upon,
+    Like unto people musing of their way,
+  Whose body lingers when the heart hath gone;
+    And lo! as near the dawning of the day,
+  Down in the west, upon the watery floor,
+    The vapor-fogs do Mars in red array,
+  Even such appeared to me a light that o'er
+    The sea so quickly came, no wing could match
+  Its moving. Be that vision mine once more."
+                       _Purgatorio_: Canto II.
+
+  "And thou, remembering well, with eye that sees
+    The light, wilt know thee like the sickly one
+  That on her bed of down can find no ease,
+    But turns and turns again her ache to shun,"
+                       _Purgatorio_: Canto VI.
+
+  "'T was now the hour the longing heart that bends
+     In voyagers, and meltingly doth sway,
+   Who bade farewell at morn to gentle friends;
+     And wounds the pilgrim newly bound his way
+   With poignant love, to hear some distant bell
+     That seems to mourn the dying of the day;
+   When I began to slight the sounds that fell
+     Upon my ear, one risen soul to view,
+   Whose beckoning hand our audience would compel."
+                        _Purgatorio_: Canto VIII.
+
+  "There I the shades see hurrying up to kiss
+     Each with his mate from every part, nor stay,
+   Contenting them with momentary bliss.
+     So one with other, all their swart array
+   Along, do ants encounter snout with snout,
+     So haply probe their fortune and their way."
+                        _Purgatorio_: Canto XXVI.
+
+  "Between two viands, equally removed
+     And tempting, a free man would die of hunger
+   Ere either he could bring unto his teeth.
+     So would a lamb between the ravenings
+   Of two fierce wolves stand fearing both alike;
+     And so would stand a dog between two does.
+   Hence, if I held my peace, myself I blame not,
+     Impelled in equal measure by my doubts,
+   Since it must be so, nor do I commend."
+                          _Paradiso_: Canto IV.
+
+  "And as a lute and harp, accordant strung
+     With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make
+   To him by whom the notes are not distinguished,
+     So from the lights that there to me appeared
+  Upgathered through the cross a melody,
+    Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn."
+                          _Paradiso_: Canto XIV.
+
+  "As through the pure and tranquil evening air
+    There shoots from time to time a sudden fire,
+  Moving the eyes that steadfast were before,
+    And seems to be a star that changeth place,
+  Except that in the part where it is kindled
+    Nothing is missed, and this endureth little;
+  So from the horn that to the right extends
+    Unto that cross's foot there ran a star
+  Out of the constellation shining there."
+                          _Paradiso_: Canto XV.
+
+  "Even as remaineth splendid and serene
+    The hemisphere of air, when Boreas
+  Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest,
+    Because is purified and resolved the rack
+  That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs
+    With all the beauties of its pageantry;
+  Thus did I likewise, after that my lady
+    Had me provided with a clear response,
+  And like a star in Heaven the truth was seen."
+                          _Paradiso_: Canto XXVIII.
+
+The first question to ask in regard to a simile found in verse is, Is
+it poetical? Is there, as effect of its introduction, any heightening
+of the reader's mood, any cleansing of his vision, any clarification
+of the medium through which he is looking? Is there a sudden play of
+light that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates the
+object before him? Few of those just quoted, put to such test, could
+be called more than conventionally poetical--if this be not a
+solecism. To illustrate one sensuous object by another does not
+animate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions.
+Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there is
+through them no steeping of intellectual perception in emotion. They
+may help to make the object ocularly more apparent, but they do not
+make the feeling a party to the movement. When this is done,--as in
+the examples from Canto XV. of the "Inferno," and Canto VIII. of the
+"Purgatorio,"--what an instantaneous vivification of the picture!
+
+But in the best of them the poetic gleam is not so unlooked-for bright
+as in the best of Shakespeare's. As one instance out of many: towards
+the end of the great soliloquy of Henry V., after enumerating the
+emblems and accompaniments of royalty, the king continues,--
+
+  "No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
+  Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
+  Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave;
+  Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind,
+  Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread;
+  Never sees horrid night, the child of hell;
+  But, like a lackey, from the rise to set,
+  Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
+  Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn,
+  Doth rise _and help Hyperion to his horse_"
+
+What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, so
+fresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beauty
+and healthfulness! Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination,
+that, in a twinkle, transmutes into the squire of Hyperion a stolid
+rustic, making him suddenly radiant with the glory of morning. It is
+by this union of unexpectedness with fitness, of solidity with
+brilliancy, of remoteness with instantaneous presence, in his figures,
+denoting overflow of resources, a divine plenitude, so that we feel
+after Shakespeare has said his best things, that he could go on saying
+more and better,--it is especially by this lustrous, ever-teeming
+fullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare throws a
+farther and whiter and a broader light than Dante. Nor does Dante's
+page glisten, as Shakespeare's so often does, with metaphor, or
+compressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritual
+sphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with the
+web of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on the
+surface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see a
+circuit of shining ripple, caused by schools of fish that have come up
+from the wealth in the depths below to help the sun to glisten,--a
+sign of life, power, and abundance.
+
+Like his great compeer, Milton, Dante fails of universality from want
+of humor. Neither had any fun in him. This was the only fault
+(liberally to interpret Can's conduct) that Dante's host, Can Grande
+of Verona, had to find with him. The subjects of both poets
+(unconsciously chosen perhaps from this very defect of humor) were
+predominantly religious, and their theology, which was that of their
+times, was crude and cruel. The deep, sympathetic earnestness, which
+is the basis of the best humor, they had, but, to use an illustration
+of Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down,--a great feat,
+only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highest
+manifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throws
+such rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom,
+and, with the fool in "Lear," forces you, like a child, to smile
+through warmest tears of sympathy. Humor imparts breadth and buoyancy
+to tolerance, enabling it to dandle lovingly the faults and
+follies of men; through humor the spiritual is calm and clear enough
+to sport with and toss the sensual; it is a compassionate, tearful
+delight; in its finest mood, an angelic laughter.
+
+Of pathos Dante has given examples unsurpassed in literature. By the
+story of Ugolino the chords of the heart are so thrilled that pity and
+awe possess us wholly; and by that of Francesca they are touched to
+tenderest sympathy. But Ugolino is to Lear what a single
+fire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes is
+to a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape with a
+hundred flashes.
+
+All the personages of Dante's poem (unless we regard himself as one)
+are spirits. Shakespeare, throughout his many works, gives only a few
+glimpses into the world beyond the grave; but how grandly by these few
+is the imagination expanded. Clarence's dream, "lengthened after
+life," in which he passes "the melancholy flood," is almost
+super-Dantesque, concentrating in a few ejaculative lines a fearful
+foretaste of trans-earthly torment for a bad life on earth. And the
+great ghost in "Hamlet," when you read of him, how shadowy real!
+Dante's representation of disembodied humanity is too pagan, too
+palpable, not ghostly enough, not spiritualized with hope and awe.
+
+Profound, awakening, far-stretching, much enfolding, thought-breeding
+thoughts, that can only grow in the soil of pure, large sensibilities,
+and by them are cast up in the heave and glow of inward motion, to be
+wrought by intellect and shaped in the light of the beautiful,--of
+these, which are the test of poetic greatness, Dante, if we may
+venture to say so, has not more or brighter examples than Milton, and
+not so many as Goethe; while of such passages, compactly embodying as
+they do the finer insights of a poetic mind, there are more in a
+single one of the greater tragedies of Shakespeare, than in all the
+three books of the "Divina Commedia."
+
+Juxtaposition beside Shakespeare, even if it bring out the
+superiorities of the English bard, is the highest honor paid to any
+other great poet. Glory enough is it if admiration can lift Dante so
+high as to take him into the same look that beholds Shakespeare; what
+though the summit of the mighty Englishman shine alone in the sky, and
+the taller giant carry up towards heaven a larger bulk and more varied
+domains. The traveler, even if he come directly from wondering
+at Mont Blanc in its sublime presence, will yet stand with earnest
+delight before the majesty of the Yungfrau and the Eigher.
+
+But it is time to speak of Dante in English.
+
+"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible, that you might
+discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as to seek to
+transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet."
+Thus writes a great poet, Shelley, in his beautiful "Defense of
+Poetry." But have we not in modern tongues the creations of Homer, and
+of Plato, who Shelley, on the same page, says is essentially a poet?
+And can we estimate the loss the modern mind would suffer by
+deprivation of them in translated form? Pope's Homer--still Homer
+though so Popish--has been a not insignificant chapter in the culture
+of thousands, who without it would have known no more of Hector and
+Achilles and the golden glowing cloud of passion and action through
+which they are seen superbly shining, than what a few of them would
+incidently have learnt from Lempriere. Lord Derby's Iliad has gone
+through many editions already. And Job and the Psalms: what should we
+have done without them in English? Translations are the
+telegraphic conductors that bring us great messages from those in
+other lands and times, whose souls were so rich and deep that from
+their words their fellow-men, in all parts of the globe, draw truth
+and wisdom forever. The flash on which the message was first launched
+has lost some of its vividness by the way; but the purport of the
+message we have distinctly, and the joy or grief wherewith it is
+freighted, and even much of its beauty. Shall we not eat oranges,
+because on being translated from Cuba to our palates they have lost
+somewhat of their flavor? In reading a translated poem we wish to have
+as much of the essence of the original, that is, as much of the
+poetry, as possible. A poem it is we sit down to read, not a relation
+of facts, or an historical or critical or philosophical or theological
+exposition,--a poem, only in another dress. Thence a work in verse,
+that has poetic quality enough to be worth translating, must be made
+to lose by the process as little as may be of its worth; and its worth
+every poem owes entirely to its poetic quality and the degree of that.
+A prose translation of a poem is an aesthetic impertinence,
+Shakespeare was at first opened to the people of the Continent
+in prose, because there was not then culture enough to reproduce him
+in verse. And in Shakespeare there is so much practical sense, so much
+telling comment on life, so much wit, such animal spirits, such
+touching stories so well told, that the great gain of having him even
+in prose concealed the loss sustained by the absence of rhythmic
+sound, and by the discoloration (impallidation, we should say, were
+the word already there) of hundreds of liveliest tinted flowers, the
+deflowering of many delicate stems. Forty years ago, Mr. Hay ward
+translated the "Faust" of Goethe into prose; but let any one compare
+the Hymn of the Archangels and other of the more highly-wrought
+passages, as rendered by him, with any of the better translations in
+verse,--with that of Mr. Brooks for example,--to perceive at once the
+insufficiency, the flatness and meagreness of even so verbally
+faithful a prose version. The effect on "Faust," or on any high
+passionate poem, of attempting to put it into prose, is akin to what
+would be the effect on an exquisite _bas-relief_ of reducing its
+projection one half by a persevering application of pumice. In all
+genuine verse (that is, in all poetic verse) the substance is so
+inwrought into the form and sound, that if in translating you entirely
+disregard these, rejecting both rhyme and measure, you subject the
+verse to a second depletion right upon that which it has to suffer by
+the transplanting of it into another soil.
+
+The translator of a poem has a much higher and subtler duty than just
+to take the words and through them attempt passively to render the
+page into his own language. He must brace himself into an active
+state, a creative mood, the most creative he can command, then
+transport himself into the mind and mental attitude of the poet he
+would translate, feeling and seeing as the poet saw and felt. To get
+into the mood out of which the words sprang, he should go behind the
+words, embracing them from within, not merely seizing them from
+without. Having imbued himself with the thought and sentiment of the
+original, let him, if he can, utter them in a still higher key. Such
+surpassing excellence would be the truest fidelity to the original,
+and any cordial poet would especially rejoice in such elevation of his
+verse; for the aspiring writer will often fall short of his ideal, and
+to see it more nearly approached by a translator who has been kindled
+by himself, to find some delicate new flower revealed in a nook which
+he had opened, could not but give him a delight akin to that
+of his own first inspirations.
+
+A poem, a genuine poem, assumes its form by an inward necessity.
+"Paradise Lost," conceived in Milton's brain, could not utter itself
+in any other mode than the unrhymed harmonies that have given to our
+language a new music. It could not have been written in the Spenserian
+stanza. What would the "Fairy Queen" be in blank verse? For his theme
+and mood Dante felt the need of the delicate bond of rhyme, which
+enlivens musical cadence with sweet reiteration. Rhyme was then a new
+element in verse, a modern aesthetic creation; and it is a help and an
+added beauty, if it be not obtrusive and too self-conscious, and if it
+be not a target at which the line aims; for then it becomes a clog to
+freedom of movement, and the pivot of factitious pauses, that are
+offensive both to sense and to ear. Like buds that lie half-hidden in
+leaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the cover
+of words, falling on the ear as though they were the irrepressible
+strokes of a melodious pulse at the heart of the verse.
+
+The _terza rima_--already in use--Dante adopted as suitable to
+continuous narrative. With his feeling and aesthetic want
+rhymed verse harmonized, the triple repetition offering no obstacle,
+Italian being copious in endings of like sound. His measure is iambic,
+free iambic, and every line consists, not of ten syllables, but of
+eleven, his native tongue having none other than feminine rhymes. And
+this weakness is so inherent in Italian speech, that every line even
+of the blank verse in all the twenty-two tragedies of Alfieri ends
+femininely, that is, with an unaccented eleventh syllable. In all
+Italian rhyme there is thus always a double rhyme, the final syllable,
+moreover, invariably ending with a vowel. This, besides being too much
+rhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect,
+the eleventh syllable being a superfluous syllable.
+
+In these two prominent features English verse is different from
+Italian: it has feminine rhymes, but the larger part of its rhymes are
+masculine; and it has fewer than Italian. This second characteristic,
+the comparative fewness of rhymes, is likewise one of its sources of
+strength: it denotes musical richness and not poverty, as at first
+aspect it seems to do, the paucity of like-sounding syllables implying
+variety in its sounds. It has all the vocalic syllables and
+endings it needs for softness, and incloses them mostly in consonants
+for condensation, vigor, and emphasis.
+
+Primarily the translator has to consider the resources and
+individualities of his own tongue. In the case of Dante the rhythmical
+basis is the same in both languages; for the iambic measure is our
+chief poetic vehicle, wrought to perfection by Shakespeare and Milton.
