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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays
+by James Russell Lowell
+
+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
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+
+Title: The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays
+
+Author: James Russell Lowell
+
+Release Date: December 27, 2004 [EBook #14481]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FUNCTION OF THE POET ***
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+Produced by Ted Garvin, Thomas Amrhein and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
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+
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+
+
+COLLECTED AND EDITED BY
+ALBERT MORDELL
+
+
+KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y.
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+
+1920 by Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+Reissued in 1967 by Kennikat Press
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The Centenary Celebration of James Russell Lowell last year showed that
+he has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet.
+Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work rather
+than in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of his
+life. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame of his youth did
+not continue to glow, but he resigned himself to his fate; nevertheless,
+it should be remembered that "The Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Biglow
+Papers," and "The Commemoration Ode" are enough to make the reputation
+of any poet.
+
+The present volume sustains Lowell's right to be considered one of the
+great American critics. The literary merit of some of the essays herein
+is in many respects nowise inferior to that in some of the volumes he
+collected himself. The articles are all exquisitely and carefully
+written, and the style of even the book reviews displays that quality
+found in his best writings which Ferris Greenslet has appropriately
+described as "savory." That such a quantity of good literature by so
+able a writer as Lowell should have been allowed to repose buried in the
+files of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact that
+Lowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute all
+the more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews on
+ephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in book
+form.
+
+The essays herein represent the matured author as they were written in
+the latter part of his life, between his thirty-sixth and fifty-seventh
+years. The only early essay is the one on Poe. It appeared in _Graham's
+Magazine_ for February, 1845, and was reprinted by Griswold in his
+edition of Poe. It has also been reprinted in later editions of Poe, but
+has never been included in any of Lowell's works. This was no doubt due
+to the slight break in the relations between Poe and Lowell, due to
+Poe's usual accusations of plagiarism. The essay still remains one of
+the best on Poe ever written.
+
+Though Lowell became in later life quite conservative and academic, it
+should not be thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberal
+ideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, and
+had good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first works
+of Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men,
+indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers will
+enjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, the
+raps at spiritualism here and there. Moreover, there is a passage in the
+first essay showing that Lowell, before Freud, understood the
+psychoanalytic theory of genius in its connection with childhood
+memories. The passage follows Lowell's narration of the story of little
+Montague.
+
+None of the essays in this volume has appeared in book form except a few
+fragments from some of the opening five essays which were reported from
+Lowell's lectures in the _Boston Advertiser_, in 1855, and were
+privately printed some years ago. Charles Eliot Norton performed a
+service to the world when he published in the _Century Magazine_ in 1893
+and 1894 some lectures from Lowell's manuscripts. These lectures are now
+collected and form the first five essays in this book. I have also
+retained Professor Norton's introductions and notes. Attention is called
+to his remark that "The Function of the Poet" is not unworthy to stand
+with Sidney's and Shelley's essays on poetry.
+
+The rest of the essays in this volume appeared in Lowell's lifetime in
+the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _North American Review_, and the _Nation_.
+They were all anonymous, but are assigned to Lowell by George Willis
+Cooke in his "Bibliography of James Russell Lowell." Lowell was editor
+of the _Atlantic_ from the time of its founding in 1857 to May, 1861. He
+was editor of the _North American Review_ from January, 1864, to the
+time he left for Europe in 1872. With one exception (that on "Poetry and
+Nationalism" which formed the greater part of a review of the poems of
+Howells's friend Piatt), all the articles from these two magazines,
+reprinted in this volume, appeared during Lowell's editorship. These
+articles include reviews of poems by his friends Longfellow and
+Whittier. And in his review of "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Lowell
+makes effective use of his scholarship to introduce a lengthy and
+interesting discourse on the dactylic hexameter.
+
+While we are on the subject of the New England poets a word about the
+present misunderstanding and tendency to underrate them may not be out
+of place. Because it is growing to be the consensus of opinion that the
+two greatest poets America has produced are Whitman and Poe, it does not
+follow that the New-Englanders must be relegated to the scrap-heap. Nor
+do I see any inconsistency in a man whose taste permits him to enjoy
+both the free verse and unpuritanic (if I may coin a word) poems of
+Masters and Sandburg, and also Whittier's "Snow-Bound" and Longfellow's
+"Courtship of Miles Standish." Though these poems are not profound,
+there is something of the universal in them. They have pleasant
+school-day memories for all of us and will no doubt have such for our
+children.
+
+Lowell's cosmopolitan tastes may be seen in his essays on men so
+different as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows that
+he even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray to
+Dickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree with
+him. As a young man he hated Swift, but he gives us a sane study of him.
+The review of Plutarch's "Essays" edited by Goodwin, with an
+introduction by Emerson, is also of interest.
+
+The last essay in the volume on "A Plea for Freedom from Speech and
+Figures of Speech-Makers" shows Lowell's satirical powers at their best.
+Ferris Greenslet tells us, in his book on Lowell, that the Philip Vandal
+whose eloquence Lowell ridicules is Wendell Phillips. The essay gives
+Lowell's humorous comments on various matters, especially on
+contemporary types of orators, reformers, and heroes. It represents
+Lowell as he is most known to us, the Lowell who is always ready with
+fun and who set the world agog with his "Biglow Papers."
+
+Lowell's work as a critic dates from the rare volume "Conversations on
+Some of the Old Poets," published in 1844 in his twenty-fifth year,
+includes his best-known volumes "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows,"
+and most fitly concludes with the "Latest Literary Essays," published in
+the year of his death in 1891. My sincere hope is that this book will
+not be found to be an unworthy successor to these volumes.
+
+Though some of Lowell's literary opinions are old-fashioned to us (one
+author even wrote an entire volume to demolish Lowell's reputation as a
+critic), there is much in his work that the world will not let die. He
+is highly regarded abroad, and he is one of the few men in our
+literature who produced creative criticism.
+
+Thanks and acknowledgments are due the _Century Magazine_ and the
+literary representatives of Lowell, for permission to reprint in this
+volume the first five essays, which are copyrighted and were published
+in the _Century Magazine_.
+
+ALBERT MORDELL
+
+_Philadelphia, January 13, 1920_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
+  _Century Magazine_, January, 1894
+
+HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
+  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
+  _Century Magazine_, November, 1893
+
+THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS (HOMER, DANTE,
+CERVANTES, GOETHE, SHAKESPEARE)
+  _Century Magazine_, December, 1893
+
+THE IMAGINATION
+  _Century Magazine_, March, 1894
+
+CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
+  _Century Magazine_, May, 1894
+    I. Life in Literature and Language
+    II. Style and Manner
+    III. Kalevala
+
+
+REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
+
+HENRY JAMES: JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES
+  _The Nation_, June 24, 1875
+
+LONGFELLOW: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1859
+
+TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
+  _North American Review_, January, 1864
+
+WHITTIER: IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
+  _North American Review_, January, 1864
+
+HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1860
+
+SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
+  _North American Review_, April, 1866
+
+POETRY AND NATIONALITY
+  _North American Review_, October, 1868
+
+W.D. HOWELLS: VENETIAN LIFE
+  _North American Review_, October, 1866
+
+EDGAR A. POE
+  _Graham's Magazine_, February, 1845;
+  R.W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)
+
+THACKERAY: ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
+  _North American Review_, April, 1864
+
+
+TWO GREAT AUTHORS
+
+SWIFT: FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT
+  _The Nation_, April 13 and 20, 1876
+
+PLUTARCH'S MORALS
+  _North American Review_, April, 1871
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1860
+
+
+
+
+ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+
+
+This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before
+the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never
+printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions
+were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in
+composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print.
+How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the
+broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his
+essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and
+1867--essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew,
+though not treated at large.
+
+But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the
+enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths
+it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression
+of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline
+alike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand with
+Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm
+and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less
+than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture
+Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."
+
+_Charles Eliot Norton_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a
+great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in
+friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels
+out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the
+development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up
+out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest
+pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions
+that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what
+little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
+barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
+everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
+certain outward respects, but essentially the same.
+
+And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
+the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
+the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
+of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
+highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer
+and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the _epea
+pteroenta_, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored
+future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise
+and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by,
+as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is
+Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey,"
+"whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"--the gift of conferring
+good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as
+they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the
+desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust,
+because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the
+future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
+were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their
+ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries
+ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have
+poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up
+by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some
+provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for
+a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The
+historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as
+they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave
+them.
+
+The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have
+a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves
+continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older
+epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.
+Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances;
+for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the
+generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for
+a purposeless moment, and reënter the dark again after they have
+performed the nothing they came for.
+
+Gradually, however, the poet as the "seer" became secondary to the
+"maker." His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher. But
+always something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has now
+come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing
+is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep,
+too. If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral,
+that man is Shakespeare. But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which
+does not see through his tragic--yes, and his comic--masks awful eyes
+that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic
+meaning--a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all
+human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself
+unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness
+that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the
+errand that was laid upon him:
+
+  Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
+  And made myself a motley to the view,
+  Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
+  Made old offences of affections new;
+  Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
+  Askance and strangely;
+
+the application of which is made clear by the next sonnet, in which he
+distinctly alludes to his profession.
+
+There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets--that, however
+in little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes a
+great and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bear
+themselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language. There
+is not a mature play of Shakespeare's in which great ideas do not jut up
+in mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces of
+thought, and known afar to many kindreds of men.
+
+And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for any
+faculty of observation and description, that we value the poet. It is in
+proportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not a
+juggler with words. It is by means of this that for every generation of
+man he plays the part of "namer." Before him, as before Adam, the
+creation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then the
+world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever a
+great imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging the
+outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away
+in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth
+beneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggests
+the invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. His
+imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his
+characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also
+perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract
+thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.
+
+Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel
+something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of
+contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change,
+he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and
+conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with
+their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as
+utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which
+faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.
+History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the
+world for a village. This life could only become other than
+phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something
+that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power
+unseen--that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits
+stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy. In the "Odyssey"
+we find pure allegory.
+
+Now, under all these names--praiser, seer, soothsayer--we find the same
+idea lurking. The poet is he who can best see and best say what is
+ideal--what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he
+celebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as it
+appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still
+clings to him; he is the revealer of Deity. He may be unconscious of his
+mission; he may be false to it; but in proportion as he is a great poet,
+he rises to the level of it the more often. He does not always directly
+rebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel what
+delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil, it is with
+such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that
+the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great
+poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to
+a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever
+learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean
+and bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly
+on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that
+they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead
+of speaking the true universal language of imagination. He who
+translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
+is the reverse of a poet.
+
+The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same
+thing--imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him the
+power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks
+about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace,
+which whoso has on understands the language of all created things. And
+as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole
+of himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said a
+thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as
+there are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than an
+interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between
+man and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, the
+possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected
+treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under
+the dusty path of our daily life.
+
+And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,--a thing which
+enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,--but
+all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
+every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the
+dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping
+news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately
+ships,--"the city on the inconstant billows dancing,"--as there is
+between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybody
+remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to
+the chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful
+chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a
+fair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw
+himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and
+fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced
+together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the
+visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to
+him again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are
+typified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscences
+of the stately home of our childhood,--for we are all of us poets and
+geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of
+every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,--and we all remember
+the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there. But
+somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty
+taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end--till
+suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and
+of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to our
+true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature
+that the poet reintroduces us.
+
+But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power
+of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank
+materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show
+its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was
+sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or
+no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
+with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
+against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
+Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
+matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
+was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
+reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
+the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
+you so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bone
+broken."
+
+And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
+character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
+phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
+For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
+not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
+purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
+What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
+less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
+eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
+defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.
+
+No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
+beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
+the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
+and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
+practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
+that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
+this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
+after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with
+which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
+common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
+visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
+two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
+the same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do we
+depend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but upon
+observation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternal
+promontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lower
+system.
+
+But it seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late,
+that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and all that is
+left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
+railroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in Brother
+Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But because _he_
+is a materialist, shall there be no more poets? When we have said that
+we live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant more
+than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
+foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at any
+rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespeare
+was richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such a
+pair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his to
+report it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, who
+continues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less
+than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he
+lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not
+sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his
+little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more
+quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have
+drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of
+affairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground for
+the public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere
+piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such
+ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick
+and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink.
+It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespeare
+received everything that came along,--of what a _present_ man he
+was,--that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought into
+England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.
+
+It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for that very
+reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation
+contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. When the
+poet comes, he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the
+passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not
+to have lived in Homer's day, or Dante's, but to be alive now. To be
+alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live
+in the past, and men yet unborn that live in the future. We are like
+Hans in Luck, forever exchanging the burdensome good we have for
+something else, till at last we come home empty-handed.
+
+That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton
+whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even
+now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and
+thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus
+that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their
+triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy,
+looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to
+behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted
+and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when there
+was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.
+
+The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its
+costume. And that is what makes it prosaic--that we have not faith
+enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented
+to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is
+that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue
+of Sir Robert Peel,--a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding
+gracefully to the present,--in which the sculptor had done his best to
+travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when
+England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of
+this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord
+Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to
+the rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, "Thus sat
+Francis Bacon"--not "Cneius Pompeius"--"Viscount Verulam." Those men had
+faith even in their own shoe-strings.
+
+After all, how is our poor scapegoat of a nineteenth century to blame?
+Why, for not being the seventeenth, to be sure! It is always raining
+opportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago who
+were intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up. We are like
+beggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must be
+counterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece of
+familiar copper. And so, as we stand in our mendicancy by the wayside,
+Time tosses carefully the great golden to-day into our hats, and we turn
+it over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised at
+finding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes. Till Dante's time
+the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings
+into but Latin,--and indeed a dead tongue was the best for dead
+thoughts,--but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men
+bargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of the
+world around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang.
+
+In our day, it is said despairingly, the understanding reigns
+triumphant: it is the age of common sense. If this be so, the wisest way
+would be to accept it manfully. But, after all, what is the meaning of
+it? Looking at the matter superficially, one would say that a striking
+difference between our science and that of the world's gray fathers is
+that there is every day less and less of the element of wonder in it.
+What they saw written in light upon the great arch of heaven, and, by a
+magnificent reach of sympathy, of which we are incapable, associated
+with the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only a
+professor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn and
+unapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanized
+among the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in every
+calyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The stars
+can no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is a
+conjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sends
+thither its special reporter with his telescope. Over those arcana of
+life where once a mysterious presence brooded, we behold scientific
+explorers skipping like so many incarnate notes of interrogation. We pry
+into the counsels of the great powers of nature, we keep our ears at the
+keyhole, and know everything that is going to happen. There is no longer
+any sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, and
+life turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needs
+no more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" We
+have found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription upon
+it, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted.
+
+Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in our
+cradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples the
+day with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimation
+of demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material for
+thought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, as
+sapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathy
+with man or nature as a town history with its genealogies of Mr.
+Nobody's great-grandparents.
+
+We have utilized everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar
+system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a
+symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass
+through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a
+museum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum of
+supernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has been
+going on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern and
+historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of
+the death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic
+imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus.
+
+Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On those
+sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.
+It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see
+farther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom of
+a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all this
+is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced
+itself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are not
+arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set
+all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In my
+opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful
+than the discoveries themselves."
+
+But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if it
+would, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination. No two
+men have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, that
+something more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that a
+logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as
+every man's _own_ logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a
+structure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring
+together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one.
+When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if a
+leaf has fallen. I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in the
+pulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have not sometimes
+found the popular giant as provokingly insensible. The [sqrt of -x] is
+nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower
+which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day
+of childhood. Demonstration may lead to the very gate of heaven, but
+there she makes us a civil bow, and leaves us to make our way back again
+to Faith, who has the key. That science which is of the intellect alone
+steps with indifferent foot upon the dead body of Belief, if only she
+may reach higher or see farther.
+
+But we cannot get rid of our wonder--we who have brought down the wild
+lightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be our
+errand-boy and penny-postman. Wonder is crude imagination; and it is
+necessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exact
+knowledge is not enough. Do we get nearer the truth or farther from it
+that we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit? We
+go on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it? The evasive
+genius flits into something else, and defies us. The powers of the outer
+and inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connection
+man is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps
+it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was
+vainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it
+wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man of
+science remakes the old spirit. But we seem to have created too many
+wonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, when
+asked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them. But
+nature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best but
+scotch it, not kill it. In this day of newspapers and electric
+telegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole
+continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as
+Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!
+Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster on
+Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblin
+is laid at last!"--and while I mused the tables were turning, and the
+chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have a
+neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed
+out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son,
+and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with
+it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so
+brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp.
+
+It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
+sort or other. If they cannot get the best they will get some substitute
+for it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine's slur that it is wine
+of devils. The mind bound down too closely to what is practical either
+becomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wilderness
+of "isms." The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted some
+persons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and found
+refreshment in taking a scalp now and then. Nature insists above all
+things upon balance. She contrives to maintain a harmony between the
+material and spiritual, nor allows the cerebrum an expansion at the cost
+of the cerebellum. If the character, for example, run on one side into
+religious enthusiasm, it is not unlikely to develop on the other a
+counterpoise of worldly prudence. Thus the Shaker and the Moravian are
+noted for thrift, and mystics are not always the worst managers. Through
+all changes of condition and experience man continues to be a citizen of
+the world of idea as well as the world of fact, and the tax-gatherers of
+both are punctual.
+
+And these antitheses which we meet with in individual character we
+cannot help seeing on the larger stage of the world also, a moral
+accompanying a material development. History, the great satirist, brings
+together Alexander and the blower of peas to hint to us that the tube of
+the one and the sword of the other were equally transitory; but
+meanwhile Aristotle was conquering kingdoms out of the unknown, and
+establishing a dynasty of thought from whose hand the sceptre has not
+yet passed. So there are Charles V, and Luther; the expansion of trade
+resulting from the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, and the
+Elizabethan literature; the Puritans seeking spiritual El Dorados while
+so much valor and thought were spent in finding mineral ones. It seems
+to be the purpose of God that a certain amount of genius shall go to
+each generation, particular quantities being represented by individuals,
+and while no _one_ is complete in himself, all collectively make up a
+whole ideal figure of a man. Nature is not like certain varieties of the
+apple that cannot bear two years in succession. It is only that her
+expansions are uniform in all directions, that in every age she
+completes her circle, and like a tree adds a ring to her growth be it
+thinner or thicker.
+
+Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, the one trivial and
+ordinary, the other sacred and recluse; the one which he carries to the
+dinner-table and to his daily work, which grows old with his body and
+dies with it, the other that which is made up of the few inspiring
+moments of his higher aspiration and attainment, and in which his youth
+survives for him, his dreams, his unquenchable longings for something
+nobler than success. It is this life which the poets nourish for him,
+and sustain with their immortalizing nectar. Through them he feels once
+more the white innocence of his youth. His faith in something nobler
+than gold and iron and cotton comes back to him, not as an upbraiding
+ghost that wrings its pale hands and is gone, but beautiful and
+inspiring as a first love that recognizes nothing in him that is not
+high and noble. The poets are nature's perpetual pleaders, and protest
+with us against what is worldly. Out of their own undying youth they
+speak to ours. "Wretched is the man," says Goethe, "who has learned to
+despise the dreams of his youth!" It is from this misery that the
+imagination and the poets, who are its spokesmen, rescue us. The world
+goes to church, kneels to the eternal Purity, and then contrives to
+sneer at innocence and ignorance of evil by calling it green. Let every
+man thank God for what little there may be left in him of his vernal
+sweetness. Let him thank God if he have still the capacity for feeling
+an unmarketable enthusiasm, for that will make him worthy of the society
+of the noble dead, of the companionship of the poets. And let him love
+the poets for keeping youth young, woman womanly, and beauty beautiful.
+
+There is as much poetry as ever in the world if we only knew how to find
+it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more
+prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped
+of material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying
+mountain-farm of imagination, which did not appear in the schedule of
+his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though he
+never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great
+poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.
+
+There is no reason why our continent should not sing as well as the
+rest. We have had the practical forced upon us by our position. We have
+had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we are
+descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright
+wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the
+Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
+be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or
+they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are
+States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.
+
+But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poetical
+people. Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men in
+visible types. He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap of
+invisibility and the purse of Fortunatus. These were once stories for
+grown men, and not for the nursery as now. We are apt ignorantly to
+wonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction the
+absurdity of which any of our primary-school children could demonstrate.
+But we forget that the world's gray fathers were children themselves,
+and that in their little world, with its circle of the black unknown all
+about it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in the
+dark. Look at a child's toys, and we shall understand the matter well
+enough. Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still),
+at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which she
+has been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, and
+a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.
+
+But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet. In her
+railroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness. Fine-Ear herself
+could not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listen
+in Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans. And what need of
+Aladdin's lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill? The
+office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these
+miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there
+is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there
+is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed
+that fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the
+lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul
+of poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does not
+seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the
+"Merchant of Venice" in it. Themes of song are waiting everywhere for
+the right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one can
+pull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more trouble
+than in plucking a violet.
+
+John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford, many years ago,
+reckoned the number of whale-ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
+out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as
+a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that
+those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever must
+be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity,
+but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that a
+race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty
+Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces.
+Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every port
+of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies
+dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert
+only flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot
+Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space
+occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!
+They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible
+as the soul.
+
+Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not as the
+mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme il
+faut_ for a great nation, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy,
+for its power of making men better by arousing in them a perception of
+their own instincts for what is beautiful, and therefore sacred and
+religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not
+have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a
+people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our
+little mother-island sunk beneath the sea, or, worse, were she conquered
+by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakespeare would be an immortal England,
+and would conquer countries, when the bones of her last sailor had kept
+their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched
+thunders of her navy.