+There only remains, then, rhyme and the division into stanzas. Can the
+_terza rima_, as used by Dante, be called a stanza? The lines are not
+separated into trios, but run into one another, clinging very properly
+to the rhymes, which, interlinking all the stanzas by carrying the
+echo still onward, bind each canto into one whole, just as our
+Spenserian form does each stanza into a whole of nine lines. Whether
+stanzas, strictly speaking, or not, shall we say our mind frankly
+about the _terza rima_? To us it seems not deserving of admiration
+_for its own sake_; and we surmise that had it not been consecrated by
+Dante, neither Byron nor Shelley would have used it for original
+poems. We are not aware that Dante's example has been followed by any
+poet of note in Italy. _Terza rima_ keeps the attention suspended too
+long, keeps it ever on the stretch for something that is to
+come, and never does come, until at the end of the canto, namely, the
+last rhyme. The rhymes cannot be held down, but are ever escaping and
+running ahead. It looks somewhat like an artificial contrivance of the
+first rhymers of an uncultivated age. But Dante used it for his great
+song; and there it stands forever, holding in its folds the "Divina
+Commedia."
+
+Now, in rendering into English the poem of Dante, is it essential,--in
+order to fulfill the conditions of successful poetic translation,--to
+preserve the triple rhyme? Not having in English a corresponding
+number of rhymes, will not the translator have to resort to
+transpositions, substitutions, forcings, indirections, in order to
+compass the meaning and the poetry? Place the passages already cited
+from Mr. Dayman beside the original, and the reader will be surprised
+to see how direct and literal, how faithful at once to the Italian
+thought and to English idiom in expressing it, Mr. Dayman is. His
+harness of triplets seems hardly to constrain his movement, so
+skillfully does he wear it. If we confront him with the spirited
+version in quatrains of Dr. Parsons, in the passages cited
+from the "Inferno," or with those from the "Paradiso," in Mr.
+Longfellow's less free unrhymed version, the resources and flexibility
+of Mr. Dayman in handling the difficult measure will be again
+manifest. To enable our readers to compare the translations with the
+original and with one another, we will give the Italian, and then the
+three versions, of the latter part of the Francesca story, from Canto
+V. of the "Inferno:"--
+
+  "Poi mi rivolsi a loro, e parlai io,
+    E cominciai: Francesca, i tuoi martiri
+  A lagrimar mi fanno tristo, e pio.
+    Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri,
+  A che, e come concedette Amore
+    Che conosceste i dubbiosi desiri?
+  Ed ella a me: nessun maggior dolore,
+    Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
+  Nella miseria, e cio sa 'l tuo dottore.
+    Ma se a conoscer la prima radice
+  Del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
+    Faro come colui che piange, e dice.
+  Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto
+    Di Lancilotto, come Amor lo strinse.
+  Soli eravamo, e senza alcun sospetto.
+    Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
+  Quella lettura, e scolorocci 'l viso:
+    Ma solo un punto fu quel, che ci vinse.
+  Qando leggemmo il disiato riso
+    Esser baciato da cotanto amante,
+  Questi, che mai da me non sia diviso,
+    La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante.
+  Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse:
+    Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.
+  Mentre che l'uno spirito queste disse,
+    L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade
+  Io venni meno come s'io morisse,
+    E caddi, come corpo morto cade."
+
+
+Mr. Dayman:--
+
+  "Then toward them turned again: 'Thy racking woe,'
+    I said, 'Francesca, wrings from out mine eyes
+  The pious drops that sadden as they flow.
+    But tell me, in your hour of honeyed sighs,
+  By whom and how love pitying broke the spell,
+    And in your doubtful longings made too wise.'
+  And she to me: 'No keener pang hath hell,
+    Than to recall, amid some deep distress,
+  Our happier time: thy teacher knows it well.
+    Yet if desire so strong thy soul possess
+  To trace the root from whence our love was bred,
+    His part be mine, who tells and weeps no less.
+  'T was on a day when we for pastime read
+    Of Lancillot, how love snared him to ruin:
+  We were alone, nor knew suspicious dread.
+    Oft on that reading paused our eyes, renewing
+  Their glance; and from our cheeks the color started;
+    But one sole moment wrought for our undoing:
+  When that we read of lover so kind-hearted
+    Kissing the smile so coveted before,
+  He that from me shall never more be parted
+    Kissed me with lip to lip, trembling all o'er.
+  The broker of our vows, it was the lay,
+    And he who wrote--that day we read no more.'
+  The other spirit, while the first did say
+    These words, so moaned, that with soft remorse
+  As death had stricken me, I swooned away,
+    And down I fell, heavily as falls a corse."
+
+
+Mr. Longfellow:--
+
+  "Then unto them I turned me, and I spake,
+  And I began: 'Thine agonies, Francesca,
+  Sad and compassionate to weeping make me.
+  But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs,
+  By what and in what manner Love conceded
+  That you should know your dubious desires?'
+  And she to me: 'There is no greater sorrow
+  Than to be mindful of the happy time
+  In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.
+  But if to recognize the earliest root
+  Of love in us thou hast so great desire,
+  I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.
+  One day we reading were for our delight
+  Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthrall.
+  Alone we were, and without any fear.
+  Full many a time our eyes together drew
+  That reading, and drove the color from our faces;
+  But one point was it that o'ercame us.
+  Whenas we read of the much-longed-for smile
+  Being by such a noble lover kissed,
+  This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
+  Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
+  Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
+  That day no farther did we read therein.'
+  And all the while one spirit uttered this,
+  The other one did weep so, that, for pity,
+  I swooned away as if I had been dying,
+  And fell even as a dead body falls."
+
+
+Dr. Parsons:--
+
+  "Then, turning round to them, I thus began:
+    'Francesca! tears must overflow mine eyes:
+  My pitying soul thy martyr-throes unman;
+    But tell me,--in the time of happy sighs,
+  Your vague desires how gave Love utterance first?"
+    And she to me: "The mightiest of all woes
+  Is, in the midst of misery, to be cursed
+    With bliss remembered,--this thy teacher knows.
+  Yet, wouldst thou learn our passion's root and head,
+    As one may speak whose eyes with tears are dim,
+  So will I speak. Together once we read
+    The tale of Lancelot,--how Love bound him.
+  Alone we were without suspecting aught:
+    Oft in perusal paled our cheeks their hue,
+  And oft our eyes each other's glances caught;
+    But one sole passage 't was which both o'erthrew.
+  At reading of the longed-for smile,--to be
+    By such a lover's kissing so much blest,
+  This dearest--never shalt thou part from me!
+    His lips to mine, to mine, all trembling, pressed.
+  The writer was our Galeot with his book:--
+    That day we read no further on." She stopped:
+  Meanwhile he moaned so that compassion took
+    My sense away, and like a corse I dropped.
+
+Observe that Dr. Parsons has put Dante's twenty-eight lines of eleven
+syllables into twenty-four lines of ten syllables; and this without
+losing a drop of the precious stream he undertakes to pour. But why
+does he make Francesca address her companion personally, instead of
+saying, "who shall never part from me?" And why does Mr. Dayman say,
+"pious drops," instead of piteous? Mr. Dayman and Mr. Longfellow fill
+up the twenty-eight lines. In neither of the three is there
+any strain or wresting of the sense. But all three, and before them
+Lord Byron and Carey, mistranslate this passage,--
+
+  "Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
+    Quella lettura."
+
+All these translators interpret it to mean, that while they read,
+their eyes often met; whereas Dante says, they read that passage over
+more than once; or, literally rendered, several times that reading or
+passage drew to it their eyes. To restore the meaning of the original
+adds to the refinement of the scene.
+
+Why does Mr. Longfellow use such long words as _compassionate_ instead
+of _pitiful_ or _piteous_, _recognize_ for _know_, _palpitating_ for
+_trembling_, _conceded that you should know_ for _gave you to know_?
+By the resolution to translate line for line, Mr. Longfellow ties his
+poetic hands. The first effect of this self-binding is, to oblige him
+to use often long Latin-English instead of short Saxon-English words,
+that is, words that in most cases lend themselves less readily to
+poetic expression. Mr. Dayman, not translating line for line, is free
+from this prosaic incumbrance; but as he makes it a rule to himself
+that every English canto shall contain the same number of lines as its
+original, he is obliged, much more often than Mr. Longfellow,
+to throw in epithets or words not in the Italian. And Dr. Parsons,
+who, happily freeing himself from either verbal or numerical bond, in
+several instances compresses a canto into two or three lines less than
+the Italian, and the XXXI. into nine lines less, might with advantage
+have curtailed each canto ten or twelve lines.
+
+Do what we will, poetic translation is brought about more from without
+than from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, a
+lack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in good
+original work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in so
+far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the
+translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full
+swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr.
+Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the
+words; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetry
+with a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a
+billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice
+passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity,
+this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in
+the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some
+pages, have--contrary to all good usage--the superfluous eleventh
+syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson
+in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do
+good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his
+Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book
+of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in
+dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a
+weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close
+to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is
+still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic
+endings--and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven
+syllables and on some pages more than a third--do a part in causing
+Mr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the
+chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would
+sound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings are
+relaxed.
+
+Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volume
+where opposite each English page is the corresponding page of
+the original, as in Mr. Dayman's, one cannot fail to be struck with
+the comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of the
+comparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as the
+strongest exemplification, the ever-recurring _and_, and the
+often-repeated _is_, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter,
+_e_. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In lines
+of thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants to
+fourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators have
+about twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one. From this
+comparative rejection of consonants, Italian cannot, as English can,
+bind into one syllable words of seven or eight letters, like _friends_
+and _straight_, nor even words of six letters, like _chimed_,
+_shoots_, _thwart_, _spring_; nor does Italian abound as English does
+in monosyllables, and the few it has are mostly of but two or three
+letters. In combination its syllables sometimes get to four letters,
+as in _fronte_ and _braccia_. As a consequence hereof, Dante's lines,
+although always of eleven syllables, average about twenty-nine
+letters, while those of the three translators about thirty-three.
+Hence, the poem in their versions carries more weight than the
+original; its soul is more cumbered with body.
+
+In order to the faithful reproduction of Dante, to the giving the best
+transcript, possible in English, of his thought and feeling, should
+not regard be had to the essential difference between the syllabic
+constitutions of the two languages, what may be called the physical
+basis of the two mediums of utterance? Here is the Francesca story,
+translated in the spirit of this suggestion:--
+
+  I turned to them, and then I spake:
+    "Francesca! tears o'erfill mine eyes,
+  Such pity thy keen pangs awake.
+    But say: in th' hour of sweetest sighs,
+  By what and how found Love relief
+    And broke thy doubtful longing's spell?"
+  And she: "There is no greater grief
+    Than joy in sorrow to retell.
+  But if so urgently one seeks
+    To know our Love's first root, I will
+  Do as he does who weeps and speaks.
+    One day of Lancelot we still
+  Read o'er, how love held him enchained.
+    Without mistrust we were alone.
+  Our cheeks oft were of color drained:
+    One passage vanquished us, but one.
+  When we read of lips longed for pressed
+    By such a lover with a kiss,
+  This one whom naught from me shall wrest,
+    All trembling kissed my mouth. To this
+  That book and writer brought us. We
+    No farther read that day." While she
+  Thus spake, the other spirit wept
+    So bitterly, with pity I
+  Fell motionless, my senses swept
+    By swoon, as one about to die.
+
+In the very first line two Italian trisyllables, _rivolsi_ and
+_parlai_, are given in English with literal fidelity by two
+monosyllables, _turned_ and _spake_. In the fourth observe how, in a
+word-for-word rendering, the eleven Italian syllables become, without
+any forcing, eight English:
+
+  "Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri:"
+  "But tell me: in th' hour of sweet sighs."
+
+For the sake of a more musical cadence, this line is slightly
+modified. Again, in the line,--
+
+  "Than joy in sorrow to retell,"
+
+_joy_ represents, and represents faithfully, three words containing
+six syllables, _del tempo felice_: _retell_ stands for _ricordarsi_,
+and _in sorrow_ for _nella miseria_, or, three syllables for six; so
+that, by means of eight syllables, is given a full and complete
+translation of what in Italian takes up seventeen. English the most
+simple, direct, idiomatic, is needed in order that a translation of
+Dante be faithful to his simplicity and naturalness; and this is the
+first fidelity his translator should feel himself bound to. Owing to
+the fundamental difference between the syllabic structures of
+the two languages, we are enabled to put into English lines of eight
+syllables the whole meaning of Dante's lines of eleven. In the above
+experiment even more has been done. The twenty-eight lines of Dante
+are given in twenty-six lines of eight syllables each, and this
+without any sacrifice of the thought or feeling; for the "this thy
+teacher knows," which is omitted, besides that the commentators cannot
+agree on its meaning, is parenthetical in sense, and with reverence be
+it said, in so far a defect in such a relation. As to the form of
+Dante, what is essential in that has been preserved, namely, the
+iambic measure and the rhyme.
+
+Let us try if this curtailment of syllables will be successful when
+applied to the terrible words, written in blackest color, over the
+gate of Hell, at the beginning of the third canto of the "Inferno":--
+
+  Through me the path to place of wail:
+    Through me the path to endless sigh:
+  Through me the path to souls in bale.
+    'Twas Justice moved my Maker high:
+  Wisdom supreme, and Might divine,
+    And primal Love established me.
+  Created birth was none ere mine,
+    And I endure eternally:
+  Ye who pass in, all hope resign.
+
+
+Has anything been lost in the transit from Italian words to English?
+English speech being organically more concentrated than Italian, does
+not the reduction of eleven syllables to eight especially subserve
+what ought to be the twofold aim of all poetic translation, namely,
+along with fidelity to the thought and spirit of the original,
+fidelity to the idiom, and cast and play of the translator's own
+tongue?
+
+Here is another short passage in a different key,--the opening of the
+last canto of the "Paradiso":--
+
+  Maid-mother, daughter of thy Son,
+    Meek, yet above all things create,
+  Fair aim of the Eternal one,
+    'Tis thou who so our human state
+  Ennobledst, that its Maker deigned
+    Himself his creature's son to be.
+  This flower, in th' endless peace, was gained
+    Through kindling of God's love in thee.
+
+In this passage nine Italian lines of eleven syllables are converted
+into eight lines of eight syllables each. We submit it to the candid
+reader of Italian to say, whether aught of the original has been
+sacrificed to brevity.
+
+The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity to
+which the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate for
+the partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabic
+verse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante does
+not feel the want.
+
+One more short passage of four lines,--the famous figure of the lark
+in the twentieth Canto of the "Paradiso":--
+
+  Like lark that through the air careers,
+    First singing, then, silent his heart,
+  Feeds on the sweetness in his ears,
+    Such joy to th' image did impart
+  Th' eternal will.
+
+This paper has exceeded the length we designed to give it; but,
+nevertheless, we beg the reader's indulgence for a few moments longer,
+while we conclude with an octosyllabic version of the last thirty
+lines of the celebrated Ugolino story. It is unrhymed; for that
+terrible tale can dispense, in English, with soft echoes at the end of
+lines.
+
+  When locked I heard the nether door
+  Of the dread tower, I without speech
+  Into my children's faces looked:
+  Nor wept, so inly turned to stone.