+
+Old Purchas in his "Pilgrims" tells of a sacred caste in India who, when
+they go out into the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world
+out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And
+it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to
+pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever
+of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in
+the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its
+activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty,
+if it be bewildered or thwarted by an outward profession of faith
+covering up a practical unbelief in anything higher and holier than the
+world of sense, it will find vent in such wretched holes and corners as
+table-tippings and mediums who sell news from heaven at a quarter of a
+dollar the item. Imagination cannot be banished out of the world. She
+may be made a kitchen-drudge, a Cinderella, but there are powers that
+watch over her. When her two proud sisters, the intellect and
+understanding, think her crouching over her ashes, she startles and
+charms by her splendid apparition, and Prince Soul will put up with no
+other bride.
+
+The practical is a very good thing in its way--if it only be not another
+name for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root
+which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from
+Parthia--which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they
+were some great matter till he died.
+
+One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes him
+feel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankind
+were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism
+which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy old
+world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany,
+talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till
+bedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and
+beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. But
+divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and
+messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as
+having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of
+Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the
+sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit
+second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of
+Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity,
+"trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of
+sunsets.
+
+No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with every
+child. It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon. Every age
+says to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I am
+like"; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, has
+need of seers and will have them. Our time is not an unpoetical one. We
+are in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces of
+unsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though they
+may be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone. It is nothing against us
+that we are a commercial people. Athens was a trading community; Dante
+and Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was already
+commercial when she produced Shakespeare.
+
+This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
+the noble, and the true, will never cease out of the world till the God
+from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselves
+in an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as new
+duties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of the
+poet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soul
+endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while
+there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will
+still send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hang
+their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God with us is
+forever the mystical name of the hour that is passing. The lives of the
+great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt
+most deeply the meaning of the present.
+
+
+
+
+HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+In the winter of 1855, when Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a
+course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His
+subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive
+lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the
+imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first
+characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the
+advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads,"
+especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of
+real life--the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative
+of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8,
+Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On
+Poetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotistic
+imaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Function
+and Prospects of Poetry."
+
+These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period of
+delivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, but
+they came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues of
+familiar studies and long reflection. No such criticism, at once
+abundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished by
+breadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, had
+been heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiastic
+audiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as the
+ablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as the
+foremost of American men of letters.
+
+In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard
+University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in
+special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of
+the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed
+Minister of the United States to Spain.
+
+During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses of
+lectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they were
+given more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject of
+these courses was in general the "Study of Literature," treating in
+different years of different special topics, from the literature of
+Northern to that of Southern Europe, from the Kalevala and the
+Niebelungen Lied to the Provençal poets; from Wolfram von Eschenbach to
+Rousseau; from the cycle of romances of Charlemagne and his peers to
+Dante and Shakespeare. Some of these lectures, or parts of them, were
+afterward prepared for publication, with such changes as were required
+to give them proper literary form; and the readers of Lowell's prose
+works know what gifts of native power, what large and solid acquisitions
+of learning, what wide and delightful survey of the field of life and of
+letters, are to be found in his essays on Shakespeare, on Dante, on
+Dryden, and on many another poet or prose writer. The abundance of his
+resources as critic in the highest sense have never been surpassed, at
+least in English literature.
+
+But considerable portions of the earlier as well as of the later
+lectures remain unprinted, partly, no doubt, because his points of view
+changed with the growth of his learning, and the increasing depth as
+well as breadth of his vision. There is but little in manuscript which
+he would himself, I believe, have been inclined to print without
+substantial change. Yet these unprinted remains contain so much that
+seems to me to possess permanent value that, after some question and
+hesitation, I have come to the conclusion that selections from them
+should be published. The fragments must be read with the fact constantly
+held in mind that they do not always represent Lowell's mature opinions;
+that, in some instances, they give but the first form of thoughts
+developed in other connections in one or other of his later essays; that
+they have not received his last revision; that they have the form of
+discourse addressed to the ear, rather than that of literary work
+finished for the eye.
+
+If so read, I trust that the reader, while he may find little in them to
+increase Lowell's well-established reputation, may find much in them to
+confirm a high estimate of his position as one of the rare masters of
+English prose as well as one of the most capable of critics; much to
+interest him alike in their intrinsic character, and in their
+illustration of the life and thought of the writer; and much to make him
+feel a keen regret that they are the final contributions of their author
+to the treasures of English literature.
+
+_Charles Eliot Norton_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hippel, the German satirist, divides the life of man into five periods,
+according to the ruling desires which successively displace each other
+in the human soul. Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, the
+second for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourth
+for money, and the fifth for a "place" in the country. I think he has
+overlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point of
+time--the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master of
+a chamber to one's self.
+
+How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that
+independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!
+How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small
+chamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor pores
+over the "Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks," his longing heightened
+as the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney.
+There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties his
+pockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of the
+housemaid. There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment of
+Schwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel the
+cool shadow of the discoverer's laurel. There the antiquary begins his
+collections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistles
+of Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late the
+property of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate,
+who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to make
+his children the ornaments of society. There the potential Dibdin or
+Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf--more fair to him
+than the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe," and
+"Gulliver," perhaps "Gil Blas," Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and
+Rome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds," the "Parent's Assistant," and
+(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," with other narratives
+of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.
+With these are admitted also "Viri Romae," Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and
+even the Latin grammar, because they _count_, playing here upon these
+mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators,
+a rôle in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated
+volumes--the "books without which no gentleman's library can be
+complete."
+
+I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery
+of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was
+first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of
+that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my
+unmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adorn
+it. The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints
+which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather's study,
+but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story
+till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther. These
+were heads of ancient worthies[1]--Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca,
+and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortly
+banished again with a _quousque tandem!_ Besides those I have mentioned,
+there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the
+slave of tradition, I called HeraclÄ­tus--an error which my excellent
+schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by
+the judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded the
+birth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree of
+knowledge, whose advantages could Adam have enjoyed during early life,
+he had known better than to have yielded to the temptation of any other.
+
+[Footnote 1: Some readers may recall the reference to these "heads of
+ancient wise men" in "An Interview with Miles Standish."--C.E.N.]
+
+Well, over my chimney hung those two antithetical philosophers--the one
+showing his teeth in an eternal laugh, while the tears on the cheek of
+the other forever ran, and yet, like the leaves on Keats's Grecian urn,
+could never be shed. I used to wonder at them sometimes, believing, as I
+did firmly, that to weep and laugh had been respectively the sole
+business of their lives. I was puzzled to think which had the harder
+time of it, and whether it were more painful to be under contract for
+the delivery of so many tears _per diem_, or to compel that [Greek:
+anêrithmon gelasma][1] I confess, I pitied them both; for if it be
+difficult to produce on demand what Laura Matilda would call the "tender
+dew of sympathy," he is also deserving of compassion who is expected to
+be funny whether he will or no. As I grew older, and learned to look on
+the two heads as types, they gave rise to many reflections, raising a
+question perhaps impossible to solve: whether the vices and follies of
+men were to be washed away, or exploded by a broadside of honest
+laughter. I believe it is Southwell who says that Mary Magdalene went to
+Heaven by water, and it is certain that the tears that people shed for
+themselves are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved
+by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers
+should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber
+enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while
+on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves
+of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits
+they can upon their fat.
+
+[Footnote 1: Countless--_i.e._, perpetual--smile.]
+
+On the other hand, man has a wholesome dread of laughter, as he is the
+only animal capable of that phenomenon--for the laugh of the hyena is
+pronounced by those who have heard it to be no joke, and to be classed
+with those [Greek: gelasmata agelasta] which are said to come from the
+other side of the mouth. Whether, as Shaftesbury will have it, ridicule
+be absolutely the test of truth or no, we may admit it to be relatively
+so, inasmuch as by the _reductio ad absurdum_ it often shows that
+abstract truth may become falsehood, if applied to the practical affairs
+of life, because its relation to other truths equally important, or to
+human nature, has been overlooked. For men approach truth from the
+circumference, and, acquiring a knowledge at most of one or two points
+of that circle of which God is the centre, are apt to assume that the
+fixed point from which it is described is that where they stand.
+Moreover, "Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat?"
+
+I side rather with your merry fellow than with Dr. Young when he says:
+
+  Laughter, though never censured yet as sin,
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Is half immoral, be it much indulged;
+  By venting spleen, or dissipating thought,
+  It shows a scorner, or it makes a fool;
+  And sins, as hurting others or ourselves.
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Yet would'st thou laugh (but at thine own expense),
+  This counsel strange should I presume to give--
+  "Retire, and read thy Bible, to be gay."
+
+With shame I confess it, Dr. Young's "Night Thoughts" have given me as
+many hearty laughs as any humorous book I ever read.
+
+Men of one idea,--that is, who have one idea at a time,--men who
+accomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, are
+inevitably destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be
+great and noble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversity
+of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a
+single idea, and that a small and rickety one--some seven months' child
+of thought--that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to
+the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no
+satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if
+Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For
+example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy
+to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two
+hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick
+Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great
+antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in
+Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person
+who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm,
+the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine
+to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm
+likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would
+have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the
+spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an
+epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"
+exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's
+axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable
+satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I
+have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks,
+Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never
+succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the
+collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus
+unconsciously by our passive enthusiast?
+
+I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see
+certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of
+the comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without
+laughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the _haruspex haruspicem_)
+and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secret
+I will keep yours." In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be
+implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body
+and soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm
+would lead us an endless dance.
+
+The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of one
+idea--for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two. He is the
+universal disenchanter. He makes himself quite as much the subject of
+ironical study as his neighbor. Is he inclined to fancy himself a great
+poet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sit
+down because a certain part of him was made of glass, and muses
+smilingly, "There are many forms of hypochondria." This duality in his
+mind which constitutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of his
+character. He is futile in action because in every path he is confronted
+by the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusion
+that nothing is very much worth the while. If he be independent of
+exertion, his life commonly runs to waste. If he turn author, it is
+commonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and "Don Quixote" was
+the fruit of a debtors' prison.
+
+It seems to be an instinct of human nature to analyze, to define, and to
+classify. We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away in
+the mind, and feel as if we knew them better when we have named them.
+And so to a certain extent we do. The mere naming of things by their
+appearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom;
+and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combines
+appearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the senses
+by impression, is poetry. A great part of criticism is scientific, but
+as the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possible
+in this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far as
+that, at some kind of classification that may help us toward that
+excellent property--compactness of mind.
+
+Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodness
+produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say that
+this was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is there
+in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne,
+Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic of
+all of them. Ben Jonson says that
+
+  When some one peculiar quality
+  Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
+  All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
+  In their constructions all to run one way,
+  This may be truly said to be a humor.
+
+But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,--of a good
+subject for the humorist,--such as Don Quixote, for example.
+
+Humor--taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous,
+and to give it expression--seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.
+Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused
+through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great
+comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their
+faces, or before they have spoken a word.
+
+The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the
+understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the
+English, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let us
+not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take
+the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.
+Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which
+arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the
+impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great
+humorist, defines it thus:
+
+    Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to
+    set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it
+    beside the great--that it may annihilate both, because in the
+    presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal,
+    only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality,
+    the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance
+    of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of
+    little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the
+    Scoffer.
+
+We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor,
+while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of
+lightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without our
+being able to put our finger on any passage, and say, "It is here." Wit
+must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wise
+deacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of human
+natur' in man," he might have added that there was a good deal more in
+some men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may be
+humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence
+of mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase,
+this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be
+instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and its
+impression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. As Galiani said of
+Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes
+every time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime
+oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art of
+saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where
+it is forbidden to say anything." Wit must also have the quality of
+unexpectedness. "Sometimes," says Barrow, "an affected simplicity,
+sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it rises
+only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty
+wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one
+knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are
+unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless
+rovings of fancy and windings of language."
+
+That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected
+likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at
+what is called a _conceit_, which has all the qualities of wit--except
+wit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long
+poem called "Albion's England," which had an immense contemporary
+popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of
+language. In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.
+Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,
+
+  Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
+  Soft were those lips that bled.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This, and one or two of the following illustrations, were
+used again by Mr. Lowell in his "Shakespeare Once More": _Works_
+(Riverside edition), III, 53.]
+
+This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good
+as a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a
+pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have
+been,--to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,--it
+should read:
+
+  Hard was the _hand_ that gave the blow,
+  Soft were those lips that bled,
+
+for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word "hard" as
+applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper
+logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which
+belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:
+
+  Her heart and morning broke together
+  In tears,
+
+which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might
+almost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionally
+violated in the word _broke_, and the sentence becomes absurd, though
+not funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of
+the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it,
+though here, again, there would be no true wit:
+
+  His heart and Biddle broke together
+  On 'change.
+
+Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of
+"Hudibras," certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose
+wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost
+rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a
+contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject. Butler says of loyalty
+that it is
+
+  True as the dial to the sun
+  Although it be not shined upon.
+
+Now what is the difference between this and the examples from Warner and
+Morris which I have just quoted? Simply that the comparison turning upon
+the word _true_, the mind is satisfied, because the analogy between the
+word as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave no
+gap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over. But it is precisely this
+jolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discompose
+our thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the object
+of a pun to give us. Wit of this kind treats logic with every possible
+outward demonstration of respect--"keeps the word of promise to the ear,
+and breaks it to the sense." Dean Swift's famous question to the man
+carrying the hare, "Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?" is
+perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an
+equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood
+abounds in examples of this sort of fun--only that his analogies are of
+a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old sailor he
+says,
+
+  His head was turned, and so he chewed
+  His pigtail till he died.
+
+This is inimitable, like all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is
+perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind
+is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical _non sequiturs_. And
+yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in
+the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of his
+ear-trumpet:
+
+  I don't pretend with horns of mine,
+  Like some in the advertising line,
+  To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales
+  That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale's.
+
+  There was Mrs. F. so very deaf
+  That she might have worn a percussion cap
+  And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
+  Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
+  She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.
+
+Again, his definition of deafness:
+
+  Deaf as the dog's ears in Enfield's "Speaker."
+
+So, in his description of the hardships of the wild beasts in the
+menagerie,
+
+  Who could not even prey
+  In their own way,
+
+and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning
+with the lion; but
+
+  Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
+  When Nero bolted him.
+
+In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit
+always suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostling
+together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.
+Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down in
+a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but
+once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn,
+they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. In
+the droll complaint of the lover,
+
+  Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
+  But why did you kick me down-stairs?
+
+the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the
+word "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking
+downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.
+Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole
+sentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment of
+Huon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that
+makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.
+
+Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as
+distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so
+full is it of quaint fancy:
+
+  Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
+  As but the offscouring of the British sand,
+  And so much earth as was contributed
+  By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
+  Or what by ocean's slow alluvium fell
+  Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
+  This indigestful vomit of the sea
+  Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
+
+  Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore
+  They, with mad labor, fished their land to shore,
+  And dived as desperately for each piece
+  Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese
+  Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
+  Less than what building swallows bear away,
+  Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll.
+  Transfusing into them their sordid soul.
+
+  How did they rivet with gigantic piles
+  Thorough the centre their new-catchèd miles,
+  And to the stake a struggling country bound,
+  Where barking waves still bait the forcèd ground!
+
+  Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid.
+  And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played,
+  As if on purpose it on land had come
+  To show them what's their _mare liberum_;
+  The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
+  And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest;
+  And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs tan
+  Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban,
+  And, as they over the new level ranged,
+  For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.
+  Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
+  Something like government among them brings;
+  And as among the blind the blinkard reigns
+  So rules among the drowned he that drains;
+  Who best could know to pump on earth a leak,
+  Him they their lord and Country's Father speak.
+  To make a bank was a great plot of state,
+  Invent a shovel and be a magistrate;
+  Hence some small dykegrave, unperceived, invades
+  The power, and grows, as 't were, a king of spades.
+
+I have cited this long passage not only because Marvell (both in his
+serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is
+as good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off
+into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that
+constitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny,
+hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an
+epigram of two lines:
+
+  Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
+  May man undam you and God damn you all.
+
+Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the
+most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
+With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus," and
+wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
+Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a
+place "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat," and this
+hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is
+certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the
+Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and
+disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But
+commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him
+rather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an example
+from the "Day of Judgment":
+
+  With a whirl of thought oppressed
+  I sank from reverie to rest,
+  A horrid vision seized my head,
+  I saw the graves give up their dead!
+  Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
+  And thunder roars, and lightning flies!
+  Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
+  The world stands trembling at his throne!
+  While each pale sinner hung his head,
+  Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said:
+  "Offending race of human kind;
+  By nature, reason, learning, blind,
+  You who through frailty stepped aside.
+  And you who never fell through pride,
+  You who in different sects were shammed,
+  And come to see each other damned
+  (So some folks told you--but they knew
+  No more of Jove's designs than you)--
+  The world's mad business now is o'er,
+  And I resent these pranks no more--
+  I to such blockheads set my wit!
+  I damn such fools! Go, go! you're bit!"
+
+The unexpectedness of the conclusion here, after the somewhat solemn
+preface, is entirely of the essence of wit. So, too, is the sudden flirt
+of the scorpion's tail to sting you. It is almost the opposite of humor
+in one respect--namely, that it would make us think the solemnest things
+in life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humor
+delights in exposing. This further difference is also true: that wit
+makes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none of
+its point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and droller
+the oftener we read it. If we cannot safely deny that Swift was a
+humorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gone
+through the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid. We should
+never forget that he died mad. Satirists of this kind, while they have
+this quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower,
+differ from their nobler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is always
+to the disadvantage of the higher. They purposely disenchant us--while
+the others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted at
+all.
+
+Ben Jonson, who had in respect of sturdy good sense very much the same
+sort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose "Discoveries," as he
+calls them, are well worth reading for the sound criticism they contain,
+says:
+
+    The parts of a comedy are the same with [those of] a tragedy, and
+    the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach: the
+    comics are called _didaskaloi_[1] of the Greeks, no less than the
+    tragics. Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy;
+    that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling.
+    For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in
+    comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's
+    nature without a disease. As a wry face moves laughter, or a
+    deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using
+    her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made
+    the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise
+    man. So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in
+    the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly
+    stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And
+    therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests
+    upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and
+    sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did
+    move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and
+    scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands
+    the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.
+
+[Footnote 1: Teachers.]
+
+He then goes on to say of Aristophanes that
+
+    he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous,
+    oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be
+    corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter
+    with that beast the multitude. They love nothing that is right and
+    proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them
+    the better it is.
+
+In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a
+little bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructed
+according to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault
+in comedy. I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniably
+true, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon the
+stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the
+writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than
+as movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the
+greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in
+limbo, qualifies him with the title of _satiro_.
+
+But if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?
+Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor? Yes; but, as it
+appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree,
+from any other ancient. I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies
+not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends,
+but for the fun of the thing. I am so poor a Grecian that I have no
+doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. But
+even through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out
+more or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was a
+master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands--puts forth
+buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it
+feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.
+Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps
+we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts
+as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent
+being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems
+too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the
+definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true
+flavor of Falstaff in him--"a million a minute and your expenses paid."
+As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file." Now
+they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come
+tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the
+circus, with a "Here we are!" I can think of nothing like it but
+Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the _go_
+out of words. They do not merely play with words; they romp with them,
+tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.
+
+I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in "The Clouds" or "The
+Birds," but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs," nor does
+the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of
+humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he
+has nothing like the scene in "The Frogs," where Bacchus is terrified
+with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries,
+and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor
+tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess,
+the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the
+ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been
+degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within
+the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those
+hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet
+saw in Tartary?
+
+Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on
+the same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, the
+greatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not,--and I am inclined
+to believe he did,--he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his
+esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human
+character--the imagination and understanding. There is a great deal more
+than this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book is
+often little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested. The
+plot is of the meagrest. A country gentleman of La Mancha, living very
+much by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances of
+chivalry, becomes at last the victim of a monomania on this one subject,
+and resolves to revive the order of chivalry in his own proper person.
+He persuades a somewhat prosaic neighbor of his to accompany him as
+squire. They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which
+they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting.
+Now if this were all of "Don Quixote," it would be simply broad farce,
+as it becomes in Butler's parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far
+as mere external characteristics are concerned. The latter knight and
+his squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficient
+reason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that they
+furnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom. They
+represent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing.
+
+I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfect
+character ever drawn. As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense,
+always a gentleman,--that is, as he is guilty of no crime that is
+technically held to operate in defeasance of his title to that name as a
+man of the world,--so is Don Quixote, in everything that does not
+concern his monomania, a perfect gentleman and a good Christian besides.
+He is not the merely technical gentleman of three descents--but the
+_true_ gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness,
+generosity, and fear of God can make. And with what consummate skill are
+the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just
+so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill
+event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from
+his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's
+treatment of him in the second part--which followed the other after an
+interval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they delude
+themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides
+shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castle
+are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.
+
+Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooner
+or later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal good
+by material means. Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is the
+type of the man with common sense. He always sees things in the daylight
+of reason. He is never taken in by his master's theory of
+enchanters,--although superstitious enough to believe such things
+possible,--but he _does_ believe, despite all reverses, in his promises
+of material prosperity and advancement. The island that has been
+promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before
+Macbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And,
+fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island
+of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate--because statesmanship
+depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on
+precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS
+
+(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)
+
+
+The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result
+in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of
+ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such
+men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light
+upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as
+the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an
+accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the
+scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth
+only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to
+know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were
+contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting
+with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from
+the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the
+New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise
+and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy
+and cumbrous--the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men;
+generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space,
+mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of
+something better than provincial scholarship.
+
+But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier
+moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can
+say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long
+steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the
+carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts.