+  They wept: and my dear Anselm said,
+  "Thou look'st so, father, what hast thou?"
+  Still I nor wept nor answer made
+  That whole day through, nor the next night,
+  Till a new sun rose on the world.
+  As in our doleful prison came
+  A little glimmer, and I saw
+  On faces four my own pale stare,
+  Both of my hands for grief I bit;
+  And they, thinking it was from wish
+  To eat, rose suddenly and said:
+  "Father, less shall we feel of pain
+  If them wilt eat of us: from thee
+  Came this poor flesh: take it again."
+  I calmed me then, not to grieve them.
+  The next two days we spake no word.
+  Oh! obdurate earth, why didst not ope?
+  When we had come to the fourth day
+  Gaddo threw him stretched at my feet,
+  Saying, "Father, why dost not help me?"
+  There died he; and, as thou seest me,
+  I saw the three fall one by one
+  The fifth and sixth day; then I groped,
+  Now blind, o'er each; and two whole days
+  I called them after they were dead:
+  Then hunger did what grief could not.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC.
+
+
+A literary critic, a genuine one, should carry in his brain an arsenal
+of opposites. He should combine common sense with tact, integrity with
+indulgence, breadth with keenness, vigor with delicacy, largeness with
+subtlety, knowledge with geniality, inflexibility with sinuousness,
+severity with suavity; and, that all these counter qualities be
+effective, he will need constant culture and vigilance, besides the
+union of reason with warmth, of enthusiasm with self-control, of wit
+with philosophy,--but hold: at this rate, in order to fit out the
+critic, human nature will have to set apart its highest and best. Dr.
+Johnson declared, the poet ought to know everything and to have seen
+everything, and the ancients required the like of an orator. Truly,
+the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued as
+generously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped by
+the light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of the
+Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the
+critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his
+birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and
+sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be
+susceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of the
+critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to
+measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual
+and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing
+aggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue lines
+that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who
+is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be
+able swiftly to follow these lines.
+
+Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip a
+veritable sure critic, we have yet to add two cardinal qualifications,
+which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberal
+allotment. The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M.
+Sainte-Beuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but a
+mellow, radiant geniality. The other, which is of still deeper
+account, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue--for so it deserves
+to be called--born directly of the nobler sensibilities, those
+in whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and the
+profound, the beautiful and the true. He who is not well endowed with
+these higher senses is not a bad critic; he is no critic at all. Not
+only can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he can
+as little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implying
+failures to reach a certain fullness, implying a falling short of the
+complete, to say where and what are deficiencies, involves the having
+in the mind an idea of the full and complete. The man so meagrely
+furnished as to hold no such idea is but a carper, not a critic. To
+know the bad denotes knowledge of the good; in criticism as in morals,
+a righteous indignation can only flash from a shock to pure feelings.
+
+In a notice of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve,
+after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the
+campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters
+smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these
+famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with
+a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a
+campaign of a great captain equally a work of genius? Napoleon is here
+the high sovereign critic, the Goethe in this department, as the
+Feuquieres, the Jominis, the St. Cyrs are the La Harpes or the
+Fontanes, the Lessings or the Schlegels, all good and expert critics;
+but he is the first of all, nor, if you reflect on it, could it have
+been otherwise. And who then would say better things of Homer than
+Milton?"--Goethe supreme in literary criticism, Milton on Homer; this
+touches the root of the matter; sympathy with the writer and his work
+the critic must have,--sympathy as one of the sources of good
+judgment, and even of knowledge. You cannot know, and therefore not
+judge of a man or book or thing, unless you have some fellow-feeling
+with him or it; and to judge well you must have much fellow-feeling.
+The critic must, moreover, be a thinker; reason is the critic's sun.
+Scott and Byron could say just and fresh things about poets and
+poetry; but neither could command the whole field, nor dig deep into
+the soil. Witness Byron's deliberate exaltation of Pope. Whereas
+Wordsworth and Coleridge were among the soundest of critics, because,
+besides being poets, they were both profound thinkers.
+
+For the perfecting of the literary critic the especial
+sympathy needed is that with excellence; for high literature is the
+outcome of the best there is in humanity, the finished expression of
+healthiest aspirations, of choicest thoughts, the ripened fruit of
+noble, of refined growths, the perfected fruit, with all the perfume
+and beauty of the flower upon it. Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve,
+throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in addition
+to that primary proof of having himself written good poems. Besides
+the love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct draws
+him to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love is
+the more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined.
+Through variety of knowledge, with intellectual keenness, he enjoys
+excellence in the diversified forms that literature assumes. His pages
+abound in illustrations of his versatility, which is nowhere more
+strikingly exhibited than in the contrast between two successive
+papers (both equally admirable) in the very first volume of the
+"Causeries du Lundi," the one on Madame Recamier, the other on
+Napoleon. Read especially the series of paragraphs beginning, "Some
+natures are born pure, and have received _quand meme_ the gift
+of innocence," to see how gracefully, subtly, delicately, with what a
+feminine tenderness, he draws the portrait of this most fascinating of
+women, this beautiful creature, for whom grace and sweetness did even
+still more than beauty, this fairy-queen of France, this refined
+coquette, who drew to her hundreds of hearts, this kindly magician,
+who turned all her lovers into friends. Then pass directly to the next
+paper, on the terrible Corsican, "who weakened his greatness by the
+gigantic--who loved to astonish--who delighted too much in what was
+his forte, war,--who was too much a bold adventurer." And further on,
+the account of Napoleon's conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in which
+account M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness and
+truthfulness and penetration of the great German. The impression thus
+made on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve's power is
+deepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot and
+his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly
+against those historians "who strain humanity, who make the lesson that
+history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place
+of Providence," which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p.
+150), "is often but a deification of our own thought."
+
+In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve--who had then, for more
+than thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the function
+of critic--describes what is a fundamental feature of his method in
+arriving at a judgment on books and authors. "Literature, literary
+production, is in my eyes not distinct, or at least not separable,
+from the rest of the man and his organization. I can enjoy a work, but
+it is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of the
+man himself; and I readily say, _as is the tree so is the fruit_.
+Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study." This, of
+course, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with the
+moderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know the
+man who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interior
+beginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best means
+is, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, his
+predecessors. "You are sure to recognize the superior man, in part at
+least, in his parents, especially in his mother, the most direct and
+certain of his parents; also in his sisters and his brothers,
+even in his children. In these one discovers important features which,
+from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminent
+individual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the _fond_, is found in
+others of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state."
+
+Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional
+conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic.
+Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part the
+cause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact in
+delineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence all
+living parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes is
+more captivating than his "Portraits de Femmes," a translation of
+which we are glad to see announced.
+
+Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of
+the "Nouveaux Lundis," an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deep
+is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For
+the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament
+was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes the
+occasion to write a paper on "Les saints Evangiles," especially the
+Sermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beatitudes,
+he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world such
+accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and
+thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of
+men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial
+recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness
+but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who
+persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar
+address to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anything
+like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the
+precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of
+human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated
+from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that
+predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we
+not a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectly
+heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before
+all coming generations?
+
+"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or less
+instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting
+itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly
+existed. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating,
+bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of
+what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind
+such words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth
+of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the
+Mount?"
+
+Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of
+Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus
+Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity toward
+the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all
+that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not
+Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What
+characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the other
+sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to
+equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright
+spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to
+simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed
+from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger
+to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on
+Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on
+the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:--
+
+    But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
+    shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
+    also.
+
+    And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy
+    coat, let him have thy cloak also....
+
+    Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow
+    of thee turn not thou away....
+
+    No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
+    and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
+    despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
+
+    Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what
+    ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body,
+    what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the
+    body than raiment?...
+
+
+"Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists,
+not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece any more than in Confucius.
+It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any more
+than in the modern Franklin. The principle of inspiration is
+different, if indeed it be not opposite: the paths may come together
+for a moment, but they cross one another. And it is this delicate
+ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement
+and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person
+and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as
+the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source."
+
+Of M. Sainte-Beuve's delight in what is the most excellent product of
+literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over
+the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page.
+"Poetry," says he, "is the essence of things, and we should be careful
+not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods of
+color. The task of poetry is not to say everything, but to make us
+dream everything." And he cites a similar judgment of Fenelon: "The
+poet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch but
+what can be beautified." In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaks
+of the youthful poems of Milton: "'Il Penseroso' is the masterpiece of
+meditative and contemplative poetry; it is like a magnificent oratorio
+in which prayer ascends slowly toward the Eternal. I make no
+comparison; let us never take august names from their sphere. All that
+is beautiful in Milton stands by itself; one feels the tranquil habit
+of the upper regions, and continuity in power." In a paper on
+the letters of Ducis, he proves that he apprehends the proportions of
+Shakespeare. He asks: "Have we then got him at last? Is our stomach up
+to him? Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (_cette
+moelle de lion_)?" And again, in an article on the men of the
+eighteenth century, he writes: "One may be born a sailor, but there is
+nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a
+battle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that,
+and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare."
+
+Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed
+himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest
+class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of
+his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures
+in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, how
+catholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takes
+pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency.
+Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Moliere, his words
+flame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust in
+his own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the
+feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His native
+favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not
+overrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls "the
+Frenchman par excellence," and of whom he is proud as the literary
+sovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devoted
+to Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, he
+lauds this spiritually-minded thinker as one of the best of critics.
+And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: "Voltaire is
+sometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even
+are impudent.--There are defects difficult to perceive, that have not
+been classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them."
+
+In a paper on Louise Labe, a poetess of the sixteenth century, he
+reproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and then
+adds: "These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that,
+at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry." No German
+or English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature,
+and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not an
+exaltation of French prose, it is a depression of French
+poetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of which
+possibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts to
+an acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are not
+capable of producing and embodying the highest poetry.
+
+Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always mentions with deference. On Eckerman's
+"Conversations with Goethe" he has a series of three papers, wherein
+he deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honest
+pride Goethe's admiration of some of the chief French writers, and his
+acknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to the
+French translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the following
+note, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a high
+tribute to our distinguished countrywoman: "The English translation is
+by Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished so
+unhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes this
+translation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of the
+subject and for justness of appreciation it leaves our preface far
+behind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was a
+person of true merit and of great intellectual vigor." A sympathetic
+student of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him;
+and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature of
+Goethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that she
+would have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe "literature," had
+she lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friends
+had nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of this
+gifted, generous, noble-hearted woman.
+
+One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the
+multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a
+hand that can shake hard,--and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteen
+years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of
+"Causeries du Lundi," a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not
+short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight
+pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thus
+ever in the thick of the literary _melee_. Attractions and repulsions,
+sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate;
+the aesthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences
+and friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris,
+if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous
+mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray
+some of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the critical
+pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is
+wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality
+is seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader will no doubt often
+perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a
+subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well
+trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. His
+perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious
+dead who are embalmed in their own excellence. Besides devoting many
+papers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates of
+literature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them,--a
+sign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness.
+
+Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly taken
+by the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition of
+virtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes. In the general tone
+there is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness. Of the
+humane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take the
+following as one of many instances. In the correspondence of Lamennais
+there is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and his
+later sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thus
+feelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure: "Let us cast
+a look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, from
+youth to our latter years, there are none of these boundless
+distances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which,
+for being hidden, are none the less real and profound."
+
+Writing weekly for the _feuilleton_ of a Paris daily journal, M.
+Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is
+always animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished,
+he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When the
+occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a
+principle or of a comprehensive thought. "Admiration is a much finer
+test of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than all
+the art of satire." By the side of this may be placed a sentence he
+cites from Grimm: "People who so easily admire bad things are
+not in a state to enjoy good." How true and cheering is this: "There
+is in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought with
+her finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up,
+smothers, or corrupts." Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says:
+"What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and
+perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful." When, to
+give a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammatic
+point, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where to
+borrow just what is wanted. Speaking of embellished oratorical
+diction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that was
+discussed in his presence: "It is not enough to have fine sentences:
+you must have something to put into them." Commenting on the
+hyper-spirituality of M. Laprade, he says: "M. Laprade starts from the
+_absolute notion of being_. For him the following is the principle of
+Art,--'to manifest what we feel of the Absolute Being, of the
+Infinite, of God, to make him known and felt by other men, such in its
+generality is the end of Art.' Is this true, is it false? I know not:
+at this elevation one always gets into the clouds. Like the most of
+those who pride themselves on metaphysics, he contents himself
+with words (_il se paye de mots_)." Here is a grand thought, that
+flashes out of the upper air of poetry: "Humanity, that eternal child
+that has never done growing."
+
+M. Sainte-Beuve's irony, keen and delicate, is a sprightly medium of
+truth: witness this passage on a new volume of M. Michelet:
+"Narrative, properly so called, which never was his forte, is almost
+entirely sacrificed. Seek here no historical highway, well laid,
+solid, and continuous; the method adopted is absolute points of view;
+you run with him on summits, peaks, on needles of granite, which he
+selects at his pleasure to gets views from. The reader leaps from
+steeple to steeple. M. Michelet seems to have proposed to himself an
+impossible wager, which, however, he has won,--to write history with a
+series of flashes." Could there be a more subtle, covert way of saying
+of a man that he is hardened by self-esteem than the following on M.
+Guizot: "The consciousness that he has of himself, and a natural
+principle of pride, place him easily above the little susceptibilities
+of self-love." M. Sainte-Beuve is not an admirer of Louis Philippe,
+and among other sly hits gives him the following: "Louis
+Philippe was too much like a _bourgeois_ himself to be long respected
+by the _bourgeoisie_. Just as in former times the King of France was
+only the first gentleman of the kingdom, he was nothing but the first
+_bourgeois_ of the country." What witty satire on Lamartine he
+introduces, with a recognition of popularity that, with one who takes
+so much joy in applause as Lamartine does, is enough to take the
+poison out of the sting: "Those who knew his verses by heart (and the
+number who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not without
+regret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, in
+his prose. This prose is, in 'Les Confidences,' too often but the
+paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the
+last, paraphrases of his feelings." Amends are made to Lamartine on
+another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says:
+"Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and the
+eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings.
+That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of
+wing." This is better as modesty than as criticism. Shakespeare,
+Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as of
+more gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyed
+getting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of their
+strongest as well as sweetest notes.
+
+A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, just
+as a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image of
+herself. His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy in
+things French. Through means of it he knows them through and through:
+they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, his
+intellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other side
+the shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more or
+less the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows.
+Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Beranger, is
+spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and
+broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his
+individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy,
+that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M.
+Michelet, to Madame de Stael and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe,
+to Fenelon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau.
+
+Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will be
+impatient to ask, nothing but praise? Not much else. Commencing his
+literary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from that
+date to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits,
+fill several thousand pages. Between his forty-fifth to his sixtieth
+year he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousand
+pages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects. This is
+the period of his critical maturity, the period of the "Causeries du
+Lundi," followed by the "Nouveaux Lundis." Many men write
+voluminously, but most of these only write _about_ a subject, not
+_into_ it. Only the few who can write into their subject add something
+to literature. One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve. In his mind there
+is vitality to animate his large acquirement, to make his many
+chapters buoyant and stimulant. All through his writings is the
+sparkle of original life.
+
+But let us now cheer the reader who is impatient of much praise, and
+at the same time perform the negative part of our task.
+
+Well, then, to be bold, as befits a critic of the critic, we beard the
+lion in his very den. We challenge a definition he gives of the
+critic. In the seventh volume of the "Causeries," article
+"Grimm," he says: "When Nature has endowed some one with this vivacity
+of feeling, with this susceptibility to impression, and that the
+creative imagination be wanting, this some one is a born critic, that
+is to say, a lover and judge of the creations of others." Why did M.
+Sainte-Beuve make Goethe sovereign in criticism? Why did he think
+Milton peculiarly qualified to interpret Homer? From the deep
+principle of like unto like; only spirit can know spirit. What were
+the worth of a comment of John Locke on "Paradise Lost," except to
+reveal the mental composition of John Locke? The critic should be what
+Locke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form of
+literature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, some
+share of that whereby poetry is fledged, "creative imagination." He
+may "want the accomplishment of verse," or the constructive faculty,
+but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful he
+must have. But do not the presence of "vivacity of feeling with
+susceptibility to impression" imply the imaginative temperament? If
+not, then we confidently assure M. Sainte-Beuve that had his
+definition fitted himself, his "Causeries du Lundi" would never have
+been rescued from the quick oblivion of the _feuilleton._
+
+Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness,
+which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue,--the love of
+glory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon's passion for glory saved him in
+his latter years from ennui, from "that languor of the soul which
+follows the age of the passions." Where are to be found men more the
+victims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not more
+distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than
+for insatiable greed of glory,--Byron and Chateaubriand? No form of
+self-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving,
+which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyond
+its sway, on praise and admiration. These stimulants--withdrawn more
+or less even from the most successful in latter years--leave a void
+which becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust.
+Instead of glory being "the potent motive-power in all great souls,"
+as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moral
+instinct, called by Milton,--
+
+  "That last infirmity of noble mind."
+
+In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it as
+hardly to be traceable in their careers. Love of glory was not the
+spring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more than
+Shakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington.
+
+The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the French
+nation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animal
+vigor of the conqueror's mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that he
+does not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon's moral nature, and
+the consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor the
+unmanning effects of his despotism. The words used to describe the
+moral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be the
+strokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset. In the
+paper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the "rare good
+sense" of Napoleon, of "his instinct of justice." But was it not a
+compact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct of
+justice, backed by a Titan's will, wielding a mighty intellect, that
+enabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despot
+and the merciless devastator? Again, can it be said of Napoleon that
+he possessed good sense in a rare degree? Good sense is an instinctive
+insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive
+discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a
+soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and
+equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. The
+moral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon's moral endowment was
+but fractional. Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basis
+of all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical,
+or in its action one-sided; and even in such its presence must be
+felt. In whatever reaches general human interests, whether as
+practical act or imaginative creation, good sense must be, for their
+prosperity, a primary ingredient. "The Tempest" and "Don Quixote"
+shoot up into shining, imperishable beauty because their roots draw
+their first nourishment from this hearty, inexhaustible substratum.
+And let us say, that in M. Sainte-Beuve himself good sense is the
+foundation of his eminent critical ability. He has been led, we
+conceive, to attribute more of it to Napoleon than is his due by the
+blinding splendor of Napoleon's military genius, through which, with
+such swiftness and cumulative effect, he adapted means to ends on the
+purely material plane.
+
+When Murray applied to Lord Byron to write a book about the
+life and manners of the upper class in Italy, Byron declined the
+proposal from personal regards, and then added, that were he to write
+such a book it would be misjudged in England; for, said he, "their
+moral is not your moral." Such international misinterpretations and
+exaggerations are instinctive and involuntary. A nation from its being
+a nation, has a certain one-sidedness. To the Italian (even to one who
+carries a stiletto) the English practice of boxing is a sheer
+brutality; while to an Englishman (himself perhaps not a Joseph) the
+_cavaliere servente_ is looked upon with reprobation tempered by
+scorn. To this misjudgment from the foreign side and over-estimation
+on the domestic, books, too, are liable; but to books as being more
+abstract than usages, more ideal than manners, an absolute moral
+standard can with less difficulty be applied. Applying it to Gil Blas,
+is not M. Sainte-Beuve subject to arraignment when he speaks of this
+and the other writings of Le Sage as being "the mirror of the world?"
+Moliere, too, is a satirist, and from his breadth a great one; and
+surely the world he holds a mirror before is a much purer world than
+that of Le Sage; and what of the Shakespearean world? The world of Le
+Sage is a nether world. "Of Gil Blas it has been well said that the
+book is moral like experience." The experience one may get in brothels
+and "hells," in consorting with pimps and knaves, has in it lessons of
+virtue and morality,--for those who can extract them; but even for
+these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot
+read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the
+experience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the
+paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high
+as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment
+of Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to
+have been written in a _cafe_, by a player of dominoes, on coming out
+of the comic theatre."
+
+Without being over-diffident, we may feel our footing not perfectly
+secure on French ground when we differ from a Frenchman; we are
+therefore not sorry to catch M. Sainte-Beuve tripping on English
+ground. In a review of the translation of the celebrated Letters of
+Lord Chesterfield--whom he calls the La Rochefoucauld of England--he
+refers to, and in part quotes, the passages in which Chesterfield
+gives his son advice as to his _liaisons_; and he adds: "All
+Chesterfield's morality, on this head, is resumed in a line of
+Voltaire,--
+
+  "Il n'est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie."
+
+It is these passages that make the grave Dr. Johnson blush: we only
+smile at them." For ourselves, we blush with Johnson, not that the man
+of the world should give to his youthful son, living at a corrupt
+Continental court, counsel as to relations which were regarded as
+inevitable in such a circle; but that the heart of the father should
+not have poured (were it but parenthetically) through the pen of the
+worldling some single sentence like this: "Writing to you, my son, as
+an experienced man of the world to one inexperienced, I recommend the
+good taste in such matters and the delicacy which become a gentleman;
+but to his dear boy, your father says, avoid, if possible, such
+_liaisons_; preserve your purity; nothing will give you such a return
+throughout the whole of the future." But, a single sentence like this
+would _vitiate_ the entire Chesterfieldian correspondence.
+
+How fully and warmly M. Sainte-Beuve prizes moral worth may be learnt
+from many passages. Not the least animated and cordial of his
+papers is one on the Abbe Gerbet, in the sixth volume, a paper which
+shows, as Gustave Planche said of him, that "he studies with his
+heart, as women do;" and one in the second volume on Malesherbes, whom
+he describes as being "separated, on the moral side, from the
+Mirabeaus and the Condorcets not by a shade, but by an abyss," and
+whom he sums up as "great magistrate, minister too sensitive and too
+easily discouraged, heroic advocate, and sublime victim." Of this
+noble, deeply dutiful, self-sacrificing Frenchman, this exemplar of
+moral greatness, Lord Lansdowne wrote many years before the French
+Revolution: "I have seen for the first time in my life what I did not
+believe could exist, that is, a man _who is exempt from fear and from
+hope_, and who nevertheless is full of life and warmth. Nothing can
+disturb his peace; nothing is necessary to him, and he takes a lively
+interest in all that is good."
+
+In a paper on a volume of miscellaneous prose essays by M. Laprade, M.
+Sainte-Beuve has this sentence: "What strikes me above all and
+everywhere is, that the author, whether he reasons or whether he
+addresses himself to literary history, only understands his own mode
+of being and his own individuality. Hereby he reveals to us
+that he is not a critic." The first paragraph of a keen critique on M.
+de Pontmartin ends thus: "To say of even those writers who are opposed
+to us nothing which their judicious friends do not already think and
+are obliged to admit, this is my highest ambition." Discussing the
+proper method of dealing with the past, he writes: "For myself I
+respect tradition and I like novelty: I am never happier than when I
+can succeed in reconciling them together." Of Hoffman he says, in a
+paper on literary criticism: "He has many of the qualities of a true
+critic, conscientiousness, independence, ideas, an opinion of his
+own." These sentences, with others of like import, are keys to the
+character of the volumes from which they are taken. The office of the
+critic M. Sainte-Beuve administers, not for temporary or personal
+ends, but with a disinterested sense of its elevation and its
+responsibilities. Through healthy sympathies and knowledge ample and
+ripe, through firm sense with artistic flexibility, through largeness
+of view and subtlety of insight, he enters upon it more than
+ordinarily empowered for its due discharge. He is at once what the
+French call _fin_ and what the English call "sound." In
+literary work, in biographical work, in work aesthetical and critical,
+he delights, and he has a wide capacity of appropriation. The spirit
+of a book, a man, an age, he seizes quickly. With a nice perception of
+shades he catches the individual color of a mind or a production; and
+by the same faculty he grasps the determining principles in a
+character. Delicately, strongly, variously endowed, there is a steady
+equilibrium among his fine powers. Considering the bulk and vast
+variety and general excellence of his critical work, is it too much to
+say of him, that he is not only, as he has been called, the foremost
+of living critics, but that he deserves to hold the first place among
+all critics? No other has done so much so well. Goethe and Coleridge
+are something more; they are critics incidentally; but M.
+Sainte-Beuve, with poetical and philosophical qualities that lift him
+to a high vantage-ground, has made criticism his life-work, and
+through conscientious and symmetrical use of these qualities has done
+his work well. Besides much else in his many and many-sided volumes,
+there is to be read in them a full, spirited history of French
+literature.
+
+Our attempt to make M. Sainte-Beuve better known on this side
+the Atlantic we cannot more fitly conclude than with a sketch of
+him--a literary sketch--by himself. This we find in the fifth volume
+of the "Nouveaux Lundis," in a paper on Moliere, published in July,
+1863. A man who, in the autumnal ripeness of his powers, thus frankly
+tells us his likes and dislikes, tells us what he is. While by
+reflected action the passage becomes a self-portraiture, it is a
+sample of finest criticism.
+
+"To make Moliere loved by more people is in my judgment to do a public
+service.
+
+"Indeed, to love Moliere--I mean to love him sincerely and with all
+one's heart--it is, do you know? to have within one's self a guarantee
+against many defects, much wrong-headedness. It is, in the first
+place, to dislike what is incompatible with Moliere, all that was
+counter to him in his day, and that would have been insupportable to
+him in ours.
+
+"To love Moliere is to be forever cured--do not say of base and
+infamous hypocrisy, but of fanaticism, of intolerance, and of that
+kind of hardness which makes one anathematize and curse; it is to
+carry a corrective to admiration even of Bossuet, and for all who,
+after his example, exult, were it only in words, over their
+enemy dead or dying; who usurp I know not what holy speech, and
+involuntarily believe themselves to be, with the thunderbolt in their
+hand, in the region and place of the Most High. Men eloquent and
+sublime, you are far too much so for me!
+
+"To love Moliere, is to be sheltered against, and a thousand leagues
+away from, that other fanaticism, the political, which is cold, dry,
+cruel, which never laughs, which smells of the sectary, which, under
+pretext of Puritanism, finds means to mix and knead all that is
+bitter, and to combine in one sour doctrine the hates, the spites, and
+the Jacobinism of all times. It is to be not less removed, on the
+other hand, from those tame, dull souls who, in the very presence of
+evil, cannot be roused to either indignation or hatred.
+
+"To love Moliere, is to be secured against giving in to that pious and
+boundless admiration for a humanity which worships itself, and which
+forgets of what stuff it is made, and that, do what it will, it is
+always poor human nature. It is, not to despise it too much, however,
+this common humanity, at which one laughs, of which one is, and into
+which we throw ourselves through a healthful hilarity whenever we are
+with Moliere.
+
+"To love and cherish Moliere, is to detest all mannerism in
+language and expression; it is, not to take pleasure in, or to be
+arrested by, petty graces, elaborate subtlety, superfine finish,
+excessive refinement of any kind, a tricky or artificial style.
+
+"To love Moliere, it is to be disposed to like neither false wit nor
+pedantic science; it is to know how to recognize at first sight our
+_Trissotins_[6] and our _Vadius_ even under their rejuvenated jaunty
+airs; it is, not to let one's self be captivated at present any more
+than formerly by the everlasting _Philaminte_, that affected pretender
+of all times, whose form only changes and whose plumage is incessantly
+renewed; it is, to like soundness and directness of mind in others as
+well as in ourselves. I only give the first movement and the pitch; on
+this key one may continue, with variations.
+
+    [6] Trissotin, Vadius, and Philaminte, are personages in Moliere's
+        comedy of _Les Femmes Savantes_ (The Blue-Stockings).
+
+
+"To love and openly to prefer Corneille, as certain minds do, is no
+doubt a fine thing, and, in one sense, a very legitimate thing; it is,
+to dwell in, and to mark one's rank in, the world of great souls: but
+is it not to run the risk of loving together with the grand
+and sublime, false glory a little, to go so far as not to detest
+inflation and magniloquence, an air of heroism on all occasions? He
+who passionately loves Corneille cannot be an enemy to a little
+boasting.
+
+"On the other hand, to love and prefer Racine, ah! that is, no doubt,
+to love above all things, elegance, grace, what is natural and true
+(at least relatively), sensibility, touching and charming passion; but
+at the same time is it not also, to allow your taste and your mind to
+be too much taken with certain conventional and over-smooth beauties,
+a certain tameness and petted languidness, with certain excessive and
+exclusive refinements? In a word, to love Racine so much, it is to run
+the risk of having too much of what in France is called taste, and
+which brings so much distaste.
+
+"To love Boileau--but no, one does not love Boileau, one esteems him,
+one respects him; we admire his uprightness, his understanding, at
+times his animation, and if we are tempted to love him, it is solely
+for that sovereign equity which made him do such unshaken justice to
+the great poets his contemporaries, and especially to him whom he
+proclaims the first of all, Moliere.