+What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vast
+combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up
+to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with all
+large mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the first
+solid result of thought, however small--the nucleus of speculation. The
+true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and
+sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of
+science.
+
+It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it
+democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy
+of thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it has
+taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it
+has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of
+reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had few
+books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it
+over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.
+Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and
+precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would
+hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of
+Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books;
+for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift.
+When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three
+hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently
+survived until our day.
+
+In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we
+admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those
+better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon
+that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is
+deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is
+forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual
+progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his
+dethroned gods.
+
+There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very
+few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I
+should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so
+universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally
+true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European
+branch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and there
+needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than
+this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the "Iliad" and the
+"Odyssey." The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work
+of one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so
+nobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I should
+place the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, in which the history of the
+spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of
+outline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same
+universal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural man
+set before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squire
+Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature--the
+imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. This
+is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly
+independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural
+history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the
+projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable
+result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only
+ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally
+represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral
+significance there may be in certain episodes of the "Odyssey," the man
+of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the
+understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive.
+There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is
+nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry,
+than that passage in the eleventh book of the "Odyssey," where the shade
+of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest
+shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades
+of Hades. Dante's poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man
+from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral
+conversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the great
+camp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so
+representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all
+men. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction
+between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the
+transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect;
+and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual
+culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness,
+and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, but
+human, and record certain phases of man's nature, certain stages of his
+moral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It will
+remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it
+remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and
+harmonious development.
+
+I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a
+different category. Though they mark the very highest level of human
+genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the
+individual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life
+as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain
+definite conditions. We all of us _may_ be in the position of Macbeth or
+Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds
+potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of
+our common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books I
+have mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us grow
+up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time,
+sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape
+our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with
+Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and
+with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the
+intellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do not
+mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them,
+in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and
+perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts
+for their permanence, and insures their immortality.
+
+
+
+
+THE IMAGINATION[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: A small portion of this lecture appeared at the time of its
+delivery, in January, 1855, in a report printed in the _Boston Daily
+Advertiser_.]
+
+Imagination is the wings of the mind; the understanding, its feet. With
+these it may climb high, but can never soar into that ampler ether and
+diviner air whence the eye dominates so uncontrolled a prospect on every
+hand. Through imagination alone is something like a creative power
+possible to man. It is the same in Aeschylus as in Shakespeare, though
+the form of its manifestation varies in some outward respects from age
+to age. Being the faculty of vision, it is the essential part of
+expression also, which is the office of all art.
+
+But in comparing ancient with modern imaginative literature, certain
+changes especially strike us, and chief among them a stronger infusion
+of sentiment and what we call the picturesque. I shall endeavor to
+illustrate this by a few examples. But first let us discuss imagination
+itself, and give some instances of its working.
+
+"Art," says Lord Verulam, "is man added to Nature" (_homo additus
+naturae_); and we may modernize his statement, and adapt it to the
+demands of aesthetics, if we define art to be Nature infused with and
+shaped by the imaginative faculty of man; thus, as Bacon says elsewhere,
+"conforming the shows of things to the desires of the mind." Art always
+platonizes: it results from a certain finer instinct for form, order,
+proportion, a certain keener sense of the rhythm there is in the eternal
+flow of the world about us, and its products take shape around some idea
+preëxistent in the mind, are quickened into life by it, and strive
+always (cramped and hampered as they are by the limitations and
+conditions of human nature, of individual temperament, and outward
+circumstances) toward ideal perfection--toward what Michelangelo called
+
+  Ideal form, the universal mould.
+
+Shakespeare, whose careless generalizations have often the exactness of
+scientific definitions, tells us that
+
+  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
+  Are of imagination all compact;
+
+that
+
+              as imagination bodies forth
+  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
+  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
+  A local habitation and a name.
+
+And a little before he had told us that
+
+  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
+  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
+  More than cool reason ever comprehends.
+
+Plato had said before him (in his "Ion") that the poet is possessed by a
+spirit not his own, and that he cannot poetize while he has a particle
+of understanding left. Again he says that the bacchantes, possessed by
+the god, drink milk and honey from the rivers, and cannot believe, _till
+they recover their senses_, that they have been drinking mere water.
+Empedocles said that "the mind could only conceive of fire by being
+fire."
+
+All these definitions imply in the imaginative faculty the capabilities
+of ecstasy and possession, that is, of projecting itself into the very
+consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by
+the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the
+tone, the color, and the temperature thereof. Shakespeare is the highest
+example of this--for example, the parting of Romeo and Juliet. There the
+poet is so possessed by the situation, has so mingled his own
+consciousness with that of the lovers, that all nature is infected too,
+and is full of partings:
+
+  Look, love, what envious streaks
+  Do lace the _severing_ clouds in yonder east.
+
+In Shelley's "Cenci," on the other hand, we have an instance of the
+poet's imagination giving away its own consciousness to the object
+contemplated, in this case an inanimate one.
+
+  Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
+  Crosses a deep ravine; 't is rough and narrow,
+  And winds with short turns down the precipice;
+  And in its depth there is a mighty rock
+  Which has, from unimaginable years,
+  Sustained itself with terror and with toil
+  Over a gulf, and with the agony
+  With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
+  Even as a wretched soul hour after hour
+  Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
+  And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
+  In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag,
+  Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
+  The melancholy mountain yawns.
+
+The hint of this Shelley took from a passage in the second act of
+Calderon's "Purgatorio de San Patricio."
+
+  No ves ese peñasco que parece
+  Que se esta sustentando con trabajo,
+  Y con el ansia misma que padece
+  Ha tantos siglos que se viene abajo?
+
+which, retaining the measure of the original, may be thus paraphrased:
+
+  Do you not see that rock there which appeareth
+  To hold itself up with a throe appalling,
+  And, through the very pang of what it feareth,
+  So many ages hath been falling, falling?
+
+You will observe that in the last instance quoted the poet substitutes
+his own _impression_ of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his
+own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all
+sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose
+excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the
+main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its
+excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and
+healthy expression. Thus Shakespeare in his ninety-seventh sonnet:
+
+  How like a winter hath my absence been
+  From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
+  What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
+  What old December's bareness everywhere!
+  And yet this time remov'd was summer's time.
+
+It is only when it becomes a habit, instead of a mood of the mind, that
+it is a token of disease. Then it is properly dyspepsia,
+liver-complaint--what you will, but certainly not imagination as the
+handmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: one
+as the _plastic_ or _shaping_ faculty, which gives form and proportion,
+and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unity
+foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as
+the _realizing_ energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts,
+not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and
+coherence.
+
+We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, in
+the one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intense
+sympathy--a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as a
+Cordelia, a Caliban as a Prospero. There is a passage in Chaucer's
+"House of Fame" which very prettily illustrates this latter function:
+
+  Whan any speche yeomen ys
+  Up to the paleys, anon ryght
+  Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
+  Which that the worde in erthe spak,
+  Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
+  And so were hys lykenesse,
+  And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
+  That it the same body be,
+  Man or woman, he or she.
+
+We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind
+of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive,
+sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of
+body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "the
+dull substance of his flesh were thought." It is not in mere intensity
+of phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, or
+the situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witness
+of itself in expression. I know nothing more profoundly imaginative
+therefore in its bald simplicity than a line in Webster's "Duchess of
+Malfy." Ferdinand has procured the murder of his sister the duchess.
+When her dead body is shown to him he stammers out:
+
+  Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.
+
+The difference between subjective and objective in poetry would seem to
+be that the aim of the former is to express a mood of the mind, often
+something in itself accidental and transitory, while that of the latter
+is to convey the impression made upon the mind by something outside of
+it, but taken up into the mind and idealized (that is, stripped of all
+unessential particulars) by it. The one would fain set forth your view
+of the thing (modified, perhaps, by your breakfast), the other would set
+forth the very thing itself in its most concise individuality.
+Subjective poetry may be profound and imaginative if it deal with the
+primary emotions of our nature, with the soul's inquiries into its own
+being and doing, as was true of Wordsworth; but in the very proportion
+that it is profound, its range is limited. Great poetry should have
+breadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere on
+the open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on their
+occasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploring
+expeditions among the crypts of metaphysics.
+
+But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengage
+what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse
+the vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things are
+gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. It
+is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that
+can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to
+itself. That the power of abstraction has something to do with the
+imagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is a
+dramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep.
+His acquaintances walk and talk before him on the stage of dream
+precisely as in life. When he wakes, his genius has flown away with his
+sleep. It was indeed nothing more than that his mind was not distracted
+by the multiplicity of details which the senses force upon it by day. He
+thinks of Smith, and it is no longer a mere name on a doorplate or in a
+directory; but Smith himself is there, with those marvellous
+commonplaces of his which, could you only hit them off when you were
+awake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too,
+that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforced
+his remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the corner
+of the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a week
+of newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination
+_bodies forth_? It is indeed the _verbum caro factum_--the word made
+flesh and blood.
+
+I said that the imagination always idealizes, that in its highest
+exercise, for example, as in the representation of character, it goes
+behind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types of
+human nature, as in Don Quixote and Hamlet, Antigone and Cordelia,
+Alcestis and Amelia. By this I mean that those features are most
+constantly insisted upon, not in which they differ from other men but
+from other kinds of men. For example, Don Quixote is never set before us
+as a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when you
+analyze it, of a very noble kind--nothing less, indeed, than devotion to
+an unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginative
+men for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats and
+disillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice at
+intervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one of
+Beethoven's symphonies, a kind of clue to guide us through those
+intricacies of harmony. So in Lear, one of Shakespeare's profoundest
+psychological studies, the weakness of the man is emphasized, as it
+were, and forced upon our attention by his outbreaks of impotent
+violence; so in Macbeth, that imaginative bias which lays him open to
+the temptation of the weird sisters is suggested from time to time
+through the whole tragedy, and at last unmans him, and brings about his
+catastrophe in his combat with Macduff. This is what I call ideal and
+imaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries of
+character, not by arbitrary lines drawn at this angle or that, according
+to the whim of the tracer, but by those mountain-ranges of human nature
+which divide man from man and temperament from temperament. And as the
+imagination of the reader must reinforce that of the poet, reducing the
+generic again to the specific, and defining it into sharper
+individuality by a comparison with the experiences of actual life, so,
+on the other hand, the popular imagination is always poetic, investing
+each new figure that comes before it with all the qualities that belong
+to the genus; Thus Hamlet, in some one or other of his characteristics
+has been the familiar of us all, and so from an ideal and remote figure
+is reduced to the standard of real and contemporary existence; while
+Bismarck, who, if we knew him, would probably turn out to be a
+comparatively simple character, is invested with all the qualities which
+have ever been attributed to the typical statesman, and is clearly as
+imaginative a personage as the Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's "Don
+Carlos." We are ready to accept any _coup de théâtre_ of him. Now, this
+prepossession is precisely that for which the imagination of the poet
+makes us ready by working on our own.
+
+But there are also lower levels on which this idealization plays its
+tricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may be
+called the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to
+delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from the
+associations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroic
+stature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar face
+in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the
+countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful
+reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most
+penetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ of
+expression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor were
+wrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at any
+rate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual and
+trivial. Their stage showed nothing that could be met in the streets. We
+barbarians, on the other hand, take delight precisely in that. We admire
+the novels of Trollope and the groups of Rogers because, as we say, they
+are so _real_, while it is only because they are so matter-of-fact, so
+exactly on the level with our own trivial and prosaic apprehensions.
+When Dante lingers to hear the dispute between Sinon and Master Adam,
+Virgil, type of the higher reason and the ideal poet, rebukes him, and
+even angrily.
+
+  E fa ragion ch'io ti sia sempre allato
+  Si più avvien che fortuna t' accoglia
+  Ove sien genti in simigliante piato;
+  Chè voler ciò udire è bassa voglia.
+
+  Remember, _I_ am always at thy side,
+  If ever fortune bring thee once again
+  Where there are people in dispute like this,
+  For wishing to hear that is vulgar wish.
+
+Verse is another of these expedients for producing that frame of mind,
+that prepossession, on the part of hearer or reader which is essential
+to the purpose of the poet, who has lost much of his advantage by the
+invention of printing, which obliges him to appeal to the eye rather
+than the ear. The rhythm is no arbitrary and artificial contrivance. It
+was suggested by an instinct natural to man. It is taught him by the
+beating of his heart, by his breathing, hastened or retarded by the
+emotion of the moment. Nay, it may be detected by what seems the most
+monotonous of motions, the flow of water, in which, if you listen
+intently, you will discover a beat as regular as that of the metronome.
+With the natural presumption of all self-taught men, I thought I had
+made a discovery in this secret confided to me by Beaver Brook, till
+Professor Peirce told me it was always allowed for in the building of
+dams. Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not only
+metre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outward
+nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray
+out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to
+spray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands
+an embodied ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of proportion, number,
+and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen the
+blue river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been ravished by the
+visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and
+downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
+how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
+flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
+vault below? At least there can be no doubt that metre, by its
+systematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes the
+senses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself in
+sympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predisposition
+to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose
+of the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right
+way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own
+sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The right
+reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary
+condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mind
+both in poet and hearer. The imagination must be sensitized ere it will
+take the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced and
+fixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun. Then
+that becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of the
+brain. Your own passion must penetrate and mingle with that of the
+artist that you may interpret him aright. You must, I say, be
+prepossessed, for it is the mind which shapes and colors the reports of
+the senses. Suppose you were expecting the bell to toll for the burial
+of some beloved person and the church-clock should begin to strike. The
+first lingering blow of the hammer would beat upon your very heart, and
+thence the shock would run to all the senses at once; but after a few
+strokes you would be undeceived, and the sound would become commonplace
+again. On the other hand, suppose that at a certain hour you knew that a
+criminal was to be executed; then the ordinary striking of the clock
+would have the sullen clang of a funeral bell. So in Shakespeare's
+instance of the lover, does he not suddenly find himself sensible of a
+beauty in the world about him before undreamed of, because his passion
+has somehow got into whatever he sees and hears? Will not the rustle of
+silk across a counter stop his pulse because it brings back to his sense
+the odorous whisper of Parthenissa's robe? Is not the beat of the
+horse's hoofs as rapid to Angelica pursued as the throbs of her own
+heart huddling upon one another in terror, while it is slow to Sister
+Anne, as the pulse that pauses between hope and fear, as she listens on
+the tower for rescue, and would have the rider "spur, though mounted on
+the wind"?
+
+Dr. Johnson tells us that that only is good poetry which may be
+translated into sensible prose. I greatly doubt whether any very
+profound emotion can be so rendered. Man is a metrical animal, and it is
+not in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joy
+over the new centre of hope and terror that is sucking life from her
+breast. Translate passion into sensible prose and it becomes absurd,
+because subdued to workaday associations, to that level of common sense
+and convention where to betray intense feeling is ridiculous and
+unmannerly. Shall I ask Shakespeare to translate me his love "still
+climbing trees in the Hesperides"? Shall I ask Marlowe how Helen could
+"make him immortal with a kiss," or how, in the name of all the Monsieur
+Jourdains, at once her face could "launch a thousand ships and burn the
+topless towers of Ilion"? Could Aeschylus, if put upon the stand, defend
+his making Prometheus cry out,
+
+  O divine ether and swift-winged winds,
+  Ye springs of rivers, and of ocean waves
+  The innumerable smile, all mother Earth,
+  And Helios' all-beholding round, I call:
+  Behold what I, a god, from gods endure!
+
+Or could Lear justify his
+
+  I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
+  I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you children!
+
+No; precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain
+any more than we can describe a perfume. There is a little quatrain of
+Gongora's quoted by Calderon in his "Alcalde of Zalamea" which has an
+inexplicable charm for me:
+
+  Las flores del romero,
+    Niña Isabel,
+  Hoy son flores azules,
+    Y mañana serán miel.
+
+If I translate it, 't is nonsense, yet I understand it perfectly, and it
+will, I dare say, outlive much wiser things in my memory. It is the very
+function of poetry to free us from that witch's circle of common sense
+which holds us fast in its narrow enchantment. In this disenthralment,
+language and verse have their share, and we may say that language also
+is capable of a certain idealization. Here is a passage from the XXXth
+song of Drayton's "Poly-Olbion":
+
+  Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every Hill
+  Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring valleys fill;
+  Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
+  From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
+  From whose stone-trophied head, it on to Wendrosse went,
+  Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent,
+  That Broadwater therewith within her banks astound,
+  In sailing to the sea, told it in Egremound.
+
+This gave a hint to Wordsworth, who, in one of his "Poems on the Naming
+of Places," thus prolongs the echo of it:
+
+  Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
+  That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
+  The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
+  Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again;
+  The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
+  Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
+  And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
+  A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
+  And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
+  Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
+  Carried the Lady's voice,--old Skiddaw blew
+  His speaking-trumpet;--back out of the clouds
+  Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
+  And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.
+
+Now, this passage of Wordsworth I should call the
+idealization of that of Drayton, who becomes poetical
+only in the "stone-trophied head of Dunbalrase";
+and yet the thought of both poets is the same.
+
+Even what is essentially vulgar may be idealized by seizing and dwelling
+on the generic characteristics. In "Antony and Cleopatra" Shakespeare
+makes Lepidus tipsy, and nothing can be droller than the drunken gravity
+with which he persists in proving himself capable of bearing his part in
+the conversation. We seem to feel the whirl in his head when we find his
+mind revolving round a certain fixed point to which he clings as to a
+post. Antony is telling stories of Egypt to Octavius, and Lepidus, drawn
+into an eddy of the talk, interrupts him:
+
+  _Lepidus_: You gave strange serpents there.
+
+  _Antony_ [_trying to shake him off_]: Ay, Lepidus.
+
+  _Lepidus_: Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud
+  by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.
+
+  _Antony_ [_thinking to get rid of him_]: They are so.
+
+Presently Lepidus has revolved again, and continues, as if he had been
+contradicted:
+
+  Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies' pyramises
+  are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard
+  that.
+
+And then, after another pause, still intent on proving himself sober, he
+asks, coming round to the crocodile again:
+
+  What manner o' thing is your crocodile?
+
+Antony answers gravely:
+
+  It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath
+  breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own
+  organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements
+  once out of it, it transmigrates.
+
+  _Lepidus_: What color is it of?
+
+  _Antony_: Of its own color, too.
+
+  _Lepidus_ [_meditatively_]: 'T is a strange serpent.
+
+The ideal in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades
+embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the
+dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic
+sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though
+these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this
+that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was
+supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and
+something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg
+encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas
+the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the
+mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this
+was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and
+personification with that typical expression which is the true function
+of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.
+
+        Revenge impatient rose;
+  He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
+        And, with a withering look,
+      The war-denouncing trumpet took,
+      And blew a blast so loud and dread,
+    Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of woe!
+        And ever and anon he beat
+        The doubling drum with furious heat.
+
+"Words, words, Horatio!" Now let us hear Chaucer with his single
+stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the
+murderous tread behind us:
+
+  The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.
+
+Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it--Collins's noise
+or Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you will
+perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness
+which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention.
+Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as
+the two points most apt to impress the imagination.
+
+The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on the
+other hand, adorns, illustrates, and commonly amplifies. The one is
+suggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander," I
+read--
+
+  Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,
+  And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
+  How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine,
+  For her love's sake, that with immortal wine
+  Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease
+  Than there was water in the Sestian seas.
+
+In the epithet "star," Hero's thought implies the beauty and brightness
+of her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune's
+skies" we have not only the simple fact that the waters are the
+atmosphere of the sea-god's realm, but are reminded of that reflected
+heaven which Hero must have so often watched as it deepened below her
+tower in the smooth Hellespont. I call this as high an example of fancy
+as could well be found; it is picture and sentiment combined--the very
+essence of the picturesque.
+
+But when Keats calls Mercury "the star of Lethe," the word "star" makes
+us see him as the poor ghosts do who are awaiting his convoy, while the
+word "Lethe" intensifies our sympathy by making us feel his coming as
+they do who are longing to drink of forgetfulness. And this again reacts
+upon the word "star," which, as it before expressed only the shining of
+the god, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitual
+association of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothing
+can be more fanciful than this bit of Henry More the Platonist:
+
+                        What doth move
+  The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?
+  The thrush or lark that, mounting high above,
+  Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn
+  Heavily hanging in the dewy morn?
+
+But compare this with Keats again:
+
+  The voice I hear this passing night was heard
+  In ancient days by emperor and clown;
+  Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
+  Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home,
+  She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
+
+The imagination has touched that word "alien," and we see the field
+through Ruth's eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, not
+merely through those of the poet.
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
+
+I. LIFE IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
+
+
+It is the office and function of the imagination to renew life in lights
+and sounds and emotions that are outworn and familiar. It calls the soul
+back once more under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest bush
+burn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible presence of God. And it
+works the same miracle for language. The word it has touched retains the
+warmth of life forever. We talk about the age of superstition and fable
+as if they were passed away, as if no ghost could walk in the pure white
+light of science, yet the microscope that can distinguish between the
+disks that float in the blood of man and ox is helpless, a mere dead
+eyeball, before this mystery of Being, this wonder of Life, the sympathy
+which puts us in relation with all nature, before that mighty
+circulation of Deity in which stars and systems are but as the
+blood-disks in our own veins. And so long as wonder lasts, so long will
+imagination find thread for her loom, and sit like the Lady of Shalott
+weaving that magical web in which "the shows of things are accommodated
+to the desires of the mind."
+
+It is precisely before this phenomenon of life in literature and
+language that criticism is forced to stop short. That it is there we
+know, but what it is we cannot precisely tell. It flits before us like
+the bird in the old story. When we think to grasp it, we already hear it
+singing just beyond us. It is the imagination which enables the poet to
+give away his own consciousness in dramatic poetry to his characters, in
+narrative to his language, so that they react upon us with the same
+original force as if they had life in themselves.