+
+"To love La Fontaine, is almost the same thing as to love
+Moliere; it is, to love nature, the whole of nature, humanity
+ingenuously depicted, a representation of the grand comedy "of a
+hundred different acts," unrolling itself, cutting itself up before
+our eyes into a thousand little scenes with the graces and freedoms
+that are so becoming, with weaknesses also, and liberties which are
+never found in the simple, manly genius of the master of masters. But
+why separate them? La Fontaine and Moliere--we must not part them, we
+love them united."
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+The number of "Putnam's Magazine," containing this paper, was sent to
+M. Sainte-Beuve accompanied by a note. In due time I received an
+answer to the note, saying that the Magazine had not reached him.
+Hereupon I sent the article by itself. On receiving it he wrote the
+following acknowledgment.
+
+In my note I referred to a rumor of his illness. His disease was, by
+_post-mortem_ examination, discovered to be as the newspapers had
+reported, the stone. But a consultation of physicians declared that it
+was what he states it to be in his letter. Had they not made so gross
+a mistake, his life might have been prolonged.
+
+
+"PARIS, 6 _Decembre_, 1868, No. 11 Rue Mont Parnasse.
+
+"CHER MONSIEUR:--
+
+"Oh! Cette fois je recois bien decidement le tres aimable et si bien
+etudie portrait du _critique_. Comment exprimer comme je le
+sens ma gratitude pour tant de soin, d'attention penetrante, de desir
+d'etre agreable tout en restant juste? Il y avait certes moyen
+d'insister bien plus sur les variations, les disparates et les
+defaillances momentanees de la pensee et du jugement a travers cette
+suite de volumes. C'est toujours un sujet d'etonnement pour moi, et
+cette fois autant que jamais, de voir comment un lecteur ami et un
+juge de gout parvient a tirer une figure une et consistante de ce qui
+ne me parait a moi meme dans mon souvenir que le cours d'un long
+fleuve qui va s'epandant un pen au hazard des pentes et desertant
+continuellement ses rives. De tels portraits comme celui que vous
+voulez bien m'offrir me rendent un point d'appui et me feraient
+veritablement croire a moi-meme. Et quand je songe a l'immense
+quantite d'esprits auxquels vous me presentez sous un aspect si
+favorable et si magistral dans ce nouveau monde de tant de jeunesse et
+d'avenir, je me prends d'une sorte de fierte et de courageuse
+confiance comme en presence deja de la posterite.
+
+"Le mal auquel vous voulez bien vous interesser est tout simplement
+une hypertrophie de la prostate. Les souffrances ne sont pas vives,
+mais l'incommodite est grande, ne pouvant supporter a aucun degre le
+mouvement de la voiture, ce qui restreint ma vie sociale a un bien
+court rayon.
+
+"Veuillez agreeer, cher Monsieur, l'assurance de ma cordiale
+gratitude, et de mes sentiments les plus distingues.
+
+SAINTE-BEUVE."
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE.
+
+
+A brain ever aglow with self-kindled fire--a cerebral battery
+bristling with magnetic life--such is Thomas Carlyle. Exceptional
+fervor of temperament, rare intellectual vivacity, manful
+earnestness--these are the primary qualifications of the man. He has
+an uncommon soul-power. Hence his attractiveness, hence his influence.
+Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, throbs with his own
+being. Themselves all authors put, of course, more or less, into what
+they write: few, very few, can make their sentences quiver with
+themselves. This Mr. Carlyle does by the intenseness of a warm
+individuality, by the nimble vigor of his mental life, and, be it
+added, by the rapture of his spirituality. The self, in his case, is a
+large, deep self, and it sends an audible pulse through his pen into
+his page.
+
+To all sane men is allotted a complete endowment of mental faculties,
+of capacities of intellect and feeling; the degree to which
+these are energized, are injected with nervous flame, makes the
+difference between a genius and a blockhead. There being high vital
+pressure at a full, rich, interior source, and thence, strong mental
+currents, through what channels the currents shall flow depends on
+individual aptitudes, these aptitudes shaping, in the one case, a
+Dante, in another, a Newton, in another, a Mirabeau. And Nature, with
+all her generosity, being jealous of her rights, allows no interchange
+of gifts. Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force of
+will and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven. In
+his dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than many
+other intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity and
+ambition have at times led him into paths where great deficiencies
+disclose themselves by the side of great superiorities. His mind is
+biographical, not historical; stronger in details than in
+generalization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, not
+constructive; literary, not philosophical. Mr. Carlyle is great at a
+picture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction. Wealth
+of thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire,
+irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem with
+passages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his "Cromwell" and his
+"Frederick." Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr.
+Carlyle, in writing their lives with duteous particularity, has
+embraced the full story of the epoch in which each was the leader. To
+him they are more than leaders. Herein he and Mr. Buckle stand at
+opposite poles; Mr. Buckle underrating the protagonists of history,
+them and their share of agency; Mr. Carlyle overrating them,--a
+prejudicial one-sidedness in both cases. Leader and led are the
+complements the one of the other.
+
+History is a growth, and a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sow
+the seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and still
+more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient,
+calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful,
+nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. One
+healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking
+him to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntingly
+throw into the face of contemporaries an Abbot Sampson of the twelfth
+century as a model. A judicial expounder would not cite one
+single example as a characteristic of that age in contrast with this.
+A patient, impartial elucidator, would not deride "ballot-boxes,
+reform bills, winnowing machines:" he would make the best of these and
+other tools within reach; or, if his part be to write and not to act,
+would animate, not dishearten, those who are earnestly doing, and who,
+by boldly striking at abuses, by steadily striving for more justice,
+by aiming to lift up the down-trodden, prepare, through such means as
+are at hand, a better ground for the next generation. If to such
+workers, instead of God-speed, a writer of force and influence gives
+jeers and gibes, and ever-repeated shrieks about "semblance and
+quackery, and cant and speciosity, and dilettantism," and deems
+himself profound and original, as well as hopeful, when he exclaims:
+"Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of
+human worth and truth, we shall never by all the machinery in
+Birmingham discover the true and worthy:" in that case, does he not
+expose him to the taunt of being himself very like a mouthing quack,
+and his words, which should be cordial, brotherly, do they not partake
+of the hollow quality of what Mr. Carlyle holds in such abhorrence,
+namely, of cant? The sick lion crouches growling in his lair;
+he cannot eat, and he will not let others eat.
+
+Many grateful and admiring readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with his
+ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven's name, what are
+all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,--worldly
+bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow
+sway-wielding dukes,--what are all these, and much else, but so many
+exemplications of might that is not right? When might shall cease to
+bully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia. Utopia may be
+at infinite distance, not attainable by finite men; but as surely as
+our hearts beat, we are gradually getting further from its opposite,
+the coarse rule of force and brutality, such rule as in the twelfth
+century was rife all around "Abbot Sampson."
+
+Like unto this moral fallacy is an aesthetic fallacy which, through
+bright pages of criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment.
+"I confess," says Mr. Carlyle, "I have no notion of a truly great man
+that could not be all sorts of men." Could Newton have written the
+"Fairy Queen?" Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation?
+Could Columbus have given birth to "Don Quixote?" One of Mr.
+Carlyle's military heroes tried hard to be a poet. Over Frederick's
+verses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned. "I cannot
+understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the
+fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could
+not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in
+that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward."
+Thus Mr. Carlyle writes in "Heroes and Hero-Worship." If Mirabeau, why
+not Savonarola, or Marcus Aurelius. In that case a "Twelfth Night," or
+an "Othello," might have come from Luther. Nature does not work so
+loosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is
+profuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence her
+ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency.
+Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her
+beauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are
+endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest
+men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once
+grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. "Petrarch and Boccaccio
+did diplomatic messages," says Mr. Carlyle. We hope they did,
+or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that. We
+Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may be
+done.
+
+On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages,
+pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and
+executed with the scholar's care and the critic's culture. His early
+papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made
+something like an epoch in English criticism. Seizing the value and
+significance of genuine poetry, he exclaims in "Past and
+Present,"--"Genius, Poet! do we know what these words mean? An
+inspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own great
+fire-heart, to see the truth, and speak it and do it." On the same
+page he thus taunts his countrymen: "We English find a poet, as brave
+a man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the
+sun; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods? Not at all. We, taking
+due counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of
+Dumfries, and pique ourselves on our 'patronage of genius.'" "George
+the Third is Defender of something we call 'the Faith' in
+those years. George the Third is head charioteer of the destinies of
+England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions,
+American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale in
+Dumfries." Poor George the Third! One needs not be a craniologist to
+know that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreating
+pyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men and
+things before them. How could they see a Robert Burns? To be sure, had
+Dundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of the
+many sinecures of two or three hundred pounds a year that were wasted
+on idle scions of titled families, an aureole of glory would now shine
+through the darkness that environs the memory of George III. So much
+for George Guelf. Now for Thomas Carlyle.
+
+If, for not recognizing Burns, _poor_ George is to be blamed,
+what terms of stricture will be too harsh for _rich_ Thomas, that
+by him were not recognized poets greater than Burns, at a time when
+for England's good, full, sympathetic recognition of them was just
+what was literarily most wanted? Here was a man, for the fine function
+of poetic criticism how rarely gifted is visible in those
+thorough papers on Burns and Goethe, written so early as 1828,
+wherein, besides a masterly setting forth of their great subjects, are
+notable passages on other poets. On Byron is passed the following
+sentence, which will, we think, be ever confirmed by sound criticism.
+"Generally speaking, we should say that Byron's poetry is not true. He
+refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar
+strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in
+dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask,
+real men; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do not
+these characters, does not the character of their author, which more
+or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the
+occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended
+to look much grander than nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies,
+this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation,
+with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor,
+is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is
+to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of
+life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds,
+there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call
+theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so
+powerful pieces."
+
+In the same paper, that on Burns, Mr. Carlyle thus opened the ears of
+that generation,--partially opened, for the general aesthetic ear is
+not fully opened yet,--to a hollowness which was musical to the many:
+"Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if _in vacuo_;
+the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much
+for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result
+of this, for certain generalizations which philosophy termed men." And
+in the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray's poetry, "a laborious mosaic,
+through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true grace
+could be expected to look." Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle to
+be, what is the critic's noblest office, an interpreter between new
+poets and the public. Such an interpreter England grievously needed,
+to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize the
+treasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and
+Shelley, and Keats. The interpreter was there, but he spoke not.
+Better than any man in England Mr. Carlyle could, if he would,
+have taught the generation that was growing up with him, whose ear he
+had already gained, what truth and fresh beauty and deep humanity
+there was in the strains of this composite chorus of superlative
+singers. Of such teaching, that generation stood in especial need, to
+disabuse its ear of the hollowness which had been mistaken for
+harmony; to refresh, with clear streams from "the divine fountain,"
+hearts that were fevered by the stimulus of Byronic "strong waters;"
+to wave before half-awakened eyes the torch which lights the way to
+that higher plane where breathe great poets, whose incomparable
+function it is, to impart to their fellow-men some of the enlargement
+and the purification of consciousness in which themselves exult
+through the influx of fresh ideas and the upspringing of prolific
+sentiment. The gifted interpreter was dumb. Nay, he made diversions
+into Scotland and Germany, to bring Burns and Scott more distinctly
+before Englishmen, and to make Schiller and Goethe and Richter better
+known to them. And it pleased him to write about "Corn-law rhymes."
+That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done,
+by the side of them, the then more urgent task. In 1828, Mr.
+Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of
+"Goethe's Helena," which is a kind of episode in the second part of
+"Faust," and was first published as a fragment. This takes up more
+than sixty pages in the first volume of the "Miscellanies," about the
+half being translations from "Helena," which by no means stands in the
+front rank of Goethe's poetic creations, which is indeed rather a high
+artistic composition than a creation. At that time there lay, almost
+uncalled for, on the publisher's shelf, where it had lain for five
+years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas,
+flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any
+in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of
+Shakespeare,--a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender,
+deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of
+feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are
+gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with
+excess of light,--or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza
+rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed
+of Nature's most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and
+a richer fragrance; I mean the "Adonais" of Shelley. For this
+glittering masterpiece,--a congenial commentary on which would have
+illuminated the literary atmosphere of England,--Mr. Carlyle had no
+word; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word for
+Wordsworth. For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here it
+is: "Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole
+consists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague,
+random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty." A parenthesis,
+short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has been
+truly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is the
+poetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and of
+whom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology in
+the youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power,
+variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the first
+class of the poetry of the world. Is not Thomas Carlyle justly
+chargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor? Nay,
+considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistent
+ignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warm
+solicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, his
+offense may be termed a literary crime. He knew better.
+
+Mr. Carlyle somewhere contrasts his age with that of Elizabeth, after
+this fashion; "For Raleighs and Shakespeares we have Beau Brummell and
+Sheridan Knowles." Only on the surmise that Mr. Carlyle owed poor
+Knowles some desperate grudge, can such an outburst be accounted for.
+Otherwise it is sheer fatuity, or an impotent explosion of literary
+spite. For the breadth and brilliancy of the poetic day shed upon it,
+no period in the history of any nation, not that of Pericles or of
+Elizabeth, is more resplendent than that which had not yet faded for
+England when Mr. Carlyle began his career; nor in the field of public
+action can the most prolific era of Greece or of England hold up, for
+the admiration of the world and the pride of fellow-countrymen, two
+agents more deservedly crowned with honor and gratitude than Nelson
+and Wellington. Here are two leaders, who, besides exhibiting rare
+personal prowess and quick-eyed military genius on fields of vast
+breadth, and in performances of unwonted magnitude and momentousness,
+were, moreover, by their great, brave deeds, most palpably
+saving England, saving Europe, from the grasp of an inexorable despot.
+Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmost
+the reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper. On the ten
+thousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place. Not only
+are their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarce
+acknowledged.
+
+Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousy
+is not a noble form of
+
+  "The last infirmity of noble mind."
+
+Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley,
+Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill
+him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or
+even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of
+Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and
+Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen
+which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things,
+should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of
+genius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one is
+driven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive. In such a case it
+is impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion an
+imaginative man will not rise.
+
+Writing of Thomas Carlyle, the last words must not be censorious
+comments on a weakness; we all owe too much to his strength; he is too
+large a benefactor. Despite over-fondness for Frederick and the like,
+and what may be termed a pathological drift towards political
+despotism, how many quickening chapters has he not added to the
+"gospel of freedom"? Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses,
+with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities step
+forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon;
+what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what
+bursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped the
+enfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirst
+wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly "Frazer,"
+to drink of the spiritual waters of "Sartor Resartus." Here was a new
+spring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, purifying draughts, did
+it bubble and sparkle! That picture, in the beginning, of the "doing
+and driving (_Thun und Treiben_)" of a city as beheld by
+Professor Teufelsdroeckh from his attic--would one have been surprised
+to read that on a page of Shakespeare?