+
+
+II. STYLE AND MANNER
+
+
+Where Milton's style is fine it is _very_ fine, but it is always liable
+to the danger of degenerating into mannerism. Nay, where the imagination
+is absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theological
+discussions in "Paradise Lost," it becomes mannerism of the most
+wearisome kind. Accordingly, he is easily parodied and easily imitated.
+Philips, in his "Splendid Shilling," has caught the trick exactly:
+
+  Not blacker tube nor of a shorter size
+  Smokes Cambrobriton (versed in pedigree,
+  Sprung from Cadwallader and Arthur, kings
+  Full famous in romantic tale) when he,
+  O'er many a craggy hill and barren cliff,
+  Upon a cargo of famed Cestrian cheese
+  High overshadowing rides, with a design
+  To vend his wares or at the Arvonian mart.
+  Or Maridunum, or the ancient town
+  Yclept Brechinia, or where Vaga's stream
+  Encircles Ariconium, fruitful soil.
+
+Philips has caught, I say, Milton's trick; his real secret he could
+never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable. But all
+authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies
+less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become
+mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily
+imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his
+time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence
+has in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined by
+him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is
+circumlocution in the crow of a cock. Cowper was only saved by mixing
+equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind of
+cross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we should
+not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that
+no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the
+majesty and compass of the organ. He was as much composer as poet.
+
+How is it with Shakespeare? did he have no style? I think I find the
+proof that he had it, and that of the very highest and subtlest kind, in
+the fact that I can nowhere put my finger on it, and say it is here or
+there.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: In his essay, "Shakespeare Once More" (_Works_, in, pp.
+36-42), published in 1868, Mr. Lowell has treated of Shakespeare's style
+in a passage of extraordinary felicity and depth of critical judgment.]
+
+I do not mean that things in themselves artificial may not be highly
+agreeable. We learn by degrees to take a pleasure in the mannerism of
+Gibbon and Johnson. It is something like reading Latin as a living
+language. But in both these cases the man is only present by his
+thought. It is the force of that, and only that, which distinguishes
+them from their imitators, who easily possess themselves of everything
+else. But with Burke, who has true style, we have a very different
+experience. If we _go_ along with Johnson or Gibbon, we are _carried_
+along by Burke. Take the finest specimen of him, for example, "The
+Letter to a Noble Lord." The sentences throb with the very pulse of the
+writer. As he kindles, the phrase glows and dilates, and we feel
+ourselves sharing in that warmth and expansion. At last we no longer
+read, we seem to hear him, so livingly is the whole man in what he
+writes; and when the spell is over, we can scarce believe that those
+dull types could have held such ravishing discourse. And yet we are told
+that when Burke spoke in Parliament he always emptied the house.
+
+I know very well what the charm of mere words is. I know very well that
+our nerves of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the violin is
+said to do, to certain modulations, so that we receive them with a
+readier sympathy at every repetition. This is a part of the sweet charm
+of the classics. We are pleased with things in Horace which we should
+not find especially enlivening in Mr. Tupper. Cowper, in one of his
+letters, after turning a clever sentence, says, "There! if that had been
+written in Latin seventeen centuries ago by Mr. Flaccus, you would have
+thought it rather neat." How fully any particular rhythm gets possession
+of us we can convince ourselves by our dissatisfaction with any
+emendation made by a contemporary poet in his verses. Posterity may
+think he has improved them, but we are jarred by any change in the old
+tune. Even without any habitual association, we cannot help recognizing
+a certain power over our fancy in mere words. In verse almost every ear
+is caught with the sweetness of alliteration. I remember a line in
+Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" which owes much of its fascination to
+three _m's_, where he speaks of the Hebrid Isles
+
+  Far placed amid the melancholy main.
+
+I remember a passage in Prichard's "Races of Man" which had for me all
+the moving quality of a poem. It was something about the Arctic regions,
+and I could never read it without the same thrill. Dr. Prichard was
+certainly far from being an inspired or inspiring author, yet there was
+something in those words, or in their collocation, that affected me as
+only genius can. It was probably some dimly felt association, something
+like that strange power there is in certain odors, which, in themselves
+the most evanescent and impalpable of all impressions on the senses,
+have yet a wondrous magic in recalling, and making present to us, some
+forgotten experience.
+
+Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems are
+full of those little pitfalls for the fancy. Whatever you have read,
+whether in the classics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stir
+you with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable. Gray
+makes use of the same artifice, and with the same success.
+
+There is a charm in the arrangement of words also, and that not only in
+verse, but in prose. The finest prose is subject to the laws of metrical
+proportion. For example, in the song of Deborah and Barak: "Awake,
+awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, utter a song! Arise, Barak, and lead thy
+captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam!" Or again, "At her feet he
+bowed; he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he
+bowed, there he fell down dead."
+
+Setting aside, then, all charm of association, all the influence to
+which we are unconsciously subjected by melody, by harmony, or even by
+the mere sound of words, we may say that style is distinguished from
+manner by the author's power of projecting his own emotion into what he
+writes. The stylist is occupied with the impression which certain things
+have made upon him; the mannerist is wholly concerned with the
+impression he shall make on others.
+
+
+III. KALEVALA
+
+
+But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which
+imagination may display itself--as an active power or as a passive
+quality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receives
+from nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latter
+reproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration by
+conventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by the
+conscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself with
+expression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we call
+art, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in a
+vivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet was
+conscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have not
+communicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have come
+down to us to which every generation adds some new significance out of
+its own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for the
+understanding, and, passing into the common currency of speech, become
+the property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, which
+is the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is the
+property of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always here
+a certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrases
+and images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditions
+remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy
+combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and
+natural relation with the world about him, however little or however
+much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious
+and incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomes
+with the advance of every generation in literary culture and social
+refinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never produced
+among cultivated people. Like the mayflower, they love the woods, and
+will not be naturalized in the garden. Now, the advantage of that
+primitive kind of poetry of which I was just speaking is that it finds
+its imaginative components ready made to its hand. But an illustration
+is worth more than any amount of discourse. Let me read you a few
+passages from a poem which grew up under the true conditions of natural
+and primitive literature--remoteness, primitiveness of manners, and
+dependence on native traditions. I mean the epic of Finland--Kalevala.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This translation is Mr. Lowell's, and, so far as I know,
+has not been printed.--C.E. NORTON.]
+
+  I am driven by my longing,
+  Of my thought I hear the summons
+  That to singing I betake me,
+  That I give myself to speaking,
+  That our race's lay I utter,
+  Song for ages handed downward.
+  Words upon my lips are melting,
+  And the eager tones escaping
+  Will my very tongue outhasten,
+  Will my teeth, despite me, open.
+
+  Golden friend, beloved brother,
+  Dear one that grew up beside me,
+  Join thee with me now in singing,
+  Join thee with me now in speaking,
+  Since we here have come together,
+  Journeying by divers pathways;
+  Seldom do we come together,
+  One comes seldom to the other,
+  In the barren fields far-lying,
+  On the hard breast of the Northland.
+
+  Hand in hand together clasping,
+  Finger fast with finger clasping,
+  Gladly we our song will utter,
+  Of our lays will give the choicest--
+  So that friends may understand it.
+  And the kindly ones may hear it.
+  In their youth which now is waxing,
+  Climbing upward into manhood:
+  These our words of old tradition,
+  These our lays that we have borrowed
+  From the belt of Wainamoinen,
+  From the forge of Ilmarinen,
+  From the sword of Kaukomeli,
+  From the bow of Jonkahainen,
+  From the borders of the ice-fields,
+  From the plains of Kalevala.
+
+  These my father sang before me,
+  As the axe's helve he fashioned;
+  These were taught me by my mother,
+  As she sat and twirled her spindle,
+  While I on the floor was lying,
+  At her feet, a child was rolling;
+  Never songs of Sampo failed her.
+  Magic songs of Lonhi never;
+  Sampo in her song grew aged,
+  Lonhi with her magic vanished,
+  In her singing died Wipunen,
+  As I played, died Lunminkainen.
+  Other words there are a many,
+  Magic words that I have taught me,
+  Which I picked up from the pathway,
+  Which I gathered from the forest,
+  Which I snapped from wayside bushes,
+  Which I gleaned from slender grass-blades,
+  Which I found upon the foot-bridge.
+  When I wandered as a herd-boy.
+  As a child into the pastures,
+  To the meadows rich in honey,
+  To the sun-begoldened hilltops,
+  Following the black Maurikki
+  By the side of brindled Kimmo.
+
+  Lays the winter gave me also,
+  Song was given me by the rain-storm,
+  Other lays the wind-gusts blew me,
+  And the waves of ocean brought them;
+  Words I borrowed of the song-birds,
+  And wise sayings from the tree-tops.
+
+  Then into a skein I wound them,
+  Bound them fast into a bundle,
+  Laid upon my ledge the burthen,
+  Bore them with me to my dwelling,
+  On the garret beams I stored them,
+  In the great chest bound with copper.
+
+  Long time in the cold they lay there,
+  Under lock and key a long time;
+  From the cold shall I forth bring them?
+  Bring my lays from out the frost there
+  'Neath this roof so wide-renownèd?
+  Here my song-chest shall I open,
+  Chest with runic lays o'errunning?
+  Shall I here untie my bundle,
+  And begin my skein unwinding?
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Now my lips at last must close them
+  And my tongue at last be fettered;
+  I must leave my lay unfinished,
+  And must cease from cheerful singing;
+  Even the horses must repose them
+  When all day they have been running;
+  Even the iron's self grows weary
+  Mowing down the summer grasses;
+  Even the water sinks to quiet
+  From its rushing in the river;
+  Even the fire seeks rest in ashes
+  That all night hath roared and crackled;
+  Wherefore should not music also,
+  Song itself, at last grow weary
+  After the long eve's contentment
+  And the fading of the twilight?
+  I have also heard say often,
+  Heard it many times repeated,
+  That the cataract swift-rushing
+  Not in one gush spends its waters,
+  And in like sort cunning singers
+  Do not spend their utmost secret,
+  Yea, to end betimes is better
+  Than to break the thread abruptly.
+
+  Ending, then, as I began them,
+  Closing thus and thus completing,
+  I fold up my pack of ballads,
+  Roll them closely in a bundle,
+  Lay them safely in the storeroom,
+  In the strong bone-castle's chamber,
+  That they never thence be stolen,
+  Never in all time be lost thence,
+  Though the castle's wall be broken,
+  Though the bones be rent asunder,
+  Though the teeth may be pried open,
+  And the tongue be set in motion.
+
+  How, then, were it sang I always
+  Till my songs grew poor and poorer,
+  Till the dells alone would hear me,
+  Only the deaf fir-trees listen?
+  Not in life is she, my mother,
+  She no longer is aboveground;
+  She, the golden, cannot hear me,
+  'T is the fir-trees now that hear me,
+  'T is the pine-tops understand me,
+  And the birch-crowns full of goodness,
+  And the ash-trees now that love me!
+  Small and weak my mother left me,
+  Like a lark upon the cliff-top,
+  Like a young thrush 'mid the flintstones
+  In the guardianship of strangers,
+  In the keeping of the stepdame.
+  She would drive the little orphan.
+  Drive the child with none to love him,
+  To the cold side of the chimney,
+  To the north side of the cottage.
+  Where the wind that felt no pity,
+  Bit the boy with none to shield him.
+  Larklike, then, I forth betook me,
+  Like a little bird to wander.
+  Silent, o'er the country straying
+  Yon and hither, full of sadness.
+  With the winds I made acquaintance
+  Felt the will of every tempest.
+  Learned of bitter frost to shiver,
+  Learned too well to weep of winter.
+
+  Yet there be full many people
+  Who with evil voice assail me,
+  And with tongue of poison sting me,
+  Saying that my lips are skilless,
+  That the ways of song I know not,
+  Nor the ballad's pleasant turnings.
+  Ah, you should not, kindly people,
+  Therein seek a cause to blame me,
+  That, a child, I sang too often,
+  That, unfledged, I twittered only.
+  I have never had a teacher,
+  Never heard the speech of great men,
+  Never learned a word unhomely,
+  Nor fine phrases of the stranger.
+  Others to the school were going,
+  I alone at home must keep me,
+  Could not leave my mother's elbow,
+  In the wide world had her only;
+  In the house had I my schooling,
+  From the rafters of the chamber.
+  From the spindle of my mother,
+  From the axehelve of my father,
+  In the early days of childhood;
+  But for this it does not matter,
+  I have shown the way to singers,
+  Shown the way, and blazed the tree-bark,
+  Snapped the twigs, and marked the footpath;
+  Here shall be the way in future,
+  Here the track at last be opened
+  For the singers better-gifted,
+  For the songs more rich than mine are,
+  Of the youth that now are waxing,
+  In the good time that is coming!
+
+Like Virgil's husbandman, our minstrel did not know how well off he was
+to have been without schooling. This, I think, every one feels at once
+to be poetry that sings itself. It makes its own tune, and the heart
+beats in time to its measure. By and by poets will begin to say, like
+Goethe, "I sing as the bird sings"; but this poet sings in that fashion
+without thinking of it or knowing it. And it is the very music of his
+race and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos.
+Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners to
+the old national lays grow fewer every day. Before long the Fins will be
+writing songs in the manner of Heine, and dramas in imitation of
+"Faust." Doubtless the material of original poetry lies in all of us,
+but in proportion as the mind is conventionalized by literature, it is
+apt to look about it for models, instead of looking inward for that
+native force which makes models, but does not follow them. This rose of
+originality which we long for, this bloom of imagination whose perfume
+enchants us--we can seldom find it when it is near us, when it is part
+of our daily lives.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
+
+
+
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales_. By Henry James, Jr.
+Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co.
+_Transatlantic Sketches_. By the same author.]
+
+Whoever takes an interest, whether of mere curiosity or of critical
+foreboding, in the product and tendency of our younger literature, must
+have had his attention awakened and detained by the writings of Mr.
+James. Whatever else they may be, they are not common, and have that air
+of good breeding which is the token of whatever is properly called
+literature. They are not the overflow of a shallow talent for
+improvisation too full of self to be contained, but show everywhere the
+marks of intelligent purpose and of the graceful ease that comes only of
+conscientious training. Undoubtedly there was a large capital of native
+endowment to start from--a mind of singular subtlety and refinement; a
+faculty of rapid observation, yet patient of rectifying afterthought;
+senses daintily alive to every aesthetic suggestion; and a frank
+enthusiasm, kept within due bounds by the double-consciousness of humor.
+But it is plain that Mr. James is fortunate enough to possess, or to be
+possessed by, that finer sixth sense which we call the artistic, and
+which controls, corrects, and discontents. His felicities, therefore,
+are not due to a lucky turn of the dice, but to forethought and
+afterthought. Accordingly, he is capable of progress, and gives renewed
+evidence of it from time to time, while too many of our authors show
+premature marks of arrested development. They strike a happy vein of
+starting, perhaps, and keep on grubbing at it, with the rude helps of
+primitive mining, seemingly unaware that it is daily growing more and
+more slender. Even should it wholly vanish, they persist in the vain
+hope of recovering it further on, as if in literature two successes of
+precisely the same kind were possible Nay, most of them have hit upon no
+vein at all, but picked up a nugget rather, and persevere in raking the
+surface of things, if haply they may chance upon another. The moral of
+one of Hawthorne's stories is that there is no element of treasure-trove
+in success, but that true luck lies in the deep and assiduous
+cultivation of our own plot of ground, be it larger or smaller. For
+indeed the only estate of man that savors of the realty is in his mind.
+Mr. James seems to have arrived early at an understanding of this, and
+to have profited by the best modern appliances of self-culture. In
+conception and expression is he essentially an artist and not an
+irresponsible _trouvère_. If he allow himself an occasional
+carelessness, it is not from incaution, but because he knows perfectly
+well what he is about. He is quite at home in the usages of the best
+literary society. In his writing there is none of that hit-or-miss
+playing at snapdragon with language, of that clownish bearing-on in what
+should be the light strokes, as if mere emphasis were meaning, and
+naturally none of the slovenliness that offends a trained judgment in
+the work of so many of our writers later, unmistakably clever as they
+are. In short, he has _tone_, the last result and surest evidence of an
+intellect reclaimed from the rudeness of nature, for it means
+self-restraint. The story of Handel's composing always in full dress
+conveys at least the useful lesson of a gentlemanlike deference for the
+art a man professes and for the public whose attention he claims. Mr.
+James, as we see in his sketches of travel, is not averse to the
+lounging ease of a shooting-jacket, but he respects the usages of
+convention, and at the canonical hours is sure to be found in the
+required toilet. He does not expect the company to pardon his own
+indolence as one of the necessary appendages of originality. Always
+considerate himself, his readers soon find reason to treat him with
+consideration. For they soon come to see that literature may be light
+and at the same time thoughtful; that lightness, indeed, results much
+more surely from serious study than from the neglect of it.
+
+We have said that Mr. James was emphatically a man of culture, and we
+are old-fashioned enough to look upon him with the more interest as a
+specimen of exclusively _modern_ culture. Of any classical training we
+have failed to detect the traces in him. His allusions, his citations,
+are in the strictest sense contemporary, and indicate, if we may trust
+our divination, a preference for French models, Balzac, De Musset,
+Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, especially the three
+latter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, their
+clever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by direct
+bluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is an
+admirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable by
+example. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to be
+called our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the French
+small-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows the
+graceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a man
+distinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of letting
+us feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusively
+aware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of his
+character by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be made
+always in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes and
+prejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proof
+of indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any fault
+with Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, it
+would be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like
+_bouder, se reconnaît, banal_, and the like), where our English, without
+being driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite as
+good and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow as
+near surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who so
+generally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us a
+disagreeable alien like _abandon_ (used as a noun), as if it could show
+an honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster.
+Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance that
+escapes our obtuser sense, a sweetness, it may be, of early association,
+for he tells us somewhere that in his boyhood he was put to school in
+Geneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into the
+rusticism that "remembers of" a thing.
+
+But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligent
+study of French models, it is plain that a much larger share of Mr.
+James's education has been acquired by travel and through the eyes of a
+thoughtful observer of men and things. He has seen more cities and
+manners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and if
+with less gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of his
+artistic apprehensiveness and scope that is of far greater value to him.
+We do not mean to imply that Mr. James lacks what is called knowledge of
+the world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in
+him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination
+ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity.
+He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in
+a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening
+the ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line he
+has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character
+and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of
+society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and
+art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr.
+James does not see things with his eyes alone. His vision is always
+modified by his imaginative temperament. He is the last man we should
+consult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow of
+sensitive impression, and are positively better than the actual
+pilgrimage. We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, but
+hardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. _Et ego in
+Arcadia_, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not the
+name we found in our guide-book. It is always _Dichtung und Wahrheit_
+(Goethe knew very well what he was about when he gave precedence to the
+giddier sister)--it is always fact seen through imagination and
+transfigured by it. A single example will best show what we mean. "It is
+partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened
+that the aqueducts are so impressive. _They seem the very source of the
+solitude in which they stand_; they look like architectural spectres,
+and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede
+along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out
+of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's
+pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance
+crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice,"
+or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it
+stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose.
+But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased. Mr. James tempts us
+into many byways of serious and fruitful thought. Especially valuable
+and helpful have we found his _obiter dicta_ on the arts of painting,
+sculpture, and architecture; for example, when he says of the Tuscan
+palaces that "in their large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty of
+effect, [they] reproduce more than other modern styles the simple
+nobleness of Greek architecture." And we would note also what he says of
+the Albani Antinoüs. It must be a nimble wit that can keep pace with Mr.
+James's logic in his aesthetic criticism. It is apt to spring airily
+over the middle term to the conclusion, leaving something in the
+likeness of a ditch across the path of our slower intelligences, which
+look about them and think twice before taking the leap. Courage! there
+are always fresh woods and pastures new on the other side. A curious
+reflection has more than once flashed upon our minds as we lingered with
+Mr. James over his complex and refined sensations: we mean the very
+striking contrast between the ancient and modern traveller. The former
+saw with his bodily eyes, and reported accordingly, catering for the
+curiosity of homely wits as to the outsides and appearances of things.
+Even Montaigne, habitually introspective as he was, sticks to the old
+method in his travels. The modern traveller, on the other hand,
+superseded by the guide-book, travels in himself, and records for us the
+scenery of his own mind as it is affected by change of sky and the
+various weather of temperament.
+
+Mr. James, in his sketches, frankly acknowledges his preference of the
+Old World. Life--which here seems all drab to him, without due lights
+and shades of social contrast, without that indefinable suggestion of
+immemorial antiquity which has so large a share in picturesque
+impression--is there a dome of many-colored glass irradiating both
+senses and imagination. We shall not blame him too gravely for this, as
+if an American had not as good a right as any ancient of them all to
+say, _Ubi libertas, ibi patria_. It is no real paradox to affirm that a
+man's love of his country may often be gauged by his disgust at it. But
+we think it might fairly be argued against him that the very absence of
+that distracting complexity of associations might help to produce that
+solitude which is the main feeder of imagination. Certainly, Hawthorne,
+with whom no modern European can be matched for the subtlety and power
+of this marvellous quality, is a strong case on the American side of the
+question.