+
+A marvelous faculty of speech has Mr. Carlyle; a gift of saying what
+he has to say with a ring in the words that makes the thought tingle
+through your ears. His diction surrounds itself with a magnetic
+_aura_, which seems to float it, to part it from the paper, it
+stands out in such transparent chiar-oscuro. Common phrases he
+refreshes by making them the vehicle for new meanings, and in the
+ordering of words he has command of a magical logic. The marrowy vigor
+in his mind it is that lends such expressiveness, such nimbleness,
+such accent to his sentences, to his style.
+
+Mr. Carlyle's power comes mainly from his sensibilities. Through them
+he is poetical; through them there is so much light in his pages. More
+often from his than from any others, except those of the major poets,
+breaks the sudden, joyful beam that flames around a thought when it
+knows itself embraced by a feeling. Of humor and of wit, what an added
+fund does our language now possess through his pen. The body of
+criticism, inclosed in the five volumes of Miscellanies, were
+enough to give their author a lasting name. When one of these papers
+appeared in the Edinburgh, or other review, it shone, amid the
+contributions of the Jeffreys and Broughams, like a guinea in a
+handful of shillings.
+
+The masterpiece of Mr. Carlyle, and the masterpiece of English prose
+literature, is his "French Revolution," a rhythmic Epic without verse.
+To write those three volumes a man needs have in him a big, glowing
+heart, thus to flood with passionate life all the men and scenes of a
+momentous volcanic epoch; a lively, strong, intellectual vision he
+must have, to grasp in their full reality the multitudinous and
+diverse facts and incidents so swiftly begotten under the pulsation of
+millions of contentious brains; he needs a literary faculty finely
+artistic, creatively imaginative, to enrank the figures of such vast
+tumultuous scenes, to depict the actors in each, to present vividly in
+clear relief the rapid succession of eventful convulsions. Outside of
+the choice achievements of verse, is there a literary task of breadth
+and difficulty that has been done so well? A theme of unusual grandeur
+and significance is here greatly treated.
+
+The foremost literary gift,--nay, the test whereby to try
+whether there be any genuine literary gift,--is the power in a writer
+to impart so much of himself, that his subject shall stand invested,
+or rather, imbued, with a life which renews it; it becomes warmed with
+a fire from the writer's soul. Of this, the most perfect exhibition is
+in poetry, wherein, by the intensity and fullness of inflammation, of
+passion, is born a something new, which, through the strong
+creativeness of the poet, has henceforth a rounded being of its own.
+With this power Mr. Carlyle is highly endowed. Not only, as already
+said, does his page quiver with himself; through the warmth and
+healthiness of his sympathies, and his intellectual mastery, he makes
+each scene and person in his gorgeous representation of the French
+Revolution to shine with its own life, the more brilliantly and truly
+that this life has been lighted up by his. Where in history is there a
+picture greater than that of the execution of Louis XVI.? With a few
+strokes how many a vivid portrait does he paint, and each one vivid
+chiefly from its faithfulness to personality and to history. And then
+his full-length, more elaborated likenesses, of the king, of the
+queen, of the Duke of Orleans, of Lafayette, of Camille
+Desmoulins, of Danton, of Robespierre: it seems now that only on his
+throbbing page do these personages live and move and have their true
+being. The giant Mirabeau, 'twas thought at first he had drawn too
+gigantic. But intimate documents, historical and biographical, that
+have come to light since, confirm the insight of Mr. Carlyle, and
+swell his hero out to the large proportions he has given him.
+
+For a conclusion we will let Mr. Carlyle depict himself. Making
+allowance for some humorous play in describing a fellow-man so
+eccentric as his friend, Professor Teufelsdroeckh, this we think he
+does consciously and designedly in the fourth chapter of "Sartor
+Resartus," wherein, under the head of "Characteristics," he comments
+on the professor's Work on Clothes, and its effect on himself. From
+this chapter we extract some of the most pertinent sentences. It opens
+thus:--
+
+"It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes
+entirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, like
+the very sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work of
+genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amid
+its effulgence,--a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness'
+double-vision, and even utter blindness.
+
+"Without committing ourselves to those enthusiastic praises and
+prophesyings of the "Weissnichtwo'sche Anzeiger," we admitted that the
+book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the
+best effect of any book; that it had even operated changes in our way
+of thought; nay, that it promised to prove, as it were, the opening of
+a new mine-shaft, wherein the whole world of _Speculation_ might
+henceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially it may now be
+declared that Professor Teufelsdroeckh's acquirements, patience of
+research, philosophic, and even poetic vigor, are here made
+indisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity and
+tortuosity and manifold inaptitude....
+
+"Many a deep glance, and often with unspeakable precision, has he cast
+into mysterious Nature, and the still more mysterious Life of man.
+Wonderful it is with what cutting words, now and then, he severs
+asunder the confusion; sheers down, were it furlongs deep, into the
+true center of the matter; and there not only hits the nail on the
+head, but with crushing force smites it home and buries it....
+
+"Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigor, a
+true inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning
+words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and
+splendor from Jove's head; a rich idiomatic diction, picturesque
+allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy twins; all the
+graces and terrors of a wild imagination, wedded to the clearest
+intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer
+sleeping and soporific passages, circumlocutions, repetitions, touches
+even of pure doting jargon so often intervene.... A wild tone pervades
+the whole utterance of the man, like its key-note and regulator; now
+screwing itself aloft as into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill
+mockery of fiends; now sinking in cadences, not without melodious
+heartiness, though sometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch,
+when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true
+character is extremely difficult to fix....
+
+"Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse,
+do we still lie with regard to the professor's moral feeling. Gleams
+of an ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite
+pity; he could clasp the whole universe into his bosom, and
+keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a
+very seraph. Then, again, he is so sly, and still so imperturbably
+saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness, towards all that
+men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter,
+sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,--that you
+look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate
+Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round,
+after all, were but some huge foolish whirligig, where kings and
+beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were
+chaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest."
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+ERRATA.[7]
+
+    [7] From Lippincott's Magazine, 1870.
+
+
+Words are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of the
+soul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thence
+it behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words a
+watch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over his
+pupils. A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lest
+language fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements into
+which all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence or
+abuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness. Style
+may be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkers
+out of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind;
+and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with its
+beauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, the
+transparency and directness of its threads, which are words.
+
+A humble freeman of the guild of scholars would here use his
+privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and
+phrases,--abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and
+written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the
+pages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or lead
+to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is
+many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show
+signs of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moral
+and intellectual energies of a people, soon spots its speech.
+
+Nevertheless, as inaccuracies, laxities, vulgarisms--transgressions
+more or less superficial--such errors take from the correctness, from
+the efficacy, from the force as well as the grace, of written or
+spoken speech.
+
+The high level of strength, suppleness and beauty occupied by our
+English tongue has been reached, and can only be maintained, by
+strenuous, varied, and continuous mental action. Offenses against the
+laws and proprieties of language--like so many other of our
+lapses--are in most cases effects of the tendency in human nature to
+relax its tone. None save the most resolute and rigorous but have
+their moods of unwatchfulness, of indolence. Moreover, men are
+prone to resist mental refinement and intellectual subdivisions.
+Discrimination requires close attention and sustained effort; and
+without habitual discrimination there can be no linguistic precision
+or excellence. In this, as in other provinces, people like to take
+things easily. Now, every capable man of business knows that to take
+things easily is an easy way to ruin. Language is in a certain sense
+every one's business; but it is especially the business, as their
+appellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of their
+high vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddling
+with, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous tools
+wherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and are
+ever a-building. Culture, demanding and creating diversity and
+subtlety of mental processes, is at once a cause and an effect of
+infinite multiplication in the relations the mind is capable of
+establishing between itself and the objects of its action, and between
+its own processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture,
+has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands,
+Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of
+its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness,
+any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex
+tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by
+the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating
+influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr.
+Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it is
+also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere on
+which thought lives--a medium essential to the activity of our
+speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its
+operation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, the
+growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds."
+
+Our enumeration of _errata_ being made alphabetically, the first to be
+cited is one of the chief of sinners--the particle.
+
+As. The misuse of _as_ for _so_ is, in certain cases, almost
+universal. If authority could justify error and convert the faulty
+into the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justification
+of which can be cited most of the best names in recent English
+literature.
+
+  "_As_ far as doth concern my single self,"
+
+is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude," p. 70) which, by a change
+of the first _as_ into _so_, would gain not only in sound (which is
+not our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar. The seventh line
+of the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and most
+beautiful of poems, Shelley's "Adonais," begins, "_As_ long as skies
+are blue," where also there would be a double gain by writing "_So_
+long as skies are blue." On page 242 of the first volume of De
+Quincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by _as_
+philosophic a politician _as_ Edmund Burke," in which the critical
+blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse
+for the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules,
+from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, I
+conceive, that the double _as_ should only be employed when there is
+direct comparison. In the first part of the following sentence there
+is no direct comparative relation--in the second, the negative
+destroys it; "_So_ far as geographical measurement goes, Philadelphia
+is not _so_ far from New York as from Baltimore." Five writers out of
+six would commit the error of using _as_ in both members of the
+sentence. The most prevalent misuse of _as_ is in connection with
+_soon_; and this general misuse, having moreover the countenance of
+good writers, is so inwoven into our speech that it will be hard to
+unravel it. But principle is higher than the authority derived from
+custom. Judges are bound to give sentence according to the statute;
+and if the highest writers, whose influence is deservedly judicial,
+violate the laws of language, their decisions ought to be, and will
+be, reversed, or language will be undermined, and, slipping into
+shallow, illogical habits, into anarchical conditions, will forfeit
+much of its manliness, of its subtlety, of its truthfulness. Language
+is a living organism, and to substitute authority, or even long usage,
+for its innate genius and wisdom, and the requirements and practices
+that result from these, were to strike at its life, and to expose it
+to become subject to upstart usurpation, to deadening despotism.
+Worcester quotes from the Psalms the phrase, "They go astray _as_ soon
+as they be born." We ask, Were not the translators of the Bible as
+liable to err in grammar as De Quincey, or Wordsworth, or Shelley? A
+writer in the English "National Review" for January, 1862, in an
+admirable paper on the "Italian Clergy and the Pope," begins a
+sentence with the same phrase: "_As_ soon as the law was passed." And
+we ourselves, sure though we be that the use of _as_ in this and every
+similar position is an error, need to brace both pen and tongue
+against running into it, so strong to overcome principle and
+conviction is the habit of the senses, accustomed daily to see and to
+hear the wrong.
+
+AT THAT. We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the
+pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into
+bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be
+italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a
+phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, of
+American mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods,
+when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicks
+up and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels.
+
+ANOTHER. Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, we
+will call up a minor criminal in A, viz. _another_, often incorrectly
+used for _other_; as in "on one ground or another," "from one
+cause or another." Now, _another_, the prefix _an_ making it
+singular,--embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary
+to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are
+but two grounds or causes. Write "on one ground or other," and the
+words are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word _other_
+implying several or many grounds.
+
+BOQUET. The sensibility that gives the desire to preserve a present
+sparkling so long as is possible with all the qualities that made it
+materially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so
+precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people,
+gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself,
+should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath of
+ignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices. We therefore protest
+against a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, the
+word _bouquet_, being maimed into _boquet_, a corruption as dissonant
+to the ear as were to the eye plucking a rose from a variegated
+nosegay, and leaving only its thorny stem. _Boquet_ is heard at times
+in well-upholstered drawing-rooms, and may even be seen in print.
+Offensive in its mutilated shape, it smells sweet again when restored
+to its native orthography.
+
+BY NO MANNER OF MEANS. The most vigorous writers are liable, in
+unguarded moments, to lapse into verbal weakness, and so you
+meet with this vulgar pleonasm in Ruskin.
+
+BY REASON OF. An ill-assorted, ugly phrase, used by accomplished
+reviewers and others, who ought to set a purer example.
+
+COME OFF. Were a harp to give out the nasal whine of the bagpipe, or
+the throat of a nightingale to emit the caw of a raven, the aesthetic
+sense would not be more startled and offended than to hear from
+feminine lips, rosily wreathed by beauty and youth, issue the words,
+"The concert will _come off_ on Wednesday." This vulgarism should
+never be heard beyond the "ring" and the cock-pit, and should be
+banished from resorts so respectable as an oyster-cellar.
+
+CONSIDER. Neither weight of authority nor universality of use can
+purify or justify a linguistic corruption, and make the intrinsically
+wrong in language right; and therefore such phrases as, "I consider
+him an honest man," "Do you consider the dispute settled?" will ever
+be bad English, however generally sanctioned. In his dedication of the
+"Diversions of Purley" to the University of Cambridge, Horne Tooke
+uses it wrongly when he says, "who always _considers_ acts of
+voluntary justice toward himself as favors." The original
+signification and only proper use of _consider_ are in phrases like
+these: "If you consider the matter carefully;" "Consider the lilies of
+the field."
+
+CONDUCT. It seems to us that it were as allowable to say of a man, "He
+carries well," as "He conducts well." We say of a gun that it carries
+well, and we might say of a pipe that it conducts well. The gun and
+pipe are passive instruments, not living organisms, and thence the
+verbs are used properly in the neuter form. Perhaps, strictly
+speaking, even here _its charge_ and _water_ are understood.
+
+CONTEMPLATE. "Do you contemplate going to Washington to-morrow?" "No:
+I contemplate moving into the country." This is more than exaggeration
+and inflation: it is desecration of a noble word, born of man's higher
+being; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties,
+a calm collecting of them for silent meditation--an act, or rather a
+mood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, and
+involves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment. An able lawyer has
+to reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it;
+but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflicts
+and wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on the
+purposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects--he is
+lifted into a contemplative mood. Archbishop Trench, in his valuable
+volume on the "Study of Words," opens a paragraph with this sentence:
+"Let us now proceed to _contemplate_ some of the attestations for
+God's truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil's
+falsehood, which may be found to lurk in words." Here we suggest that
+the proper word were _consider_; for there is activity, and a
+progressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters,
+which disqualifies the verb _contemplate_.
+
+Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lack
+of discipline or lack of refinement. Our American magniloquence--the
+tendency to which is getting more and more subdued--comes partly from
+national youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty,
+and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more the
+prospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridge
+somewhere says is to be "England in glorious magnification."
+
+I AM FREE TO CONFESS. An irredeemable vulgarism.
+
+IN THIS CONNECTION. Another.
+
+INDEBTEDNESS. "The amount of my _engagedness_" sounds as well
+and is as proper as "the amount of my _indebtedness_." We have already
+_hard-heartedness_, _wickedness_, _composedness_, and others.
+Nevertheless, this making of nouns out of adjectives with the
+participial form is an irruption over the boundaries of the parts of
+speech which should not be encouraged.
+
+Archbishop Whately, in a passage of his shortcoming comments on
+Bacon's "Essays," uses _preparedness_. Albeit that brevity is a
+cardinal virtue in writing, a circumlocution would, we think, be
+better than a gawky word like this, so unsteady on its long legs. In
+favor of _indebtedness_ over others of like coinage, this is to be
+said--that it imports that which in one form or other comes home to
+the bosom of all humanity.
+
+INTELLECTS. That man's intellectual power is not one and indivisible,
+but consists of many separate, independent faculties, is a momentous
+truth, revealed by the insight of Gall. One of the results of this
+great discovery may at times underlie the plural use of the important
+word _intellect_ when applied to one individual. If so, it were still
+indefensible. It has, we suspect, a much less philosophic origin, and
+proceeds from the unsafe practice of overcharging the verbal
+gun in order to make more noise in the ear of the listener. The plural
+is correctly used when we speak of two or more different men.
+
+LEFT. "I left at ten o'clock." This use of _leave_ as a neuter verb,
+however attractive from its brevity, is not defensible. _To leave off_
+is the only proper neuter form. "We left off at six, and left (the
+hall) at a quarter past six." The place should be inserted after the
+second _left_. Even the first is essentially active, some form of
+action being understood after _off_: we left off _work_ or _play_.
+
+MIDST. "In our midst" is a common but incorrect phrase.
+
+OUR AUTHOR. A vulgarism, which, by its seeming convenience, gets the
+countenance of critical writers. We say _seeming_ convenience; for in
+this seeming lies the vulgarity, the writer expressing, unconsciously
+often, by the _our_, a feeling of patronage. With his _our_ he pats
+the author on the back.
+
+PERIODICAL is an adjective, and its use as a substantive is an
+unwarrantable gain of brevity at the expense of grammar.
+
+PROPOSE. Hardly any word that we have cited is so frequently
+misused, and by so many good writers, as _propose_, when the meaning
+is to design, to intend to propose. It should always be followed by a
+personal accusative--I propose to you, to him, to myself. In the
+preface to Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" occurs the following sentence;
+"The author _proposed_ to himself merely to write a fanciful story,
+evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not _purpose_ attempting a
+portraiture of Italian manners and character"--a sentence than which a
+fitter could not be written to illustrate the proper use of _propose_
+and _purpose_.
+
+PREDICATED UPON. This abomination is paraded by persons who lose no
+chance of uttering "dictionary words," hit or miss; and is sometimes
+heard from others from whom the educated world has a right to look for
+more correctness.
+
+RELIABLE. A counterfeit, which no stamping by good writers or
+universality of circulation will ever be able to introduce into the
+family circle of honest English as a substitute for the robust Saxon
+word whose place it would usurp--_trustworthy_. _Reliable_ is,
+however, good English when used to signify that one is liable again.
+When you have lost a receipt, and cannot otherwise prove that
+a bill rendered has been paid, you are _re-liable_ for the amount.
+
+RELIGION. Even by scholars this word is often used with looseness. In
+strictness it expresses exclusively our relation to the Infinite, the
+_bond_ between man and God. You will sometimes read that he is the
+truly religious man who most faithfully performs his duties of
+neighbor, father, son, husband, citizen. However much a religious man
+may find himself strengthened by his faith and inspirited for the
+performance of all his duties, this strength is an indirect, and not a
+uniform or necessary, effect of religious convictions. Some men who
+are sincere in such convictions fail in these duties conspicuously;
+while, on the other hand, they are performed, at times, with more than
+common fidelity by men who do not carry within them any very lively
+religious belief or impressions. "And now abideth faith, hope, and
+charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Nor can
+the greatest do the work of the others any more than faith that of
+hope or charity. Each one of "these three" is different from and
+independent of the other, however each one be aided by cooperation
+from the others. The deep, unique feeling which lifts up and
+binds the creature to the Creator is elementarily one in the human
+mind, and the word used to denote it should be kept solely for this
+high office, and not weakened or perverted by other uses. Worcester
+quotes from Dr. Watts the following sound definition: "In a proper
+sense, _virtue_ signifies duty toward men, and _religion_ duty to
+God."
+
+SALOON. That eminent pioneer of American sculpture, brilliant talker,
+and accomplished gentleman, the lamented Horatio Greenough, was
+indignantly eloquent against the American abuse of this graceful
+importation from France, applied as it is in the United States to
+public billiard-rooms, oyster-cellars and grog-shops.
+
+SUBJECT-MATTER. A tautological humpback.
+
+TO VENTILATE, applied to a subject or person. The scholar who should
+use this vilest of vulgarisms deserves to have his right thumb taken
+off.
+
+We have here noted a score of the errors prevalent in written and
+spoken speech--some of them perversions or corruptions, countenanced
+even by eminent writers; some, misapplications that weaken and
+disfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downright
+vulgarisms--that is, phrases that come from below, and are
+thrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. These
+last are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against such
+abuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience of
+some of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech as not to be
+readily distinguishable from their healthy neighbors, clinging for
+generations to tongues and pens. Of this tenacity there is a notable
+exemplification in a passage of Boswell, written nearly a hundred
+years ago. Dr. Johnson found fault with Boswell for using the phrase
+to _make_ money: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To _make_ money
+is to _coin_ it: you should say _get_ money." Johnson, adds Boswell,
+"was jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and
+prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms; such as _pledging_ myself,
+for _undertaking_; _line_ for _department_ or _branch_, as the _civil
+line_, the _banking line_. He was particularly indignant against the
+almost universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or
+_opinion_, when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of
+which an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an _idea_ or
+_image_ of a mountain, a tree, a building, but we surely cannot have
+an idea or image of an _argument_ or _proposition_. Yet we
+hear the sages of the law 'delivering their _ideas_ upon the question
+under consideration;' and the first speakers of Parliament 'entirely
+coinciding in the _idea_ which has been ably stated by an honorable
+member.'"
+
+Whether or not the word _idea_ may be properly used in a deeper or
+grander sense than that stated by Dr. Johnson, there is no doubt that
+he justly condemned its use in the cases cited by him, and in similar
+ones. All the four phrases _make money_, _pledge_, _line_, and _idea_,
+whereupon sentence of guilty was passed by the great lexicographer,
+are still at large, and, if it be not a bull to say so, more at large
+to-day than in the last century, since the area of their currency has
+been extended to America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+A NATIONAL DRAMA.[8]
+
+    [8] From _Putnam's Monthly_, 1857.
+
+
+We are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows,
+processions, and organized spectacles; we are so much more imitative
+than our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to the
+mimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descent
+for man might find support in the features of our general life. To
+complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order
+that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but
+that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which
+lifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask any
+number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical
+people. A loud, unanimous, derisive _no_ would be the answer. And
+yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward
+to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the
+richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter
+are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical.
+From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures,
+lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in
+Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment.
+Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth, are of our stock;
+and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while
+yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddling-clothes, is an earnest of a
+creative future. We are to have a national literature and a national
+drama. What is a national drama? Premising that as little in their
+depth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with the
+dimensions of this great theme, we would say a few words.
+
+A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in the
+heart of a people. Good books are the crystallization of thoughts and
+feelings. To have a literature--that is, a body of enduring
+books--implies vigor and depth. Such books are the measure of the
+mental vitality in a people. Those peoples that have the best books
+will be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those that
+have none, at the bottom. Good books, once brought forth,
+exhale ever after both fragrance and nourishment. They educate while
+they delight many generations.
+
+Good books are the best thoughts of the best men. They issue out of
+deep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts and
+strong heads such books are sure to come to life. The mind, like the
+body, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative,
+transmitting itself to a remote posterity.
+
+The best books are the highest products of human effort. Themselves
+the evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power.
+Consider what a spring of life to European people have been the books
+of the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?
+
+To be good, books must be generic. They may be, in subject, in tone,
+and in color, national; but in substance they must be so universally
+human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them.
+Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be
+a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a
+proof of their breadth and depth--of their high humanity.
+
+The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which is
+needed to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarily
+sang and wrote merely of itself. Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks.
+But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes a
+Trojan for his hero. This appropriation of foreign material shows that
+the aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas and
+feelings that are independent of time and place. Thence, when, by
+multiplication of Christian nations our mental world had become vastly
+enlarged, embracing in one bond of culture, not only all modern
+civilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, the
+poets--especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presently
+stated--looked abroad and afar for the frame-work and corporeal stuff
+of their writings.
+
+The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is most
+generic in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendent
+conceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare's
+fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England; and that
+one, "The Merry Wives of Windsor"--the only one not written chiefly or
+largely in verse--is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies
+(except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, "Lear" and
+"Macbeth," stand on British ground. Is "Hamlet" on that score less
+English than "Lear," or "Othello" than "Macbeth"? Does Italy count
+Juliet among her trophies, or Desdemona?
+
+Of Milton's two dramas---to confine myself here to the dramatic
+domain--the tragedy ("Samson Agonistes,") like his epics, is Biblical;
+the comedy ("Comus") has its home in a sphere
+
+  "Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
+  Which men call earth."
+
+Of the numerous athletic corps of dramatists, contemporary with
+Shakespeare and Milton, few have left works pithy enough and so
+poetically complete as to withstand the wear of time and keep fresh to
+each successive generation. But if you inspect the long list from
+which Charles Lamb took his "Specimens," you will find few British
+names.
+
+Casting our eyes on the dramatic efforts of the recent English poetic
+celebrities, we perceive that Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, all
+abandoned, in every instance, native ground. The only dramatic work of
+a great modern, the scene of which is laid within the British limits,
+is "The Borderers," of Wordsworth, which, though having the
+poetic advantage of remoteness in time--being thrown back to the reign
+of Henry III.--is, in strictness, neither a drama nor a poem,
+Wordsworth's deficiency in dramatic gifts being so signal as to cause,
+by the impotent struggle in an uncongenial element, a partial
+paralysis even of his high poetic genius.
+
+Glance now across the Channel. French poetic tragedy is in its
+subjects almost exclusively ancient--Greek, Roman, and Biblical. In
+the works of the great comic genius of France, Moliere, we have a
+salient exception to the practice of all other eminent dramatists. The
+scene of his plays is Paris; the time is the year in which each was
+written.
+
+Let us look for the cause of this remarkable isolation.
+
+Moliere was the manager of a theatrical company in the reign of Louis
+XIV., and he wrote, as he himself declares, to please the king and
+amuse the Parisians. But deeper than this; Moliere was by nature a
+great satirist. I call him a _great_ satirist, because of the
+affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite--namely, a
+clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the
+false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense,
+shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the
+comic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was
+the best field, and for Moliere especially, gifted as he was with
+histrionic genius. The vices and abuses, the follies and absurdities,
+the hypocrisies and superficialities of civilized life, these were the
+game for his faculties. The interior of Paris households he
+transferred to the stage with biting wit, doubling the attractiveness
+of his pictures by comic hyperbole. His portraits are caricatures, not
+because they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloat
+out a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him a
+lop-sided deformity. Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a
+personage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not a
+miser; he is Avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; he
+is Misanthropy personified.
+
+This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature of
+relations and juxtapositions. With laughable unscrupulousness Moliere
+multiplies improbable blunders and conjunctions. All verisimilitude is
+sacrificed to scenic vivacity. Hence, the very highest of his comedies
+are farce-like; even "Tartuffe" is so.
+
+In Moliere little dramatic growth goes on before the
+spectator's eye. His personages are not gradually built up by
+successive touches, broad or fine; they do not evolve themselves
+chiefly by collision with others; in the first act they come on the
+stage unfolded. The action and plot advance rapidly, but not through
+the unrolling of the persons represented. Hence, his most important
+personages are prosaic and finite. They interest you more as agents
+for the purpose in hand than as men and women. They are subordinate
+rather to the action than creative of action.
+
+Moliere is a most thorough realist, and herein is his strength. In him
+the comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency and
+body to the comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet.
+Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, was
+a present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedy
+ought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life.
+Moliere's comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are,
+philosophically speaking, low life. His are comedies not of character
+and sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore cannot be
+highly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remote
+ground, clean of all local coloring and association, such as is
+essential to the dramatist whose inspiration is poetical, and who
+therefore must reconcile the ideal with the real, by which
+reconciliation only can be produced the purest truth. That,
+notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, his
+comedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of the
+breadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of his
+rich mind, and his superlative comic genius.
+
+Of Alfieri's twenty-two tragedies, three only are modern, and of these
+three the scene of one is in Spain.
+
+Of the nine or ten tragedies of the foremost German dramatic poet,
+Schiller, three are German, "The Robbers," "Intrigue and Love," and
+"Wallenstein."
+
+Goethe's highest dramas, "Iphigenia," "Egmont," "Torquato Tasso," are
+all foreign in clothing. "The Natural Daughter" has no local
+habitation, no dependence on time or place. "Goetz von Berlichingen,"
+written in Goethe's earliest days of authorship, is German and in
+prose, "Faust"--the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivaling
+the greatest poems of all time--"Faust" is not strictly a drama: its
+wonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramatic
+necessity.
+
+The drama of Spain, like the comedies of Moliere, is an exception to
+the rule we deduce from the practice of other dramatists; but it is an
+exception which, like that of Moliere, confirms the rule. Unlike the
+ancient Greek and the French tragic poets, unlike Schiller,
+Shakespeare, Goethe, Alfieri, the Spanish dramatists do not aim at
+ideal humanity. The best of them, Calderon, is so intensely Spanish
+and Romish, as to be, in comparison with the breadth and universality
+of his eminent compeers above named, almost provincial. His personages
+are not large and deep enough to be representative. The manifold
+recesses of great minds he does not unveil; he gets no deeper than the
+semi-barbarous exaggerations of selfish, passionate love; of revenge,
+honor, and jealousy. His characterization is weak. His highest
+characters lack intellectual calibre, and are exhibited in lyrical
+one-sidedness rather than dramatic many-sidedness. He is mostly
+content with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled by
+the conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which have
+already passed away even in Spain. He is a marvelously fertile,
+skillful, poetic playwright.
+
+Thus we perceive that, with poetic dramatists, the prevailing
+practice is, to look abroad for fables. Moreover, in the cases where
+these were drawn from the bosom of the poet's own people, he shuns the
+present, and hies as far back as he can into the dark abysms of time,
+as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear. The Greek tragic poets,
+having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era of
+Greece. The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that of
+place as well as that of time; and he must have one or the other.