+
+Mr. James's tales, if without any obvious moral, are sure to have a
+clearly defined artistic purpose. They are careful studies of character
+thrown into dramatic action, and the undercurrent of motive is, as it
+should be, not in the circumstances but in the characters themselves. It
+is by delicate touches and hints that his effects are produced. The
+reader is called upon to do his share, and will find his reward in it,
+for Mr. James, as we cannot too often insist, is first and always an
+artist. Nowhere does he show his fine instinct more to the purpose than
+in leaving the tragic element of tales (dealing as they do with
+contemporary life, and that mainly in the drawing-room) to take care of
+itself, and in confining the outward expression of passion within the
+limits of a decorous amenity. Those who must have their intellectual
+gullets tingled with the fiery draught of coarse sensation must go
+elsewhere for their dram; but whoever is capable of the aroma of the
+more delicate vintages will find it here. In the volume before us
+"Madame de Mauves" will illustrate what we mean. There is no space for
+detailed analysis, even if that were ever adequate to give the true
+impression of stories so carefully worked out and depending so much for
+their effect on a gradual cumulation of particulars each in itself
+unemphatic. We have said that Mr. James shows promise as well as
+accomplishment, gaining always in mastery of his material. It is but a
+natural inference from this that his "Roderick Hudson" is the fullest
+and most finished proof of his power as a story-teller. Indeed, we may
+say frankly that it pleases us the more because the characters are drawn
+with a bolder hand and in more determined outline, for if Mr. James need
+any friendly caution, it is against over-delicacy of handling.
+
+
+
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
+
+
+The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon English
+soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was
+first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre
+remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel
+Harvey,--a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,--whose chief claim to
+remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was
+the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure
+Letters" (1592) he says, "If I never deserve anye better remembraunce,
+let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English Hexameter,
+whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and excellent Sir
+Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and elsewhere."
+This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an afterthought
+with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him and Spenser in
+1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a collaborator with
+Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of Surrey is said to have
+been the first who wrote thus in English. The most successful person,
+however, was William Webb, who translated two of Virgil's Eclogues with
+a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in his "Schoolmaster" (1570),
+had already suggested the adoption of the ancient hexameter by English
+poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham in his "Art of Poesie")
+thought the number of monosyllabic words in English an insuperable
+objection to verses in which there was a large proportion of dactyls,
+and recommended, therefore, that a trial should be made with iambics.
+Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have tried his hand at the new
+kind of verse. He says:
+
+    I like your late Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I
+    also enure my penne sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or
+    chiefest hardnesse, whych seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime
+    gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that
+    it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, as in
+    _Carpenter_; the middle sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when
+    it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that
+    draweth one legge after hir and _Heaven_, being used shorte as one
+    sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a _Diastole_, is
+    like a lame dogge that holdes up one legge. But it is to be wonne
+    with Custome, and rough words must be subdued with Vse. For why a
+    God's name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of our
+    owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the Sounde, reserving the
+    Quantitie to the Verse?
+
+The amiable Edmonde seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this
+sentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue
+English to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for
+example, make the vowel in "debt" long, in the teeth of use and wont.
+
+We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the ear
+of Master Gabriel Harvey,--an ear that must have been long by position,
+in virtue of its place on his head.
+
+  Not the like _Discourser_, for Tongue and head to be fóund out;
+  Not the like _resolute Man_, for great and serious áffayres;
+  Not the like _Lynx_, to spie out secretes and priuities óf States;
+  _Eyed_ like to _Argus_, _Earde_ like to _Midas_, _Nosd_ like to _Naso_,
+  Winged like to _Mercury_, fittst of a Thousand for to be émployed.
+
+And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the
+"Aeneid."
+
+  Laocoon storming from Princelie Castel is hastning,
+  And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine
+  Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie?
+  Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,
+  Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlisses
+  So soone forgotten? My life for an haulfpennie (Trojans), etc.
+
+Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:--
+
+  Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,
+  And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed.
+
+Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff, "that
+drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill,
+like the waye betwixt Stamford and Beechfeeld, and goes like a horse
+plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to the
+saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It will be noticed that his
+prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England at
+that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so far
+useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's "Defence of Ryme" (1603),
+one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also, in his
+"Satires," condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for their
+grave beauty and strength.
+
+The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich
+Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to
+the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His
+"Odyssey" (1783), his "Iliad" (1791), and his "Luise" (1795), were
+confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann and
+Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modern
+hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other classic metres
+into England, and we should be grateful to him, at least, for having
+given the model for Canning's "Knife-grinder." The exotic, however,
+again refused to take root, and for many years after we have no example
+of English hexameters. It was universally conceded that the temper of
+our language was unfriendly to them.
+
+It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only
+tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of the
+Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but "Evangeline"
+(1847), though encumbered with too many descriptive irrelevancies, was
+so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made converts by
+thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than this, it made
+Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary English poets.
+Clough's "Bothie"--poem whose singular merit has hitherto failed of the
+wide appreciation it deserves--followed not long after; and Kingsley's
+"Andromeda" is yet damp from the press.
+
+While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by "Evangeline" is a
+striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have
+never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a
+dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform
+for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow
+into prose,--as in the verse
+
+  Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,
+
+and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his style
+in other metres, as where he says
+
+  Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_,
+
+using a word as essentially unpoetic as "surtout or pea-jacket." We
+think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms
+the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented
+sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of
+phrase.
+
+But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as
+frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles
+Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the
+narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with a
+firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness, and
+simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest
+artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the
+picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is with
+a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and characters
+of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of Priscilla
+spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We feel charmed
+to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the little old
+familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are astonished,
+like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius could be
+contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot associate
+sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins may be
+consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot
+Desmoulins--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.
+
+Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary
+popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait
+for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any
+general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to
+receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in
+itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and
+always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly
+popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the
+great poets--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and
+naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which
+brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed
+expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that is
+a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one who
+is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr.
+Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics
+are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done,
+because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault is
+a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his readers,
+which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be drawn from
+any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two stanzas could
+be cut off from "The Two Angels," a poem which, without them, is as
+perfect as anything in the language.
+
+Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain jewels
+in Maga's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should, perhaps,
+have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of our most
+precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some very
+unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it seemed to
+us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original poet. The
+writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more complex or
+more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite with the
+few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and not
+personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the development
+of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the gratitude and
+love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace
+and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr.
+Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets,
+deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic
+narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In
+our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red
+pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to
+overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if,
+since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative
+than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Apart from its intrinsic
+beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful
+consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict
+of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no
+fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that
+which charms now and charms always,--true power and originality, without
+grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic type
+of strength.
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
+
+
+It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular of
+American, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of his
+nature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of his
+images, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justify
+the public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation will
+settle into fame. That he has not _this_ of Tennyson, nor _that_ of
+Browning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other things
+that are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in his
+verse that make day for a moment in this dim cavern of consciousness
+where we grope; but there is an equable sunshine that touches the
+landscape of life with a new charm, and lures us out into healthier air.
+If he fall short of the highest reaches of imagination, he is none the
+less a master within his own sphere--all the more so, indeed, that he is
+conscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving to
+be other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as in
+these latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poets
+like that of Irving among our prose-writers. Make whatever deductions
+and qualifications, and they still keep their place in the hearts and
+minds of men. In point of time he is our Chaucer--the first who imported
+a finer foreign culture into our poetry.
+
+His present volume shows a greater ripeness than any of its
+predecessors. We find a mellowness of early autumn in it. There is the
+old sweetness native to the man, with greater variety of character and
+experience. The personages are all drawn from the life, and sketched
+with the light firmness of a practised art. They have no more
+individuality than is necessary to the purpose of the poem, which
+consists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellers
+gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its
+sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a
+natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of
+his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the
+same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities
+of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes,
+and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease of
+style which is, of all things, the hardest to attain. The verse flows
+clear and sweet as honey, and with a faint fragrance that tells, but not
+too plainly, of flowers that grew in many fields. We are made to feel
+that, however tedious the processes of culture may be, the ripe result
+in facile power and scope of fancy is purely delightful. We confess that
+we are so heartily weary of those cataclysms of passion and sentiment
+with which literature has been convulsed of late,--as if the main object
+were, not to move the reader, but to shake the house about his
+ears,--that the homelike quiet and beauty of such poems as these is like
+an escape from noise to nature.
+
+As regards the structure of the work looked at as a whole, it strikes us
+as a decided fault, that the Saga of King Olaf is so disproportionately
+long, especially as many of the pieces which compose it are by no means
+so well done as the more strictly original ones. We have no quarrel with
+the foreign nature of the subject as such,--for any good matter is
+American enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking
+that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for
+freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself
+felt. Put into English, the Saga seems _too_ Norse; and there is often a
+hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for
+literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but
+hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the
+ethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent"
+is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," which
+he learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland,
+where he played as a boy. We are willing, however, to pardon the parts
+which we find somewhat ineffectual, in favor of the "Nun of Nidaros,"
+which concludes, and in its gracious piety more than redeems, them all.
+
+
+
+
+WHITTIER
+
+IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
+
+
+It is a curious illustration of the attraction of opposites, that, among
+our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in
+the Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a
+drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to
+the tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of
+our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burns
+all the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is not
+as a singular antithesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity of
+his is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as illustrating
+how deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon the
+commonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sect
+they chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of the
+Puritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englander
+is too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens to
+reverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of a
+sincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poetic
+sentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitiful
+snobbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of the
+Puritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest men
+brought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of the
+democracy which was to develop itself from their institutions. They
+brought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly nature
+of the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate and
+disperse itself. The same conditions have produced the same results also
+at the South, and nothing but slavery blocks the way to a perfect
+sympathy between the two sections.
+
+Mr. Whittier is essentially a lyric poet, and the fervor of his
+temperament gives his pieces of that kind a remarkable force and
+effectiveness. Twenty years ago many of his poems were in the nature of
+_conciones ad populum_, vigorous stump-speeches in verse, appealing as
+much to the blood as the brain, and none the less convincing for that.
+By regular gradations ever since his tone has been softening and his
+range widening. As a poet he stands somewhere between Burns and Cowper,
+akin to the former in patriotic glow, and to the latter in intensity of
+religious anxiety verging sometimes on morbidness. His humanity, if it
+lack the humorous breadth of the one, has all the tenderness of the
+other. In love of outward nature he yields to neither. His delight in it
+is not a new sentiment or a literary tradition, but the genuine passion
+of a man born and bred in the country, who has not merely a visiting
+acquaintance with the landscape, but stands on terms of lifelong
+friendship with hill, stream, rock, and tree. In his descriptions he
+often catches the _expression_ of rural scenery, a very different thing
+from the mere _looks_, with the trained eye of familiar intimacy. A
+somewhat shy and hermitical being we take him to be, and more a student
+of his own heart than of men. His characters, where he introduces such,
+are commonly abstractions, with little of the flesh and blood of real
+life in them, and this from want of experience rather than of sympathy;
+for many of his poems show him capable of friendship almost womanly in
+its purity and warmth. One quality which we especially value in him is
+the intense home-feeling which, without any conscious aim at being
+American, gives his poetry a flavor of the soil surprisingly refreshing.
+Without being narrowly provincial, he is the most indigenous of our
+poets. In these times, especially, his uncalculating love of country has
+a profound pathos in it. He does not flare the flag in our faces, but
+one feels the heart of a lover throbbing in his anxious verse.
+
+Mr. Whittier, if the most fervid of our poets, is sometimes hurried away
+by this very quality, in itself an excellence, into being the most
+careless. He draws off his verse while the fermentation is yet going on,
+and before it has had time to compose itself and clarify into the ripe
+wine of expression. His rhymes are often faulty beyond the most
+provincial license even of Burns himself. Vigor without elegance will
+never achieve permanent success in poetry. We think, also, that he has
+too often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path to
+which his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, into
+metaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real life
+of his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a _smudge_, and gives
+evidence of itself in smoke instead of flame. Where he follows his truer
+instincts, he is often admirable in the highest sense, and never without
+the interest of natural thought and feeling naturally expressed.
+
+
+
+
+HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
+
+
+The natural product of a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man
+and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard
+Barton. _His_ verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the
+sect; for from title-page to colophon there was no sin either in the way
+of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse,
+that brewed a cup, neither cheering unduly nor inebriating, out of the
+emptyings of Wordsworth's teapot. How that little busy B. improved each
+shining hour, how neatly he laid his wax, it gives us a cold shiver to
+think of--_ancora ci raccappriccia!_ Against a copy of verses signed
+"B.B.," as we remember them in the hardy Annuals that went to seed so
+many years ago, we should warn our incautious offspring as an
+experienced duck might her brood against a charge of B.B. shot. It
+behooves men to be careful; for one may chance to suffer lifelong from
+these intrusions of cold lead in early life, as duellists sometimes
+carry about all their days a bullet from which no surgery can relieve
+them. Memory avenges our abuses of her, and, as an awful example, we
+mention the fact that we have never been able to forget certain stanzas
+of another B.B., who, under the title of "Boston Bard," whilom obtained
+from newspaper columns that concession which gods and men would
+unanimously have denied him.
+
+George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on
+established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him
+crazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else it
+might be, was surely not of that kind "that never was on land or sea."
+There has been much that was poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in
+the men themselves. Poetry demands a richer and more various culture,
+and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias
+Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth is
+something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of
+the same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as
+they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate
+for the waste of human life as the Journal of an average Quaker.
+Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing
+springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness.
+
+Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, who
+can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she
+made a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choice
+between Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on the
+whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. He
+sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery. He has not forgiven the
+Puritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admires
+them for all that, calls on his countrymen as
+
+  Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
+  Answering Charles's royal mandate with a stern "Thus saith the Lord,"
+
+and at heart, we suspect, has more sympathy with Miles Standish than
+with Mary Dyer. Indeed,
+
+  Sons of men who sat in meeting with their broadbrims o'er their brow,
+  Answering Charles's royal mandate with a _thee_ instead of _thou_,
+
+would hardly do. Whatever Mr. Whittier may lack, he has the prime merit
+that he smacks of the soil. It is a New England heart he buttons his
+straight-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain now
+and then. Even the native idiom crops out here and there in his verses.
+He makes _abroad_ rhyme with _God_, _law_ with _war_, _us_ with _curse_,
+_scorner_ with _honor_, _been_ with _men_, _beard_ with _shared_. For
+the last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest
+we can make no terms whatever,--they must march out with no honors of
+war. The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give
+a flavor of _essence-pennyr'y'l_ to the very Beatitudes. It differs from
+Lowland Scotch as a _patois_ from a dialect.
+
+But criticism is not a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has other
+and better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in the
+heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soil
+might have made him a Burns or a Béranger for us. New England is dry and
+hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the
+magnolia grows after a fashion. It is all very nice to say to our poets,
+"You have sky and wood and waterfall and men and women--in short, the
+entire outfit of Shakespeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere"; and
+when the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir of
+approval. But it is all _bosh_, nevertheless. Nature is _not_ the same
+here, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled his
+being with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped in
+history, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere of
+thought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition. Nature without an
+ideal background is nothing. We may claim whatever merits we like (and
+our orators are not too bashful), we may be as free and enlightened as
+we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We may
+be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to
+the political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has little
+of that marvellous bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finer
+issues than a gregarious activity in hoarding. The Puritans left us a
+fine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but they
+disinherited us of the past. Not a single stage-property of poetry did
+they bring with them but the good old Devil, with his graminivorous
+attributes, and even he could not stand the climate. Neither horn nor
+hoof nor tail of him has been seen for a century. He is as dead as the
+goat-footed Pan, whom he succeeded, and we tenderly regret him.
+
+Mr. Whittier himself complains somewhere of
+
+  The rigor of our frozen sky,
+
+and he seems to have been thinking of our clear, thin, intellectual
+atmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artists
+complain that it rounds no edges. We have sometimes thought that his
+verses suffered from a New England taint in a too great tendency to
+metaphysics and morals, which may be the bases on which poetry rests,
+but should not be carried too high above-ground. Without this, however,
+he would not have been the typical New England poet that he is. In the
+present volume there is little of it. It is more purely objective than
+any of its forerunners, and is full of the most charming rural pictures
+and glimpses, in which every sight and sound, every flower, bird, and
+tree, is neighborly and homely. He makes us see
+
+        the old swallow-haunted barns,
+  Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
+  Through which the moted sunlight streams.
+  And winds blow freshly in to shake
+  The red plumes of the roosted cocks
+  And the loose hay-mow's scented locks,--
+
+                the cattle-yard
+  With the white horns tossing above the wall,
+
+the spring-blossoms that drooped over the river,
+
+  Lighting up the swarming shad,--
+
+and
+
+        the bulged nets sweeping shoreward
+  With their silver-sided haul.
+
+Every picture is full of color, and shows that true eye for Nature which
+sees only what it ought, and that artistic memory which brings home
+compositions and not catalogues. There is hardly a hill, rock, stream,
+or sea-fronting headland in the neighborhood of his home that he has not
+fondly remembered. Sometimes, we think, there is too much description,
+the besetting sin of modern verse, which has substituted what should be
+called wordy-painting for the old art of painting in a single word. The
+essential character of Mr. Whittier's poetry is lyrical, and the rush of
+the lyric, like that of a brook, allows few pictures. Now and then there
+may be an eddy where the feeling lingers and reflects a bit of scenery,
+but for the most part it can only catch gleams of color that mingle with
+the prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it. This volume
+contains some of the best of Mr. Whittier's productions in this kind.
+"Skipper Ireson's Ride" we hold to be by long odds the best of modern
+ballads. There are others nearly as good in their way, and all, with a
+single exception, embodying native legends. In "Telling the Bees," Mr.
+Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of exquisite
+grace and feeling. "The Garrison of Cape Ann" would have been a fine
+poem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at the
+end of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point of a sword. It is
+pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton
+Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad
+English and worse Latin. With all his faults, that conceited old pedant
+contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on
+this side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the trouble
+to give us a tolerably correct edition of it. Absurdity is common
+enough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightful
+gift.
+
+This last volume has given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier's
+powers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his
+earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third
+stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said
+Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer
+and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The
+half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and,
+we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia." The
+years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richer
+quality in these verses where the ferment is over and the _rile_ has
+quietly settled. We have had no more purely American poet than Mr.
+Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous
+expression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been
+so true to the present.
+
+
+
+
+SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
+
+
+At the close of his poem Mr. Whittier utters a hope that it may recall
+some pleasant country memories to the overworked slaves of our great
+cities, and that he may deserve those thanks which are all the more
+grateful that they are rather divined by the receiver than directly
+expressed by the giver. The reviewer cannot aspire to all the merit of
+this confidential privacy and pleasing shyness of gratitude, but he may
+fairly lay claim to a part of it, inasmuch as, though obliged to speak
+his thanks publicly, he need not do it to the author's face. We are
+again indebted to Mr. Whittier, as we have been so often before, for a
+very real and a very refined pleasure. The little volume before us has
+all his most characteristic merits. It is true to Nature and in local
+coloring, pure in sentiment, quietly deep in feeling, and full of those
+simple touches which show the poetic eye and the trained hand. Here is a
+New England interior glorified with something of that inward light which
+is apt to be rather warmer in the poet than the Quaker, but which,
+blending the qualities of both in Mr. Whittier, produces that kind of
+spiritual picturesqueness which gives so peculiar a charm to his verse.
+There is in this poem a warmth of affectionate memory and religious
+faith as touching as it is uncommon, and which would be altogether
+delightful if it did not remind us that the poet was growing old. Not
+that there is any other mark of senescence than the ripened sweetness of
+a life both publicly and privately well spent. There is fire enough, but
+it glows more equably and shines on sweeter scenes than in the poet's
+earlier verse. It is as if a brand from the camp-fire had kindled these
+logs on the old homestead's hearth, whose flickering benediction touches
+tremulously those dear heads of long ago that are now transfigured with
+a holier light. The father, the mother, the uncle, the schoolmaster, the
+uncanny guest, are all painted in warm and natural colors, with perfect
+truth of detail and yet with all the tenderness of memory. Of the family
+group the poet is the last on earth, and there is something deeply
+touching in the pathetic sincerity of the affection which has outlived
+them all, looking back to before the parting, and forward to the assured
+reunion.
+
+But aside from its poetic and personal interest, and the pleasure it
+must give to every one who loves pictures from the life, "Snow-Bound"
+has something of historical interest. It describes scenes and manners
+which the rapid changes of our national habits will soon have made as
+remote from us as if they were foreign or ancient. Already, alas! even
+in farmhouses, backlog and forestick are obsolescent words, and
+close-mouthed stoves chill the spirit while they bake the flesh with
+their grim and undemonstrative hospitality. Already are the railroads
+displacing the companionable cheer of crackling walnut with the dogged
+self-complacency and sullen virtue of anthracite. Even where wood
+survives, he is too often shut in the dreary madhouse cell of an
+airtight, round which one can no more fancy a social mug of flip
+circling than round a coffin. Let us be thankful that we can sit in Mr.
+Whittier's chimney-corner and believe that the blaze he has kindled for
+us shall still warm and cheer, when a wood fire is as faint a tradition
+in New as in Old England.
+
+We have before had occasion to protest against Mr. Whittier's
+carelessness in accents and rhymes, as in pronouncing "ly'ceum," and
+joining in unhallowed matrimony such sounds as _awn_ and _orn_, _ents_
+and _ence_. We would not have the Muse emulate the unidiomatic
+preciseness of a normal school-mistress, but we cannot help thinking
+that, if Mr. Whittier writes thus on principle, as we begin to suspect,
+he errs in forgetting that thought so refined as his can be fitly
+matched only with an equal refinement of expression, and loses something
+of its charm when cheated of it. We hope he will, at least, never mount
+Pega'sus, or water him in Heli'con, and that he will leave Mu'seum to
+the more vulgar sphere and obtuser sensibilities of Barnum. Where Nature
+has sent genius, she has a right to expect that it shall be treated with
+a certain elegance of hospitality.
+
+
+
+
+POETRY AND NATIONALITY[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: This essay, to which I have given the above title, forms
+the greater part of a review of poems by John James Piatt. The brief,
+concluding portion of the review is of little value and is omitted here.
+Piatt died several years ago. He was a great friend of William Dean
+Howells, and once published a volume of poems in collaboration with him.
+A.M.]
+
+One of the dreams of our earlier horoscope-mongers was, that a poet
+should come out of the West, fashioned on a scale somewhat proportioned
+to our geographical pretensions. Our rivers, forests, mountains,
+cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in him their antitype
+and voice. Shaggy he was to be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties,
+unhampered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse, half-alligator
+breed. By him at last the epos of the New World was to be fitly sung,
+the great tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for all time. It
+was a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judicious
+prophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its
+terms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dare
+affirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he was
+impossible? And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless.
+
+Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturally
+levy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images and
+illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhere
+outside of the life that lay immediately about him. Life in its large
+sense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, is
+the only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always close
+at hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the
+difference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota is
+almost inappreciable. Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always to
+underlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it. The Iliad
+and the Odyssey paint manners that are only here and there incidentally
+true to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either never
+existed or had long since passed away. Had Dante's scope been narrowed
+to contemporary Italy, the "Divina Commedia" would have been a
+picture-book merely. But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspired
+him was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theories
+as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shakespeare shows us less of
+the England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time.
+The struggle of Goethe's whole life was to emancipate himself from
+Germany, and fill his lungs for once with a more universal air.
+
+Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in these rare fruits, some
+gift of the sun peculiar to the region that ripened them. If we are ever
+to have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality will be of
+this subtile essence, something that shall make him unspeakably nearer
+to us, while it does not provincialize him for the rest of mankind. The
+popular recipe for compounding him would give us, perhaps, the most
+sublimely furnished bore in human annals. The novel aspects of life
+under our novel conditions may give some freshness of color to our
+literature; but democracy itself, which many seem to regard as the
+necessary Lucina of some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract an
+influence to serve for any such purpose. If any American author may be
+looked on as in some sort the result of our social and political ideal,
+it is Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the traditional, in the
+irresponsible freedom of his speculation, and his faith in the absolute
+value of his own individuality, is certainly, to some extent, typical;
+but if ever author was inspired by the past, it is he, and he is as far
+as possible from the shaggy hero of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, who
+have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may
+safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our
+representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the
+credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hope
+for better things.
+
+[Footnote 1: This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is
+mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. The
+Howells essay appeared two years before the above. A.M.]
+
+The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; and
+if a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and the
+gift of the right word,--for it is these, and not sublime spaces, that
+make a poet,--he will be original rather in spite of democracy than in
+consequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite as much to the
+accumulations of the Old World as to the promises of the New. But for a
+long while yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not, perhaps, for
+the birth of such a man, but for his development and culture. At
+present, with the largest reading population in the world, perhaps no
+country ever offered less encouragement to the higher forms of art or
+the more thorough achievements of scholarship. Even were it not so, it
+would be idle to expect us to produce any literature so peculiarly our
+own as was the natural growth of ages less communicative, less open to
+every breath of foreign influence. Literature tends more and more to
+become a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality. Any
+more Cids, or Songs of Roland, or Nibelungens, or Kalewalas are out of
+the question,--nay, anything at all like them; for the necessary
+insulation of race, of country, of religion, is impossible, even were it
+desirable. Journalism, translation, criticism, and facility of
+intercourse tend continually more and more to make the thought and turn
+of expression in cultivated men identical all over the world. Whether we
+like it or not, the costume of mind and body is gradually becoming of
+one cut.
+
+
+
+
+W.D. HOWELLS
+
+VENETIAN LIFE
+
+
+Those of our readers who watch with any interest the favorable omens of
+our literature from time to time, must have had their eyes drawn to
+short poems, remarkable for subtilty of sentiment and delicacy of
+expression, and bearing the hitherto unfamiliar name of Mr. Howells.
+Such verses are not common anywhere; as the work of a young man they are
+very uncommon. Youthful poets commonly begin by trying on various
+manners before they settle upon any single one that is prominently their
+own. But what especially interested us in Mr. Howells was, that his
+writings were from the very first not merely tentative and preliminary,
+but had somewhat of the conscious security of matured _style_. This is
+something which most poets arrive at through much tribulation. It is
+something which has nothing to do with the measure of their intellectual
+powers or of their moral insight, but is the one quality which
+essentially distinguishes the artist from the mere man of genius. Among
+the English poets of the last generation, Keats is the only one who
+early showed unmistakable signs of it, and developed it more and more
+fully until his untimely death. Wordsworth, though in most respects a
+far profounder man, attained it only now and then, indeed only once
+perfectly,--in his "Laodamia." Now, though it be undoubtedly true from
+one point of view that what a man has to say is of more importance than
+how he says it, and that modern criticism especially is more apt to be
+guided by its moral and even political sympathies than by aesthetic
+principles, it remains as true as ever that only those things have been
+said finally which have been said perfectly, and that this finished
+utterance is peculiarly the office of poetry, or of what, for want of
+some word as comprehensive as the German _Dichtung_, we are forced to
+call imaginative literature. Indeed, it may be said that, in whatever
+kind of writing, it is style alone that is able to hold the attention of
+the world long. Let a man be never so rich in thought, if he is clumsy
+in the expression of it, his sinking, like that of an old Spanish
+treasureship, will be hastened by the very weight of his bullion, and
+perhaps, after the lapse of a century, some lucky diver fishes up his
+ingots and makes a fortune out of him.
+
+That Mr. Howells gave unequivocal indications of possessing this fine
+quality interested us in his modest preludings. Marked, as they no doubt
+were, by some uncertainty of aim and indefiniteness of thought, that
+"stinting," as Chaucer calls it, of the nightingale "ere he beginneth
+sing," there was nothing in them of the presumption and extravagance
+which young authors are so apt to mistake for originality and vigor.
+Sentiment predominated over reflection, as was fitting in youth; but
+there was a refinement, an instinctive reserve of phrase, and a felicity
+of epithet, only too rare in modern, and especially in American writing.
+He was evidently a man more eager to make something good than to make a
+sensation,--one of those authors more rare than ever in our day of
+hand-to-mouth cleverness, who has a conscious ideal of excellence, and,
+as we hope, the patience that will at length reach it. We made occasion
+to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase
+our interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the
+rough-and-ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with
+no advantage of college-training, who, passing from the compositor's
+desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of
+the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated. A
+singular fruit, we thought, of our shaggy democracy,--as interesting a
+phenomenon in that regard as it has been our fortune to encounter. Where
+is the rudeness of a new community, the pushing vulgarity of an
+imperfect civilization, the licentious contempt of forms that marks our
+unchartered freedom, and all the other terrible things which have so
+long been the bugaboos of European refinement? Here was a natural
+product, as perfectly natural as the deliberate attempt of "Walt
+Whitman" to answer the demand of native and foreign misconception was
+perfectly artificial. Our institutions do not, then, irretrievably doom
+us to coarseness and to impatience of that restraining precedent which
+alone makes true culture possible and true art attainable. Unless we are
+mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells
+which is a better argument for the American social and political system
+than any empirical theories that can be constructed against it.
+
+We know of no single word which will so fitly characterize Mr. Howells's
+new volume about Venice as "delightful." The artist has studied his
+subject for four years, and at last presents us with a series of
+pictures having all the charm of tone and the minute fidelity to nature
+which were the praise of the Dutch school of painters, but with a higher
+sentiment, a more refined humor, and an airy elegance that recalls the
+better moods of Watteau. We do not remember any Italian studies so
+faithful or the result of such continuous opportunity, unless it be the
+"Roba di Roma" of Mr. Story, and what may be found scattered in the
+works of Henri Beyle. But Mr. Story's volumes recorded only the chance
+observations of a quick and familiar eye in the intervals of a
+profession to which one must be busily devoted who would rise to the
+acknowledged eminence occupied by their author; and Beyle's mind, though
+singularly acute and penetrating, had too much of the hardness of a man
+of the world and of Parisian cynicism to be altogether agreeable. Mr.
+Howells, during four years of that consular leisure which only Venice
+could make tolerable, devoted himself to the minute study of the superb
+prison to which he was doomed, and his book is his "Prigioni." Venice
+has been the university in which he has fairly earned the degree of
+Master. There is, perhaps, no European city, not even Bruges, not even
+Rome herself, which, not yet in ruins, is so wholly of the past, at once
+alive and turned to marble, like the Prince of the Black Islands in the
+story. And what gives it a peculiar fascination is that its antiquity,
+though venerable, is yet modern, and, so to speak, continuous; while
+that of Rome belongs half to a former world and half to this, and is
+broken irretrievably in two. The glory of Venice, too, was the
+achievement of her own genius, not an inheritance; and, great no longer,
+she is more truly than any other city the monument of her own greatness.
+She is something wholly apart, and the silence of her watery streets
+accords perfectly with the spiritual mood which makes us feel as if we
+were passing through a city of dream. Fancy now an imaginative young man
+from Ohio, where the log-hut was but yesterday turned to almost less
+enduring brick and mortar, set down suddenly in the midst of all this
+almost immemorial permanence of grandeur. We cannot think of any one on
+whom the impression would be so strangely deep, or whose eyes would be
+so quickened by the constantly recurring shock of unfamiliar objects.
+Most men are poor observers, because they are cheated into a delusion of
+intimacy with the things so long and so immediately about them; but
+surely we may hope for something like seeing from fresh eyes, and those
+too a poet's, when they open suddenly on a marvel so utterly alien to
+their daily vision and so perdurably novel as Venice. Nor does Mr.
+Howells disappoint our expectation. We have here something like a
+full-length portrait of the Lady of the Lagoons.
+
+We have been struck in this volume, as elsewhere in writings of the same
+author, with the charm of _tone_ that pervades it. It is so constant as
+to bear witness, not only to a real gift, but to the thoughtful
+cultivation of it. Here and there Mr. Howells yields to the temptation
+of _execution_, to which persons specially felicitous in language are
+liable, and pushes his experiments of expression to the verge of being
+unidiomatic, in his desire to squeeze the last drop of significance from
+words; but this is seldom, and generally we receive that unconscious
+pleasure in reading him which comes of naturalness, the last and highest
+triumph of good writing. Mr. Howells, of all men, does not need to be
+told that, as wine of the highest flavor and most delicate _bouquet_ is
+made from juice pressed out by the unaided weight of the grapes, so in
+expression we are in danger of getting something like acridness if we
+crush in with the first sprightly runnings the skins and kernels of
+words in our vain hope to win more than we ought of their color and
+meaning. But, as we have said, this is rather a temptation to which he
+now and then shows himself liable, than a fault for which he can often
+be blamed. If a mind open to all poetic impressions, a sensibility too
+sincere ever to fall into maudlin sentimentality, a style flexible and
+sweet without weakness, and a humor which, like the bed of a stream, is
+the support of deep feeling, and shows waveringly through it in spots of
+full sunshine,--if such qualities can make a truly delightful book, then
+Mr. Howells has made one in the volume before us. And we give him
+warning that much will be expected of one who at his years has already
+shown himself capable of so much.
+
+
+
+
+EDGAR A. POE[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: The following notice of Mr. Poe's life and works was
+written at his own request, and accompanied a portrait of him published
+in _Graham's Magazine_ for February, 1845. It is here [in R.W.
+Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)] given with a few alterations
+and omissions.]
+
+The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or,
+if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into
+many systems, each revolving round its several sun, and often presenting
+to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capital
+city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from which
+life and vigor radiate to the extremities, but resembles more an
+isolated umbilicus, stuck down as near as may be to the centre of the
+land, and seeming rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to
+serve any present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its
+literature almost more distinct than those of the different dialects of
+Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one of her own, of
+which some articulate rumor barely has reached us dwellers by the
+Atlantic.
+
+Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism of
+contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give praise where
+it is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often seduces
+the iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she writes what
+seems rather like an epitaph than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as
+an alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into any man's hat. The
+critic's ink may suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls
+or of sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we
+might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding-place
+of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we usually find
+mixed with it.
+
+Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life of
+imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and
+peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of a
+romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by
+Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed the
+warranty of a large estate to the young poet. Having received a
+classical education in England, he returned home and entered the
+University of Virginia, where, after an extravagant course, followed by
+reformation at the last extremity, he was graduated with the highest
+honors of his class. Then came a boyish attempt to join the fortunes of
+the insurgent Greeks, which ended at St. Petersburg, where he got into
+difficulties through want of a passport, from which he was rescued by
+the American consul, and sent home.[1] He now entered the military
+academy at West Point from which he obtained a dismissal on hearing of
+the birth of a son to his adopted father, by a second marriage, an event
+which cut off his expectations as an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, in
+whose will his name was not mentioned, soon after relieved him of all
+doubt in this regard, and he committed himself at once to authorship for
+a support. Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) a
+small volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, and
+excited high expectations of its author's future distinction in the
+minds of many competent judges.
+
+[Footnote 1: There is little evidence for this story, which some
+biographers have dismissed as a myth created by Poe himself. See
+Woodberry's _Poe_, v. i, p. 337.]
+
+That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet's earliest lispings
+there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare's first poems, though
+brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness, give but a very faint
+promise of the directness, condensation, and overflowing moral of his
+maturer works. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare is hardly a case in point,
+his "Venus and Adonis" having been published, we believe, in his
+twenty-sixth year. Milton's Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye for
+nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint
+of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all
+the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and
+eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow
+namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius
+which he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lost
+more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator
+of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is
+called) the interest of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke
+White's promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey
+but surely with no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a
+traditional piety, which, to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less
+objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment
+of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning
+pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional
+simple, lucky beauty. Burns, having fortunately been rescued by his
+humble station from the contaminating society of the "best models" wrote
+well and naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough to
+have had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from
+which, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from
+the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever
+of that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest,
+most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's
+"Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid
+and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is
+but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early
+poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient
+investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer
+of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
+who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and
+more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest
+specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that
+ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions
+of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope
+of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a
+wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for
+rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional
+combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate
+physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only
+remarkable when it displays an effort of _reason_, and the rudest verses
+in which we can trace some conception of the ends of poetry, are worth
+all the miracles of smooth juvenile versification. A schoolboy, one
+would say, might acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by an
+association with the motion of the play-ground tilt.
+
+Mr. Poe's early productions show that he could see through the verse to
+the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the life
+and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of the
+other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever
+read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of
+purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre.
+Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express
+by the contradictory phrase of _innate experience_. We copy one of the
+shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a
+little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and symmetry of the
+outline are such as few poets ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosia
+about it.
+
+  TO HELEN
+
+  Helen, thy beauty is to me
+    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
+  That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
+    The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
+    To his own native shore.
+
+  On desperate seas long wont to roam,
+    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
+  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
+    To the glory that was Greece
+    And the grandeur that was Rome.
+
+  Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
+    How statue-like I see thee stand!
+  The agate lamp within thy hand,
+    Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
+    Are Holy Land!
+
+It is the _tendency_ of the young poet that impresses us. Here is no
+"withering scorn," no heart "blighted" ere it has safely got into its
+teens, none of the drawing-room sans-culottism which Byron had brought
+into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the Greek
+Helicon in it. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It is not of
+that kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of the
+fingers. It is of that finer sort which the inner ear alone can
+estimate. It seems simple, like a Greek column, because of its
+perfection. In a poem named "Ligeia," under which title he intended to
+personify the music of nature, our boy-poet gives us the following
+exquisite picture:
+
+  Ligeia! Ligeia!
+    My beautiful one,
+  Whose harshest idea
+    Will to melody run,
+  _Say, is it thy will_,
+    _On the breezes to toss_,
+  _Or, capriciously still_,
+    _Like the lone albatross_,
+  _Incumbent on night_,
+    _As she on the air_,
+  _To keep watch with delight_
+    _On the harmony there_?
+
+John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too long
+capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similar
+passages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.
+
+Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to call
+_genius_. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there
+is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power. Let
+talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such magnetism.
+Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting. Talent
+sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of
+clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so
+that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton, and if
+Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses
+shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may
+make friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the
+divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to
+what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has
+not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are
+allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away
+by their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely
+prisoned in the pommel of its sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of
+the spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive the
+ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man of
+mere talent ever flung his inkstand at the devil.
+
+When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he has
+produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it at all
+is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence for the
+trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and the greenest
+laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses and Aristotles of our
+newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order to
+render a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness of
+attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is,
+according to these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of
+the country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable
+residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude
+be, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of their
+idiosyncrasy.
+
+Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous
+yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first
+of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge
+of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to
+conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a
+correct outline, while the second groups, fills up, and colors. Both of
+these Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his prose
+works, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the first in his
+later ones. In judging of the merit of an author, and assigning him his
+niche among our household gods, we have a right to regard him from our
+own point of view, and to measure him by our own standard. But, in
+estimating the amount of power displayed in his works, we must be
+governed by his own design, and, placing them by the side of his own
+ideal, find how much is wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions
+of the objects of art. He esteems that object to be the creation of
+Beauty, and perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that we
+disagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we shall
+take his own standard as our guide. The temple of the god of song is
+equally accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it for
+all who bring offerings, or seek an oracle.
+
+In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that
+dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable
+into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a
+very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a
+power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of
+mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a
+button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the
+predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded,
+analysis. It is this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at once
+reaches forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bring
+about certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate parts
+tend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to
+his own mind. To him _x_ is a known quantity all along. In any picture
+that he paints, he understands the chemical properties of all his
+colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the
+shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a
+geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with
+_Mysticism_. The Mystic dwells _in_ the mystery, is enveloped with it;
+it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and
+the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other
+hand, is a spectator _ab extrà_. He analyzes, he dissects, he watches
+
+  ----with an eye serene,
+  The very pulse of the machine,
+
+for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and piston-rods,
+all working to produce a certain end.
+
+This analyzing tendency of his mind balances the poetical, and, by
+giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful
+reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great
+power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to
+trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of
+horror, also, he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by a
+dusky hint some terrible _doubt_ which is the secret of all horror. He
+leaves to imagination the task of finishing the picture, a task to which
+only she is competent.
+
+  For much imaginary work was there;
+  Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
+  That for Achilles' image stood his spear
+  Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind
+  Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind.
+
+Beside the merit of conception, Mr. Poe's writings have also that of
+form. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly classical. It
+would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied
+powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales,
+"The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque
+and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one
+could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre
+beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been
+enough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master of a classic
+style. In this tale occurs, perhaps, the most beautiful of his poems.
+
+The great masters of imagination have seldom resorted to the vague and
+the unreal as sources of effect. They have not used dread and horror
+alone, but only in combination with other qualities, as means of
+subjugating the fancies of their readers. The loftiest muse has ever a
+household and fireside charm about her. Mr. Poe's secret lies mainly in
+the skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mystery
+and terror. In this his success is so great and striking as to deserve
+the name of art, not artifice. We cannot call his materials the noblest
+or purest, but we must concede to him the highest merit of construction.
+
+As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient. Unerring in his
+analysis of dictions, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in the
+faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art. His criticisms are,
+however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic.
+They have the exactness, and at the same time, the coldness of
+mathematical demonstrations. Yet they stand in strikingly refreshing
+contrast with the vague generalisms and sharp personalities of the day.
+If deficient in warmth, they are also without the heat of partizanship.
+They are especially valuable as illustrating the great truth, too
+generally overlooked, that analytic power is a subordinate quality of
+the critic.
+
+On the whole, it may be considered certain that Mr. Poe has attained an
+individual eminence in our literature, which he will keep. He has given
+proof of power and originality. He has done that which could only be
+done once with success or safety, and the imitation or repetition of
+which would produce weariness.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
+
+
+The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death of
+Thackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still our
+social and literary capital. Not even the loss of Irving called forth so
+universal and strong an expression of sorrow. And yet it had been the
+fashion to call Thackeray a cynic. We must take leave to doubt whether
+Diogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been so
+tenderly regretted. We think there was something more in all this than
+mere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius. There was
+a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,--a
+true man.
+
+Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist,
+and could not have been one if he would. Your true cynic is a sceptic
+also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish
+suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself,
+but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest quality
+always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees,
+and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is
+and man as he might be, between the real snob and the ideal image of his
+Creator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm;
+the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from
+the harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to
+say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and
+teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of
+all manner of _shams_, an equally intense love for every kind of
+manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye
+for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever
+it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to
+betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have
+been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison
+between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid
+light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that
+flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that
+_ingenium perfervidum_ of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-Mall
+Jeremiah after all.
+
+It is curious to see how often Nature, original and profuse as she is,
+repeats herself; how often, instead of sending one complete mind like
+Shakespeare, she sends two who are the complements of each
+other,--Fielding and Richardson, Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and George
+Sand, and now again Thackeray and Dickens. We are not fond of
+comparative criticism, we mean of that kind which brings forward the
+merit of one man as if it depreciated the different merit of another,
+nor of supercilious criticism, which measures every talent by some ideal
+standard of possible excellence, and, if it fall short, can find nothing
+to admire. A thing is either good in itself or good for nothing. Yet
+there is such a thing as a contrast of differences between two eminent
+intellects by which we may perhaps arrive at a clearer perception of
+what is characteristic in each. It is almost impossible, indeed, to
+avoid some sort of parallel _à la_ Plutarch between Thackeray and
+Dickens. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they may
+be equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a few
+striking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints
+character, and Dickens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages are
+all men, those of Dickens personified oddities. The one is an artist,
+the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.
+Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the
+illustrations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as
+we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for Dickens
+invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is
+perfect, that of Dickens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast
+less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.
+Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from the
+reporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of the
+greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more
+types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is
+marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is
+very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had
+pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are
+masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon
+by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never
+act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.
+
+Thackeray's style is beyond praise,--so easy, so limpid, showing
+everywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture,
+it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was natural
+to him,--his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond," for example)
+being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respects
+the most finished example we have of what is called a man of the world.