+
+The law lying behind this phenomenon is transparent. The higher poetry
+is, the more generic it is. Its universality is a chief constituent of
+its excellence. The drama is the most generically human, and,
+therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry. The epic deals
+with the material, the outward--humanity concreted into events; the
+lyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as to
+gush out in ode or song. The dramatic is the union of the epic and
+lyric--the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outward
+while co-working with it. In the dramatic, the action is more made by
+the personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in the
+strong, full stream of events. The lyric is the utterance of
+one-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which must
+be linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and his
+actions. The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic. Out of
+humanity and human action it extracts the essence. It presents men in
+their completest form, in warm activity, impelled thereto by strongest
+feelings. Hence, it must be condensed and compact, and must, for its
+highest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, and
+all prosaic circumscriptions. The poetic dramatist needs the highest
+poetic freedom, and only through this can he attain to that breadth
+and largeness whereof the superiority of his form admits, and which
+are such in Shakespeare, that in his greatest plays the whole world
+seems to be present as spectators and listeners.
+
+Observe that the highest dramatic literatures belong to the two freest
+peoples--the Greeks and the English. A people, possessing already a
+large political freedom, must be capable of, and must be in the act
+of, vigorous, rich development, through deep inward passion and
+faculty, in order that its spirit shall issue in the perennial flowers
+of the poetic drama. The dramatic especially implies and
+demands variety and fullness and elevation of _personality_; and
+this is only possible through freedom, the attainment of which freedom
+implies on its side the innate fertility of nature which results in
+fullness and elevation.
+
+Now in the subjective elevation of the individual, and therewith the
+unprecedented relative number of individuals thus elevated, herein do
+we exceed all other peoples. By subjective elevation I mean,
+liberation from the outward, downward pressure of dogmatic
+prescription, of imperious custom, of blindfolded tradition, of
+irresponsible authority. The despotic objectivity of Asia--where
+religion is submissiveness, and manhood is crushed by obedience--has
+been partially withstood in Europe. The emancipation therefrom of the
+Indo-Germanic race is completed in Anglo-America. Through this
+manifold emancipation we are to be, in all the high departments of
+human achievement, preeminently creative, because, while equipped with
+the best of the past, we are at the same time preeminently subjective;
+and, therefore, high literature will, with us, necessarily take the
+lyrical, and especially the dramatic, form.
+
+More than our European ancestors, we mold, each one of us, our
+own destiny; we have a stronger inward sense of power to unfold and
+elevate ourselves; we are more ready and more capable to withstand the
+assaults of circumstance. Here is more thoroughly embodied the true
+Christian principle, that out of himself is to come every man's
+redemption; that the favor and help of God are only to be obtained
+through resolute self-help, and honest, earnest struggle. In
+Christendom we stand alone as having above us neither the objectivity
+of politics nor that of the church. The light of the past we have,
+without its darkness. We carry little weight from the exacting past.
+Hence, our unexampled freedom and ease of movement which, wanting the
+old conventional ballast, to Europeans seems lawless and reckless.
+Even among ourselves, many tremble for our future, because they have
+little faith in humanity, and because they cannot grasp the new, grand
+historic phenomenon of a people possessing all the principles,
+practices, and trophies of civilization without its paralyzing
+incumbrances.
+
+But think not, because we are less passive to destiny, we are
+rebellious against Deity; because we are boldly self-reliant, we are,
+therefore, irreligiously defiant. The freer a people is, the
+nearer it is to God. The more subjective it is, through acquired
+self-rule, the more will it harmonize with the high objectivity of
+absolute truth and justice. For having thrown off the capricious
+secondary rule of man, we shall not be the less, but the more, under
+the steadfast, primary rule of God; for having broken the force of
+human, fallible prescription, we shall the more feel and acknowledge
+the supremacy of flawless, divine law; for having rejected the tyranny
+of man's willfulness, we shall submit the more fully to the beneficent
+power of principle.
+
+Our birth, growth, and continued weal, depending on large, deep
+principles--principles deliberately elaborated and adopted by reason,
+and generously embracing the whole--our life must be interpenetrated
+by principle, and thence our literature must embrace the widest and
+most human wants and aspirations of man. And thus, it will be our
+privilege and our glory to be then the most national in our books when
+we are the most universal.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+USEFULNESS OF ART.
+
+ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE RHODE ISLAND ART
+ASSOCIATION IN PROVIDENCE, SEPTEMBER 4, 1854.
+
+
+_Gentlemen of the Rhode Island Art Association:_--
+
+We are met to inaugurate an Association whose aim and end shall be the
+encouragement and culture of Art. A most high end--among the highest
+that men can attempt; an end that never can be entertained except by
+men of the best breed. There is no art among savages, none among
+barbarians. Barbarism and art are adversary terms. When men capable of
+civilization ascend into it, art manifests itself an inevitable
+accompaniment, an indispensable aid to human development. I will say
+further, that in a people the capacity to be cultivated involves the
+capacity, nay, the necessity of art. And still further, that those
+nations that have been or are preeminent on the earth, are preeminent
+in art. Nay, more, that a nation cannot attain to and maintain
+eminence without being proficient in art; and that to abstract from a
+people its artists were not merely to pluck the flowers from its
+branches; it were to cut off its-deep roots.
+
+Who is the artist?
+
+He who embodies, in whatever mode,--so that they be visible or
+audible, and thus find entrance to the mind,--conceptions of the
+beautiful, is an artist. The test and characteristic of the artistic
+nature are superior sensibility to the beautiful. Unite to this the
+faculties and the will to give form to the impressions and emotions
+that are the fruit of this susceptibility, and you have the artist.
+Whether he shall embody his conception in written verse, in marble, in
+stone, in sound, on the canvas, that will depend on each one's
+individual aptitudes. Generic, common, indispensable to all is the
+superior sensibility to the beautiful. In this lies the essence of the
+artist.
+
+The beautiful and the perfect being, if not identical, in closest
+consanguinity, the artist's is an important, a great function. The
+artist must receive into his mind, or engender in his mind's native
+richness, conceptions of what is most high, most perfect, most
+beautiful in shape or sound, in thought or feeling; and producing it
+before his fellow-men, appeal to their sensibility to the beautiful,
+to their deepest sympathies, to their capacity of being moved by the
+grandest and the noblest there is in man and nature. Truly, a mighty
+part is that of the artist.
+
+Artists are the educators of humanity. Tutors and professors instruct
+princes and kings, but poets (and all genuine artists are poets)
+educate nations. Take from Greece Homer and Phidias, and Sophocles and
+Scopas, and the planner of the Parthenon, and you efface Greece from
+history. Wanting them, she would not have been the great Greece that
+we know; she would not have had the vigor of sap, the nervous
+vitality, to have continued to live in a remote posterity, immortal in
+the culture, the memories, and the gratitude of men.
+
+So great, so far-stretching, so undying is the power of this exalted
+class of men, that it were hardly too much to say that had Homer and
+Phidias never lived, we should not be here today. If this be deemed
+extravagant, with confidence I affirm that but for the existence of
+the greatest artist the world has ever known,--of him who may
+be called the chief educator of England,--but for Shakespeare, we
+assuredly should not be here to-day doing the good work we are doing.
+
+There are probably some of this company who, like myself, having had
+the good fortune to be in London at the time of the world's fair,
+stood under that magnificent, transparent roof, trod that immense area
+whereon fifty thousand people moved at ease. It was a privilege,--the
+memory of which will last a life-time, to have been admitted into that
+gigantic temple of industry, there to behold in unimaginable profusion
+and variety the product of man's labor, intellect, and genius,
+gathered from the four corners of the earth into one vast, gorgeous
+pile,--a spectacle peerless from its mere material splendor, and from
+its moral significance absolutely sublime.
+
+On entering by the chief portal into the transept,--covering in the
+huge oaks of Hyde Park,--the American, after wondering for a moment in
+the glare of the first aspect, will, with the eagerness and perhaps
+the vanity of his nation,--have hastened through the compartments of
+France, Belgium, Germany, gorgeous with color, glistening with gold.
+He will have hastened, hard as it was to hurry through such a
+show, in order to reach at once the far eastern end of the palace
+where a broad area had been allotted to the United States,--Jonathan,
+as is his wont, having helped himself largely. Great was the
+American's disappointment, cutting was the rebuke to his vanity; his
+country made no _show_ at all. The samples of her industry were
+not outwardly brilliant. Their excellence lay in their inward power,
+in their wide usefulness. They were not ornaments and luxuries for the
+dwellings of the few, they were inventions that diffuse comforts and
+blessings among the many,--labor-saving machines and cheap newspapers.
+By the thoughtful visitor the merit of these was appreciated, as it
+was acknowledged in the final awards of the judges. And even in this
+high department where we are so eminent, owing to distance and
+misunderstandings, we were not adequately represented. But even if we
+had been, the European would have said, "This has a high value and
+interest; but still I find not here enough to justify the expectations
+entertained by this people, and by many in Europe, of the future
+greatness of the American Republic. These things, significant as they
+are, are yet not an alphabet that can be so compounded as to
+write the richest page of man's history. In this present display I
+find not prefigured that splendid future the Americans are fond of
+predicting for themselves." And the American, acknowledging the force
+of the comment, would have turned away mortified, humbled. But he was
+saved any such humiliation. In the midst of that area, under that
+beautiful flag, day after day, week after week, month after month,
+from morn till night, go when he would, he beheld there a circle ever
+full, its vacancies supplied as soon as they were made, a circle
+silent with admiration, hushed by emotion, gazing at a master-piece of
+American art, the Greek Slave of Powers. And from that contemplation
+hundreds of thousands of Europeans carried away an impression of
+American capacity, a conviction that truly a great page is to be
+written by the young republic in the book of history,--a sense of
+American power which they could have gotten from no other source.
+
+Our Association, gentlemen, owes its origin to the wants of industry.
+The moving power which has been strongest in bringing so many of us
+together to found an institution for the encouragement of art in Rhode
+Island, is the desire hereby more thoroughly to inweave the
+beautiful into cotton and woolen fabrics, into calicoes and delaines;
+to melt the beautiful into iron and brass, and copper, as well as into
+silver and gold; so that our manufacturers and artisans may hold their
+own against the competition of England and France and Germany, whereof
+in the two latter countries especially, schools of design have long
+existed, and high artists find their account in furnishing the
+beautiful to manufacturers.
+
+"A low origin this for such a society, and the fruits will be without
+flavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered," will say some travelled
+dilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wonders
+of the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teaches
+a different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely,
+but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studded
+canopy of the earth, but also our near earth itself, has He made
+beautiful. He surrounds us with beauty; He envelops us in beauty.
+Beauty is spread out on the familiar grass, glows in the daily flower,
+glistens in the dew, waves in the commonest leafy branch. All about
+us, in infinite variety, beauty is lavished by God in sights
+and sounds, and odors. Now, in using the countless and multifarious
+substances that are put within our reach, to be by our ingenuity and
+contrivance wrought into materials for our protection and comfort, and
+pleasure, it becomes us to--it is part of his design that we
+shall--follow the divine example, so that in all our handiwork, as in
+his, there shall be beauty, so much as the nature of each product is
+susceptible of. That it is the final purpose of Providence that our
+whole life, inward and outward, shall be beautiful, and be steeped in
+beauty, we have evidence, in the yearnings of the best natures for the
+perfect, in the delight we take in the most resplendent objects of art
+and nature, in the ennobling thrill we feel on witnessing a beautiful
+deed.
+
+By culture we can so create and multiply beauty, that all our
+surroundings shall be beautiful.
+
+Can you not imagine a city of the size of this, or vastly larger, the
+structure of whose streets and buildings shall be made under the
+control of the best architectural ideas, being of various stones and
+marbles, and various in style and color, so that each and every one
+shall be either light, or graceful, or simple, or ornate, or solid,
+or grand, according to its purpose, and the conception of the
+builder; and in the midst and on the borders of the city, squares, and
+parks, planted with trees and flowers and freshened by streams and
+fountains. And when you recall the agreeable, the elevating sensation
+you have experienced in front of a perfect piece of architecture
+(still so rare), will you not readily concede that where every edifice
+should be beautiful, and you never walked or drove out but through
+streets of palaces and artistic parks, the effect on the whole
+population of this ever-present beauty and grandeur, would be to
+refine, to expand, to elevate. When we look at the architectural
+improvements made within a generation, in London, in Paris, in New
+York, we may, without being Utopians, hope for this transformation.
+But the full consummation of such a hope can only be brought about in
+unison with improvements in all the conditions and relations of life,
+and the diffusion of such improvements among the masses.
+
+It is to further-such diffusion that this Association has been
+founded. Our purpose is to meet the growing demand for beauty in all
+things; to bring into closer cooperation the artisan and the artist;
+to make universally visible and active the harmony,--I almost might
+say the identity,--there is between the useful and the beautiful.
+
+Gentlemen, ever in the heart of the practical, in the very core of the
+useful, there is enclosed a seed of beauty; and upon the
+fructification, growth, and expansion of that seed depends,--aye,
+absolutely depends,--the development of the practical. But for the
+expansion of that seed, we should have neither the plough nor the
+printing-press, neither shoes nor the steam engine. To that we owe
+silver forks as well as the electric telegraph. In no province of work
+or human endeavor is improvement made, is improvement possible, but by
+the action of that noble faculty through which we are uplifted when
+standing before a masterpiece of Raphael. This ceaseless seeking for a
+better, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought the
+English race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, from
+the narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to this
+wide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence of
+life; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to our
+present as that is to the times of Alfred.
+
+In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they are
+radiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is often
+the measure of its usefulness. How beautiful is a field of
+golden wheat--whereby our bodies live--and the more beautiful the
+closer it stands and the fuller are its heads. The oak and the pine
+owe their majestic beauty to that which is the index of their
+usefulness, the solid magnitude of their trunks. The proportions which
+give the horse his highest symmetry of form, give him his fleetness
+and endurance and strength. And thus, too, with man,--his works, when
+best, sparkle most with this fire of the beautiful. We profit by
+history in proportion as it registers beautiful sayings and beautiful
+doings. We profit one another in everyday life in proportion as our
+acts, the minor as well as the greater, are vitalized by this divine
+essence of beauty. To the speeches of Webster, even to the most
+technical, this essence gives their completeness and their grandeur of
+proportion; while it is this which illuminates with undying splendor
+the creations of Allston. Thus, gentlemen, the aim of our Association
+is most noble and useful, drawing its nobleness from its high
+usefulness. May it so prosper, that a generation hence, thousands and
+tens of thousands shall look back to this the day of its inauguration
+with praise and thankfulness.
+
+
+
+
+
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