+In the pardonable eulogies which were uttered in the fresh grief at his
+loss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked above
+Fielding,--a position which no one would have been so eager in
+disclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on their
+pedestals. Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written in
+English since Shakespeare. Of a broader and deeper nature, of a larger
+brain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter is
+Society. The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common was
+Richard Steele, as these "Roundabout Papers" show plainly enough. He
+admired Fielding, but he loved Steele.
+
+
+
+
+TWO GREAT AUTHORS
+
+
+
+
+SWIFT[1]
+
+I
+
+
+[Footnote 1: [A review of _The Life of Jonathan Swift_, by John Forster.]]
+
+The cathedral of St. Patrick's, dreary enough in itself seems to grow
+damper and chillier as one's footsteps disturb the silence between the
+grave of its famous Dean and that of Stella, in death as in life near
+yet divided from him, as if to make their memories more inseparable and
+prolong the insoluble problem of their relation to each other. Nor was
+there wanting, when we made our pilgrimage thither, a touch of grim
+humor in the thought that our tipsy guide (Clerk of the Works he had
+dubbed himself for the nonce), as he monotonously recited his
+contradictory anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane," varied by times with
+an irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinary
+biographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled our
+cicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse into
+rhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind of
+conjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servant
+Patrick, but in that sad presence his grotesqueness was as shocking as
+the clown in one of Shakespeare's tragedies to Châteaubriand. A shilling
+sent him back to the neighboring pot-house whence a half-dozen ragged
+volunteers had summoned him, and we were left to our musings. One
+dominating thought shouldered aside all others--namely, how strange a
+stroke of irony it was, how more subtle even than any of the master's
+own, that our most poignant association with the least sentimental of
+men should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to that
+of Abélard and Héloïse should invest the memory of him who had done more
+than all others together to strip life and human nature of their last
+instinctive decency of illusion. His life, or such accounts as we had of
+it, had been full of antitheses as startling as if some malign enchanter
+had embodied one of Macaulay's characters as a conundrum to bewilder the
+historian himself. A generous miser; a sceptical believer; a devout
+scoffer; a tender-hearted misanthrope; a churchman faithful to his order
+yet loathing to wear its uniform; an Irishman hating the Irish, as Heine
+did the Jews,[1] because he was one of them, yet defending them with the
+scornful fierceness of one who hated their oppressors more; a man honest
+and of statesmanlike mind, who lent himself to the basest services of
+party politics for purely selfish ends; a poet whose predominant faculty
+was that of disidealizing; a master of vernacular style, in whose works
+an Irish editor finds hundreds of faults of English to correct;
+strangest of all, a middle-aged clergyman of brutal coarseness, who
+could inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with a
+fruitless passion that broke her heart, the other with a love that
+survived hope and faith to suck away the very sources of that life
+whereof it was the only pride and consolation. No wonder that a new life
+of so problematic a personage as this should be awaited with eagerness,
+the more that it was to be illustrated with much hitherto unpublished
+material and was to be written by the practised hand of Mr. Forster.
+Inconsistency of conduct, of professed opinion, whether of things or
+men, we can understand; but an inconsistent character is something
+without example, and which nature abhors as she does false logic.
+Opportunity may develop, hindrance may dwarf, the prevailing set of
+temptation may give a bent to character, but the germ planted at birth
+can never be wholly disnatured by circumstance any more than soil or
+exposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it is
+cumulative, whether for good or ill; the general tenor of the life is a
+logical sequence from it, and a man can always explain himself to
+himself, if not to others, as a coherent whole, because he always knows,
+or thinks he knows, the value of _x_ in the personal equation. Were it
+otherwise, that sense of conscious identity which alone makes life a
+serious thing and immortality a rational hope, would be impossible. It
+is with the means of finding out this unknown quantity--in other words,
+of penetrating to the man's motives or his understanding of them--that
+the biographer undertakes to supply us, and unless he succeed in this,
+his rummaging of old papers but raises a new cloud of dust to darken our
+insight.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lowell was mistaken. Heine never lost his love for the
+Jews. He regretted his apostasy and always regarded himself as a Jew,
+and not a Christian. His own genius was Hebraic, and not, as Matthew
+Arnold thought, Hellenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowell
+had great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitchell once told
+me that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even wished that he
+had a Hebraic nose. Several documents attest to Lowell's ideas on the
+subject. He even claimed that his middle name "Russell" showed that he
+had Jewish blood. A.M.]
+
+If Mr. Forster's mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality of
+genius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for his
+task. The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which is
+beset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer. A finer sense might recoil
+before investigations whose importance is not at first so clear as their
+promise of unsavoriness. So far as Mr. Forster has gone, we think he has
+succeeded in the highest duty of a biographer: that of making his
+subject interesting and humanly sympathetic to the reader--a feat surely
+of some difficulty with a professed cynic like Swift. He lets him in the
+main tell his own story--a method not always trustworthy, to be sure,
+but safer in the case of one who, whatever else he may have been, was
+almost brutally sincere when he could be so with safety or advantage.
+Still, it should always be borne in mind that he _could_ lie with an air
+of honest candor fit to deceive the very elect. The author of the
+"Battle of the Books" (written in 1697) tells us in the preface to the
+Third Part of Temple's "Miscellanea" (1701) that he "cannot well inform
+the reader upon what occasion" the essay upon Ancient and Modern
+Learning "was writ, having been at that time in another kingdom"; and
+the professed confidant of a ministry, whom the Stuart Papers have
+proved to have been in correspondence with the Pretender, puts on an air
+of innocence (in his "Enquiry into the Behavior of the Queen's last
+Ministry") and undertakes to convince us that nothing could be more
+absurd than to accuse them of Jacobitism. It may be, as Orrery asserted,
+that Swift was "employed, not trusted," but this is hardly to be
+reconciled with Lewis's warning him on the Queen's death to burn his
+papers, or his own jest to Harley about the one being beheaded and the
+other hanged. The fact is that, while in certain contingencies Swift was
+as unscrupulous a liar as Voltaire, he was naturally open and truthful,
+and showed himself to be so whenever his passions or his interest would
+let him. That Mr. Forster should make a hero of the man whose life he
+has undertaken to write is both natural and proper; for without sympathy
+there can be no right understanding, and a hearty admiration is alone
+capable of that generosity in the interpretation of conduct to which all
+men have a right, and which he needs most who most widely transcends the
+ordinary standards or most resolutely breaks with traditionary rules.
+That so virile a character as Swift should have been attractive to women
+is not wonderful, but we think Mr. Forster has gone far towards proving
+that he was capable of winning the deep and lasting affection of men
+also. Perhaps it may not always be safe to trust implicitly the fine
+phrases of his correspondents; for there can be no doubt that Swift
+inspired fear as well as love. Revengefulness is the great and hateful
+blot on his character; his brooding temper turned slights into injuries,
+gave substance to mere suspicion, and once in the morbid mood he was
+utterly reckless of the means of vengeance. His most playful scratch had
+poison in it. His eye was equally terrible for the weak point of friend
+and foe. But giving this all the value it may deserve, the weight of the
+evidence is in favor of his amiability. The testimony of a man so
+sweet-natured and fair-minded as Dr. Delany ought to be conclusive, and
+we do not wonder that Mr. Forster should lay great stress upon it. The
+depreciatory conclusions of Dr. Johnson are doubtless entitled to
+consideration; but his evidence is all from hearsay, and there were
+properties in Swift that aroused in him so hearty a moral repulsion as
+to disenable him for an unprejudiced opinion. Admirable as the
+rough-and-ready conclusions of his robust understanding often are, he
+was better fitted to reckon the quantity of a man's mind than the
+quality of it--the real test of its value; and there is something almost
+comically pathetic in the good faith with which he applies his
+beer-measure to juices that could fairly plead their privilege to be
+gauged by the wine standard. Mr. Forster's partiality qualifies him for
+a fairer judgment of Swift than any which Johnson was capable of
+forming, or, indeed, would have given himself the trouble to form.
+
+But this partiality in a biographer, though to be allowed and even
+commended as a quickener of insight, should not be strong enough to warp
+his mind from its judicial level. While we think that Mr. Forster is
+mainly right in his estimate of Swift's character, and altogether so in
+insisting on trying him by documentary rather than hearsay evidence, it
+is equally true that he is sometimes betrayed into overestimates, and
+into positive statement, where favorable inference would have been
+wiser. Now and then his exaggeration is merely amusing, as where he
+tells us that Swift, "as early as in his first two years after quitting
+Dublin, was _accomplished in French_," the only authority for such a
+statement being a letter of recommendation from Temple saying that he
+"had _some French_." Such compulsory testimonials are not on their _voir
+dire_ any more than epitaphs. So, in speaking of Betty Jones, with whom
+in 1689 Swift had a flirtation that alarmed his mother, Mr. Forster
+assumes that she "was an educated girl" on the sole ground, so far as
+appears, of "her mother and Swift's being cousins." Swift, to be sure,
+thirty years later, on receiving some letters from his old sweetheart,
+"suspects them to be counterfeit" because "she spells like a
+kitchen-maid," and this, perhaps, may be Mr. Forster's authority. But,
+as the letters _were_ genuine, the inference should have been the other
+way. The "letters to Eliza," by the way, which Swift in 1699 directs
+Winder, his successor at Kilroot, to burn, were doubtless those
+addressed to Betty Jones. Mr. Forster does not notice this; but that
+Swift should have preserved them, or copies of them, is of some
+consequence, as tending to show that they were mere exercises in
+composition, thus confirming what he says in the remarkable letter to
+Kendall, written in 1692, when he was already off with the old love and
+on with a new.
+
+These instances of the temptation which most easily besets Mr. Forster
+are trifles, but the same leaning betrays him sometimes into graver
+mistakes of overestimate. He calls Swift the best letter-writer in the
+language, though Gray, Walpole, Cowper, and Lamb be in some essential
+qualities his superiors. He praises his political writing so
+extravagantly that we should think he had not read the "Examiner," were
+it not for the thoroughness of his work in other respects. All that
+Swift wrote in this kind was partisan, excellently fitted to its
+immediate purpose, as we might expect from his imperturbable good sense,
+but by its very nature ephemeral. There is none of that reach of
+historical imagination, none of that grasp of the clue of fatal
+continuity and progression, none of that eye for country which divines
+the future highways of events, that makes the occasional pamphlets of
+Burke, with all their sobs of passionate sentiment, permanent
+acquisitions of political thinking. Mr. Forster finds in Swift's
+"Examiners" all the characteristic qualities of his mind and style,
+though we believe that a dispassionate reader would rather conclude that
+the author, as we have little doubt was the fact, was trying all along
+to conceal his personality under a disguise of decorous commonplace. In
+the same uncritical way Mr. Forster tells us that "the ancients could
+show no such humor and satire as the 'Tale of a Tub' and the 'Battle of
+the Books.'" In spite of this, we shall continue to think Aristophanes
+and even Lucian clever writers, considering the rudeness of the times in
+which they lived. The "Tale of a Tub" has several passages of
+rough-and-tumble satire as good as any of their kind, and some hints of
+deeper suggestion, but the fable is clumsy and the execution unequal and
+disjointed. In conception the "Battle" is cleverer, and it contains
+perhaps the most perfect apologue in the language, but the best strokes
+of satire in it are personal (that of Dryden's helmet, for instance),
+and we enjoy them with an uneasy feeling that we are accessaries in
+something like foul play. Indeed, it may be said of Swift's humor
+generally that it leaves us uncomfortable, and that it too often
+impregnates the memory with a savor of mortal corruption proof against
+all disinfectants. Pure humor cannot flow from so turbid a source as
+_soeva indignatio_, and if man be so filthy and disgusting a creature as
+Swift represents him to be, if he be truly "by nature, reason, learning,
+blind," satire is thrown away upon him for reform and cruel as
+castigation.
+
+Mr. Forster not only rejects the story of Stella's marriage with Swift
+as lacking substantial evidence, but thinks that the limits of their
+intercourse were early fixed and never overpassed. According to him,
+their relation was to be, from the first, one "of affection, not
+desire." We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only woman
+Swift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, that
+he probably did marry her,[1] but only when all hope of the old
+open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault,
+if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa,
+and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no
+explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief
+folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened
+his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with
+remorseful self-contempt. Nothing could be more galling to a proud man
+than the feeling that he had been betrayed by his vanity. It is commonly
+assumed that pride is incompatible with its weaker congener. But pride,
+after all, is nothing more than a stiffened and congealed vanity, and
+melts back to its original ductility when exposed to the milder
+temperature of female partiality. Swift could not deny himself the
+flattery of Vanessa's passion, and not to forbid was to encourage. He
+could not bring himself to administer in time the only effectual remedy,
+by telling her that he was pledged to another woman. When at last he did
+tell her it was too late; and he learned, like so many before and since,
+that the most dangerous of all fires to play with is that of love. This
+was the extent of his crime, and it would have been none if there had
+been no such previous impediment. This alone gives any meaning to what
+he says when Vanessa declared her love:
+
+  Cadenus felt within him rise
+  _Shame_, disappointment, _guilt_, surprise.
+
+[Footnote 1: Most of the authorities conclude that Swift never married
+Stella. A.M.]
+
+Shame there might have been, but surely no guilt on any theory except
+that of an implicit engagement with Stella. That there was something of
+the kind, more or less definite, and that it was of some ten years'
+standing when the affair with Vanessa came to a crisis, we have no
+doubt. When Tisdall offered her marriage in 1704, and Swift wrote to him
+"that if my fortunes and humor served me to think of that state, I
+should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice," she
+accepted the implied terms and rejected her suitor, though otherwise not
+unacceptable to her. She would wait. It is true that Swift had not
+absolutely committed himself, but she had committed him by dismissing
+Tisdall. Without assuming some such tacit understanding, his letters to
+her are unintelligible. He repeatedly alludes to his absence from her as
+only tolerable because it was for her sake no less than his own, and the
+details of his petty economies would be merely vulgar except to her for
+whom their motive gave them a sweetness of humorous pathos. The evidence
+of the marriage seems to be as conclusive as that of a secret can well
+be. Dr. Delany, who ought to have been able to judge of its probability,
+and who had no conceivable motive of misstatement, was assured of it by
+one whose authority was Stella herself. Mr. Monck-Berkeley had it from
+the widow of Bishop Berkeley, and she from her husband, who had it from
+Dr. Ashe, by whom they were married. These are at least unimpeachable
+witnesses. The date of the marriage is more doubtful, but Sheridan is
+probably not far wrong when he puts it in 1716. It was simply a
+reparation, and no union was implied in it. Delany intimates that
+Vanessa, like the young Chevalier, vulgarized her romance in drink. More
+than this, however, was needful to palliate even in Swift the brutal
+allusion to her importunacy in "Gulliver," unless, as is but too
+possible, the passage in question be an outbreak of ferocious spleen
+against her victorious rival. Its coarseness need not make this seem
+impossible, for that was by no means a queasy age, and Swift continued
+on intimate terms with Lady Betty Germaine after the publication of the
+nasty verses on her father. The communication of the secret to Bishop
+Berkeley (who was one of Vanessa's executors) may have been the
+condition of the suppressing Swift's correspondence with her, and would
+have exasperated him to ferocity.
+
+
+II
+
+
+We cannot properly understand Swift's cynicism and bring it into any
+relation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiability
+without taking his whole life into account. Few give themselves the
+trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough
+to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature
+was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it
+effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet.
+With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole
+which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of
+momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the Cowleian
+Pindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint of
+Parisian rather than Theban origin. If the master was but a fresh
+example of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of the
+flying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not even
+the secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earth
+while with perfect good faith he went through all the motions of
+soaring? Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment,
+though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and
+the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent. He who
+could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if
+he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the
+simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a
+trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything
+something else than it was, he would see things as they were--or as, in
+his sullen disgust, they seemed to be--and call them all by their right
+names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a
+Hottentot--nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble
+compromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and not
+ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious
+exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical
+fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with the
+brutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed
+and aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with
+himself. He despised mankind because he found something despicable in
+Jonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion to
+their likeness with himself. He had more or less consciously sacrificed
+self-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man's
+accidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, as
+no other "man of his level" in Ireland was, to being happy with the
+woman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and the
+independence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude after
+all. "Money," he was fond of saying, "is freedom," but he never learned
+that self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect. With a
+hearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yet
+bring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier of
+three royal strumpets. How should he be happy who had defined happiness
+to be "the perpetual possession of being well deceived," and who could
+never be deceived himself? It may well be doubted whether what he
+himself calls "that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of
+things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries
+that in the inside they are good for nothing," be of so penetrative an
+insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather
+that to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had the
+microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the
+loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that
+tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with
+all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his
+shallow friend Gay that life was a jest. To his nobler temper it was
+always profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, we
+suspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears. The lesson is
+worth remembering that _his_ apples of Sodom, like those of lesser men,
+were plucked from boughs of his own grafting.
+
+But there are palliations for him, even if the world were not too ready
+to forgive a man everything if he will only be a genius. Sir Robert
+Walpole used to say "that it was fortunate so few men could be prime
+ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking
+wickedness of mankind." Swift, from his peculiar relation to two
+successive ministries, was in a position to know all that they knew, and
+perhaps, as a recognized place-broker, even more than they knew, of the
+selfish servility of men. He had seen the men who figure so imposingly
+in the stage-processions of history too nearly. He knew the real Jacks
+and Toms as they were over a pot of ale after the scenic illusion was
+done with. He saw the destinies of a kingdom controlled by men far less
+able than himself; the highest of arts, that of politics, degraded to a
+trade in places, and the noblest opportunity, that of office, abused for
+purposes of private gain. His disenchantment began early, probably in
+his intimacy with Sir William Temple, in whom (though he says that all
+that was good and great died with him) he must have seen the weak side
+of solemn priggery and the pretension that made a mystery of statecraft.
+In his twenty-second year he writes:
+
+  Off fly the vizards and discover all:
+    How plain I see through the deceit!
+    How shallow and how gross the cheat!
+       *       *       *       *       *
+    On what poor engines move
+  The thoughts of monarchs and designs of states!
+  What petty motives rule their fates!
+
+      I to such blockheads set my wit!
+      I damn such fools! go, go, you're bit!
+
+Mr. Forster's own style (simpler now than when he was under the
+immediate influence of Dickens, if more slipshod than when repressed by
+Landor) is not in essentials better or worse than usual. It is not
+always clear nor always idiomatic. On page 120 he tells us that "Scott
+did not care to enquire if it was likely that stories of the kind
+referred to should have contributed to form a character, or if it were
+not likelier still that they had grown and settled round a character
+already famous as well as formed." Not to speak of the confusion of
+moods and tenses, the phrase "to form a character" has been so long
+appropriated to another meaning than that which it has here, that the
+sense of the passage vacillates unpleasantly. He tells us that Swift was
+"under engagement to Will Frankland to christen _the baby his wife is
+near bringing to bed_." Parthenogenesis is a simple matter to this. And
+why _Will_ Frankland, _Joe_ Beaumont, and the like? We cannot claim so
+much intimacy with them as Swift, and the eighteenth century might be
+allowed to stand a little on its dignity. If Mr. Forster had been
+quoting the journal to Stella, there would be nothing to say except that
+Swift took liberties with his friends in writing to her which he would
+not have ventured on before strangers. In the same odd jargon, which the
+English journals are fond of calling American, Mr. Forster says that
+"Tom [Leigh] was not _popular_ with Swift." Mr. Forster is not only no
+model for contemporary English, but (what is more serious) sometimes
+mistakes the meaning of words in Swift's day, as when he explains that
+"strongly engaged" meant "interceded with or pressed." It meant much
+more than that, as could easily be shown from the writings of Swift
+himself.
+
+All the earlier biographers of Swift Mr. Forster brushes contemptuously
+aside, though we do not find much that is important in his own biography
+which industry may not hit upon somewhere or other in the confused
+narrative of Sheridan, for whom and for his sources of information he
+shows a somewhat unjust contempt. He goes so far as sometimes to
+discredit anecdotes so thoroughly characteristic of Swift that he cannot
+resist copying them himself. He labors at needless length the question
+of Swift's standing in college, and seems to prove that it was not
+contemptible, though there can be no doubt that the contrary opinion was
+founded on Swift's own assertion, often repeated. We say he seems to
+prove it, for we are by no means satisfied which of the two Swifts on
+the college list, of which a facsimile is given, is the future Dean. Mr.
+Forster assumes that the names are ranked in the order of seniority, but
+they are more likely to have been arranged alphabetically, in which case
+Jonathan would have preceded Thomas, and at best there is little to
+choose between three _mediocriters_ and one _male_, one _bene_, and one
+_negligenter_. The document, whatever we may think of its importance,
+has been brought to light by Mr. Forster. Of his other materials
+hitherto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving that
+Swift's Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707. This
+shows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whig
+to Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his former
+associates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency if
+not of desertion to the enemy. Whatever the motives of his change, it
+would have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty,
+and in spite of Mr. Forster's assertion that Addison continued to love
+and trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was any
+cordiality in their intercourse after 1710. No one familiar with Swift's
+manner of thinking will deem his political course of much import in
+judging of his moral character. At the bottom of his heart he had an
+impartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aims
+of both were more or less consciously selfish. Even if sincere, the
+matters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment as
+that which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput. With him the
+question was simply one between men who galled his pride and men who
+flattered it. Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceable
+inferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footing
+of friendship. To him they were all, more or less indifferently, rounds
+in the ladder by which he hoped to climb. He always claimed to have been
+a consistent Old Whig--that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchman
+who accepted the Revolution of 1688. This, to be sure, was not quite
+true, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on a
+Cavalier grandfather, and whose first known verses were addressed to the
+non-juring primate Sancroft after his deprivation, to become first a
+Tory and then a conniver at the restoration of the Stuarts as the best
+device for preventing a foreign succession and an endless chance of
+civil war. A man of Swift's way of thinking would hardly have balked at
+the scruple of creed, for he would not have deemed it possible that the
+Pretender should have valued a kingdom at any lower rate than his
+great-grandfather had done before him.
+
+The more important part of Mr. Forster's fresh material is to come in
+future volumes, if now, alas! we are ever to have them. For some of what
+he gives us in this we can hardly thank him. One of the manuscripts he
+has unearthed is the original version of "Baucis and Philemon" as it was
+before it had passed under the criticism of Addison. He seems to think
+it in some respects better than the revised copy though in our judgment
+it entirely justifies the wisdom of the critic who counselled its
+curtailment and correction. The piece as we have hitherto had it comes
+as near poetry as anything Swift ever wrote except "Cadenus and
+Vanessa," though neither of them aspires above the region of cleverness
+and fancy. Indeed, it is misleading to talk of the poetry of one whose
+fatal gift was an eye that disidealized. But we are not concerned here
+with the discussion of Swift's claim to the title of poet. What we are
+concerned about is to protest in the interests of good literature
+against the practice, now too common, of hunting out and printing what
+the author would doubtless have burned. It is unfair to the dead writer
+and the living reader by disturbing that unitary impression which every
+good piece of work aims at making, and is sure to make, only in
+proportion to the author's self-denial and his skill in
+
+  The last and greatest art, the art to blot.
+
+We do not wish, nor have we any right to know, those passages through
+which the castigating pen has been drawn.
+
+Mr. Forster may almost claim to have rediscovered Swift's journals to
+Esther Johnson, to such good purpose has he used them in giving life and
+light to his narrative. He is certainly wrong, however, in saying to the
+disparagement of former editors that the name Stella was not invented
+"till long after all the letters were written." This statement,
+improbable in itself as respects a man who forthwith refined Betty,
+Waring, and Vanhomrigh into Eliza, Varina, and Vanessa, is refuted by a
+passage in the journal of 14th October, 1710, printed by Mr. Forster
+himself. At least, we know not what "Stellakins" means unless it be
+"little Stella." The value of these journals for their elucidation of
+Swift's character cannot be overestimated, and Mr. Forster is quite
+right in insisting upon the importance of the "little language," though
+we are by no means sure that he is always so in his interpretation of
+the cipher. It is quite impossible, for instance, that ME can stand for
+Madam Elderly, and so for Dingley. It is certainly addressed, like the
+other endearing epithets, to Esther Johnson, and may mean My Esther or
+even Marry Esther, for anything we know to the contrary.
+
+Mr. Forster brings down his biography no farther than the early part of
+1710, so that we have no means of judging what his opinion would be of
+the conduct of Swift during the three years that preceded the death of
+Queen Anne. But he has told us what he thinks of his relations with
+Esther Johnson; and it is in them, as it seems to us, that we are to
+seek the key to the greater part of what looks most enigmatical in his
+conduct. At first sight, it seems altogether unworthy of a man of
+Swift's genius to waste so much of it and so many of the best years of
+his life in a sordid struggle after preferment in the church--a career
+in which such selfish ambitions look most out of place. How much better
+to have stayed quietly at Laracor and written immortal works! Very good:
+only that was not Swift's way of looking at the matter, who had little
+appetite for literary fame, and all of whose immortal progeny were
+begotten of the moment's overmastering impulse, were thrown nameless
+upon the world by their father, and survived only in virtue of the vigor
+they had drawn from his stalwart loins. But how if Swift's worldly
+aspirations, and the intrigues they involved him in, were not altogether
+selfish? How if he was seeking advancement, in part at least, for
+another, and that other a woman who had sacrificed for him not only her
+chances of domestic happiness, but her good name? to whom he was bound
+by gratitude? and the hope of repairing whose good fame by making her
+his own was so passionate in that intense nature as to justify any and
+every expedient, and make the patronage of those whom he felt to be his
+inferiors endurable by the proudest of men? We believe that this was the
+truth, and that the woman was Stella. No doubt there were other motives.
+Coming to manhood with a haughtiness of temper that was almost savage,
+he had forced himself to endure the hourly humiliation of what could not
+have been, however Mr. Forster may argue to the contrary, much above
+domestic servitude. This experience deepened in him the prevailing
+passions of his life, first for independence and next for consideration,
+the only ones which could, and in the end perhaps did, obscure the
+memory and hope of Stella. That he should have longed for London with a
+persistency that submitted to many a rebuff and overlived continual
+disappointment will seem childish only to those who do not consider that
+it was a longing for life. It was there only that his mind could be
+quickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dying
+daily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, if
+there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without
+impair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age.
+
+This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the world
+is just opening. In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, "I
+desire that you and all my friends will take a special care that my
+disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I have
+credible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from the
+twenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age." His contempt for
+mankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfuges
+by which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify and
+conceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of its
+cleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than being
+prime minister. How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody when
+his old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophic
+relief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty!
+
+Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose also
+with the "Tale of a Tub." Its levity, if it was not something worse,
+twice balked him of the mitre when it seemed just within his reach.
+Justly or not, he had the reputation of scepticism. Mr. Forster would
+have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to
+prove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimate
+friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him
+sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman.
+Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession
+which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect
+independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes.
+He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while he
+was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among
+savages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood
+in his way. A man's little faults are more often the cause of his
+greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever
+respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly
+had the advantage of him in that _savoir vivre_ which makes so large an
+element of worldly success. In judging him, however, we must take into
+account that his first literary hit was made when he was already
+thirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of others
+and distrust of himself.
+
+The reaction in Swift's temper and ambition told with the happiest
+effect on his prose. For its own purposes, as good working English, his
+style (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had no
+style at all), has never been matched. It has been more praised than
+studied, or its manifest shortcomings, its occasional clumsiness, its
+want of harmony and of feeling for the finer genialities of language,
+would be more often present in the consciousness of those who discourse
+about it from a superficial acquaintance. With him language was a means
+and not an end. If he was plain and even coarse, it was from choice
+rather than because he lacked delicacy of perception; for in badinage,
+the most ticklish use to which words can be put, he was a master.
+
+
+
+
+PLUTARCH'S MORALS[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: A review of the English translation edited by William W.
+Goodwin with an Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson.]
+
+Plutarch is perhaps the most eminent example of how strong a hold simple
+good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man
+of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make
+him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is
+more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be
+more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days
+in the rose's neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his
+temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he
+always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as
+shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born
+middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner
+and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the
+problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic
+interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his
+worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish
+to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better
+Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas
+Browne, love to lose himself in an _O, altitudo!_ yet the sky-piercing
+peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the
+horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually
+gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom
+invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook
+like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled
+amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming
+intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled
+predilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet like
+flowers." But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him
+and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother
+of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is
+most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that
+passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the
+volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the
+_atrium_ (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the
+great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and
+who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become
+human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his
+lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible
+virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion,
+patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which
+associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is
+theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson
+disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian
+unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended
+him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints
+which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch
+in the essay on "Physiognomy." After speaking of some "escripts encores
+plus révérez," he asks, in his idiomatic way, "à, quoy faire nous allons
+nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however,
+Montaigne liked him because he was _good talk_, as it is called, a
+better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are
+noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation
+between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style
+is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in
+Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived
+perhaps from authors much more ancient." But if they are borrowed, they
+have none of the discordant effect of the _purpureus pannus_, for the
+warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them
+his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly
+original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this
+selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural
+elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or
+sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We
+are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are
+trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and
+there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has
+flowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into the
+ports of every nation," says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction
+to Goodwin's Plutarch's "Morals." No doubt we are becalmed pretty often,
+and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation,
+so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and
+quotation.
+
+It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser,
+in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose
+mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative
+(if we take the "Lives" and the "Morals" together) in the thought and
+action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And on
+the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether
+good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them
+over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was his
+own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their
+purpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among men
+and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. His
+influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any
+other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the
+Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a
+remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years,
+living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had
+peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of
+his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect
+that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of
+us. Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past was
+inhabited by creatures like ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
+AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+
+
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
+AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+
+
+I must beg allowance to use the first person singular. I cannot, like
+old Weller, spell myself with a We. Ours is, I believe, the only
+language that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (to
+himself) as to erect the first personal pronoun into a kind of votive
+column to the dignity of human nature. Other tongues have, or pretend, a
+greater modesty.
+
+                     I
+
+What a noble letter it is! In it every reader sees himself as in a
+glass. As for me, without my I's, I should be as poorly off as the great
+mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of
+reason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess I
+always liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek drama
+which were well sprinkled with _ai ai_, they were so grandly simple. The
+force of great men is generally to be found in their intense
+individuality,--in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this
+essay will be similar.
+
+What I was going to say is this.
+
+My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics,
+which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun
+to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence and
+Statuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for human
+habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on very
+well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the
+fish which we cured, _more medicorum_, by laying them out. But this
+summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association.
+Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town
+wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain number
+of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their
+own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call
+their lectures "The Universal Brotherhood Course,"--for no other reason,
+that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.
+They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip
+Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, from
+what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the
+introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything like
+universal brotherhood. He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster,
+without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into the
+world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular.
+Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of
+vaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right of
+Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public
+Vituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand the
+nature of philanthropy.
+
+Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example. He loves his kind so much that
+he has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother's son of
+them. He goes about to save them by proving that not one of them is
+worth damning. And he does it all from the point of view of an early (a
+_knurly_) Christian. Let me illustrate. I was sauntering along Broadway
+once, and was attracted by a bird-fancier's shop. I like dealers in
+out-of-the-way things,--traders in bigotry and virtue are too
+common,--and so I went in. The gem of the collection was a terrier,--a
+perfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as a
+Cockney would say, than the 'ole British hairystocracy. "A'n't he a
+stunner?" said my disrespectable friend, the master of the shop. "Ah,
+you should see him worry a rat! He does it like a puffic Christian!"
+Since then, the world has been divided for me into Christians and
+_perfect_ Christians; and I find so many of the latter species in
+proportion to the former, that I begin to pity the rats. They (the rats)
+have at least one virtue,--they are not eloquent.
+
+It is, I think, a universally recognized truth of natural history, that
+a young lady is sure to fall in love with a young man for whom she feels
+at first an unconquerable aversion; and it must be on the same principle
+that the first symptoms of love for our neighbor almost always manifest
+themselves in a violent disgust at the world in general, on the part of
+the apostles of that gospel. They give every token of hating their
+neighbors consumedly; _argal_, they are going to be madly enamored of
+them. Or, perhaps, this is the manner in which Universal Brotherhood
+shows itself in people who wilfully subject themselves to infection as a
+prophylactic. In the natural way we might find the disease inconvenient
+and even expensive; but thus vaccinated with virus from the udders
+(whatever they may be) that yield the (butter-)milk of human kindness,
+the inconvenience is slight, and we are able still to go about our
+ordinary business of detesting our brethren as usual. It only shows that
+the milder type of the disease has penetrated the system, which will
+thus be enabled to out-Jenneral its more dangerous congener. Before long
+we shall have physicians of our ailing social system writing to the
+"Weekly Brandreth's Pill" somewhat on this wise:--"I have a very marked
+and hopeful case in Pequawgus Four Corners. Miss Hepzibah Tarbell,
+daughter of that archenemy of his kind, Deacon Joash T., attended only
+one of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most
+encouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family,--accusing
+her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno
+C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the
+magnetic needle. If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of Primitive
+Christian were well-founded, I think we may entertain them now."
+
+What I chiefly object to in the general-denunciation sort of reformers
+is that they make no allowance for character and temperament. They wish
+to repeal universal laws, and to patch our natural skins for us, as if
+they always wanted mending. That while they talk so much of the godlike
+nature of man, they should so forget the human natures of men! The
+Flathead Indian squeezes the child's skull between two boards till it
+shapes itself into a kind of gambrel roof against the rain,--the
+readiest way, perhaps, of uniforming a tribe that wear no clothes. But
+does he alter the inside of the head? Not a hair's-breadth. You remember
+the striking old gnomic poem that tells how Aaron, in a moment of
+fanatical zeal against that member by which mankind are so readily led
+into mischief, proposes a rhinotomic sacrifice to Moses? What is the
+answer of the experienced law-giver?
+
+  Says Moses to Aaron,
+  "'T is the fashion to wear 'em!'"
+
+Shall we advise the Tadpole to get his tail cut off, as a badge of the
+reptile nature in him, and to achieve the higher sphere of the Croakers
+at a single hop? Why, it is all he steers by; without it, he would be as
+helpless as a compass under the flare of Northern Lights; and he no
+doubt regards it as a mark of blood, the proof of his kinship with the
+preadamite family of the Saurians. Shall we send missionaries to the
+Bear to warn him against raw chestnuts, because they are sometimes so
+discomforting to our human intestines, which are so like his own? One
+sermon from the colic were worth the whole American Board.
+
+Moreover, as an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Street
+against a unanimity in goodness. Not to mention that a Quaker world, all
+faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,--what should
+we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, no
+literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a
+sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be
+thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as
+indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me
+monthly,--what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband
+forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The
+pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the
+very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and
+him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the
+curse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; she
+is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been
+feeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us.
+Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in Nathaniel
+Greene, and makes a general of him, to confute five generations of
+Broadbrims. The Puritans were good in their way, and we enjoy them
+highly as a preterite phenomenon; but they were _not_ good at cakes and
+ale, and that is one reason why they are a preterite phenomenon.
+
+I suppose we are all willing to let a public censor like P.V. run amuck
+whenever he likes,--so it be not down our street. I confess to a good
+deal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in No. 21, have
+plenty of stoicism to spare for the griefs of the dwellers in No. 23.
+Indeed, I agreed with our young Cato heartily in what he said about
+Statues. We must have an Act for the Suppression, either of Great Men,
+or else of Sculptors. I have not quite made up my mind which are the
+greater nuisances; but I am sure of this, that there are too many of
+both. They used to be _rare_ (to use a Yankeeism omitted by Bartlett),
+but nowadays they are overdone. I am half inclined to think that the
+sculptors club together to write folks up during their lives in the
+newspapers, quieting their consciences with the hope of some day making
+them look so mean in bronze or marble as to make all square again. Or do
+we really have so many? Can't they help growing twelve feet high in this
+new soil, any more than our maize? I suspect that Posterity will not
+thank us for the hereditary disease of Carrara we are entailing on him,
+and will try some heroic remedy, perhaps lithotripsy.
+
+Nor was I troubled by what Mr. Vandal said about the late Benjamin
+Webster. I am not a Boston man, and have, therefore, the privilege of
+thinking for myself. Nor do I object to his claiming for women the right
+to make books and pictures and (shall I say it?) statues,--only this
+last becomes a grave matter, if we are to have statues of all the great
+women, too! To be sure, there will not be the trousers-difficulty,--at
+least, not at present; what we may come to is none of my affair. I even
+go beyond him in my opinions on what is called the Woman Question. In
+the gift of speech, they have always had the advantage of us; and though
+the jealousy of the other sex have deprived us of the orations of
+Xantippe, yet even Demosthenes does not seem to have produced greater
+effects, if we may take the word of Socrates for it,--as I, for one,
+very gladly do.
+
+No,--what I complain of is not the lecturer's opinions, but the
+eloquence with which he expressed them. He does not like statues better
+than I do; but is it possible that he fails to see that the one nuisance
+leads directly to the other, and that we set up three images of Talkers
+for one to any kind of man who was useful in his generation? Let him
+beware, or he will himself be petrified after death. Boston seems to be
+specially unfortunate. She has more statues and more speakers than any
+other city on this continent. I have with my own eyes seen a book called
+"The Hundred Boston Orators." This would seem to give her a fairer title
+to be called the _tire_ than the _hub_ of creation. What with the
+speeches of her great men while they are alive, and those of her
+surviving great men about those aforesaid after they are dead, and those
+we look forward to from her _ditto ditto_ yet to be upon her _ditto
+ditto_ now in being, and those of her paulopost _ditto ditto_ upon her
+_ditto ditto_ yet to be, and those--But I am getting into the house that
+Jack built.
+
+And yet I remember once visiting the Massachusetts State House and being
+struck with the Pythagorean fish hung on high in the Representatives'
+Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to be
+observed except on Sundays. Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal to you as a
+man and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there are
+plenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-water
+that threatens the land. Let us adopt as our creed these two
+propositions:--
+
+I. _Tongues were given us to be held._
+
+II. _Dumbness sets the brute below the man: Silence elevates the man
+above the brute._
+
+Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than
+that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account
+how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be
+commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception
+is positively stunning.
+
+Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late
+Town Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA
+NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general.
+_He_, at least, never betrayed his clients. As it is, there is no end to
+it. We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal
+Schoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the same
+ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man
+had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.
+We are the victims of a droll antithesis. Daniel would not give in to
+Nebuchadnezzar's taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down
+and worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have
+gone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor. I do not
+think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one is
+so apt to encounter;--I met one once at an evening party. But I would be
+thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that
+statue. Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the
+monumental line! Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of
+convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late
+visit, got off without a single speech. The cheerful hospitalities of
+Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but
+nothing more melancholy. In his case I doubt the expediency of the
+omission. Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it
+would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers
+of the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together.
+
+In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts our
+friends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) are
+put to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay for
+it. The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the Stark
+Mills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for making
+a very dead bronze horse stand on his hind legs. For twenty-five cents I
+have seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful,--make a very
+living bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occurs
+to me that _hind legs_ is indelicate) posterior extremities to the
+wayward music of an out-of-town (_Scoticè_, out-o'-toon) band. Now, I
+will make a handsome offer to the public. I propose for twenty-five
+thousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of a
+distinguished general officer as he _would have_ appeared at the Battle
+of Buena Vista. This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown the
+new dome of the Capitol at Washington. By this happy contrivance, the
+horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth
+at all,--thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for
+originality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the
+horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which
+way the wind blows by going along with it. The inferior animal I have
+resolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection. In
+this way I shall combine two striking advantages. The advocates of the
+Ideal in Art cannot fail to be pleased with a charger which embodies, as
+it were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attention
+of the spectator will not be distracted from the principal figure. The
+material to be pure brass. I have also in progress an allegorical group
+commemorative of Governor Wise. This, like-Wise, represents only a
+potentiality. I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment when
+and the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury at
+Washington. His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of his
+speeches. Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling on
+his own steel pen; a broken telegraph wire hints at the weight of the
+thoughts to which it has found itself inadequate; while the Army and
+Navy of the United States are conjointly typified in a horse-marine who
+flies headlong with his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. I
+think I shall be able to have this ready for exhibition by the time Mr.
+Wise is nominated for the Presidency,--certainly before he is elected.
+The material to be plaster, made of the shells of those oysters with
+which Virginia shall have paid her public debt. It may be objected, that
+plaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itself
+could hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor's speeches. But
+it must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype,
+have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of the
+spectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some reasonable hope
+of silence. This design, also, is intended only _in terrorem_, and will
+be suppressed for an adequate consideration.
+
+I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The
+fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may
+deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves
+into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a
+wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other
+way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of
+the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with
+the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in
+the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new
+victims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the wooden
+horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr.
+Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever
+material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short
+of a general.
+
+Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures. He counsels us to sell our real
+estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's reputation with
+posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor. To
+a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose military
+reputation insures his cutting and running (I mean, of course, in marble
+and bronze), the question becomes an interesting one,--To whom, in case
+of a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have the land all
+to themselves,--until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancient
+heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness will
+revive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican Art. For my own
+part, I never look at one of them now without thinking of at least one
+human sacrifice.
+
+I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing's proposal, and yet something
+ought to be done. We must put up with what we have already, I suppose,
+and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol
+pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand
+rests,--no bad type of the great man's state of mind after the
+nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a
+penal statue. But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that
+Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues? I go
+back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment. I had even gone so far
+as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the
+Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it
+would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our
+graven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects
+enumerated in the divine ordinance. Perhaps a double-barrelled statute
+might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the
+monumental difficulty. Let a law be passed that all speeches delivered
+more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all
+eulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel of
+the Deaf and Dumb asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds
+of the Institution for the Blind. Let the penalty for infringement in
+the one case be to read the last President's Message, and in the other
+to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as
+to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual
+punishments.
+
+Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should
+pass so self-denying an ordinance. They might, perhaps, make all oratory
+but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates
+might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed
+by a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be
+by an appetite for slate pencils. _Vita brevis, lingua longa._ I protest
+that among lawgivers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the
+Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence. The ancient Greeks also
+(though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions,
+especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the
+advantage of communication with America. Now the Greeks had a Muse of
+Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how
+hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more
+excellent Muse of Leaving-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her out
+and kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a goddess to be
+worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!
+
+Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch's
+lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts
+and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in
+comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine
+lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are
+as dust in the balance to those of speech.
+
+We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.
+There are now two debating clubs, seminaries of multiloquence. A few of
+us old-fashioned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it
+"The Jolly Oysters." No member is allowed to open his mouth except at
+high-tide by the calendar. We have biennial festivals on the evening of
+election day, when the constituency avenges itself in some small measure
+on its Representative elect by sending a baker's dozen of orators to
+congratulate him.
+
+But I am falling into the very vice I condemn,--like Carlyle, who has
+talked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue. And yet
+something should be done about it. Even when we get one orator safely
+underground, there are ten to pronounce his eulogy, and twenty to do it
+over again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue. I go to
+listen: we all go: we are under a spell. 'T is true, I find a casual
+refuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he called
+Sleep the child of Silence. Speech begets her as often. But there is no
+sure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, let
+there be written on my head-stone, with impartial application to these
+Black Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to our
+equestrian statues,--
+
+  _Os sublime_ did it!
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Function Of The Poet And Other
+Essays, by James Russell Lowell
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays
+by James Russell Lowell
+
+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: The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays
+
+Author: James Russell Lowell
+
+Release Date: December 27, 2004 [EBook #14481]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FUNCTION OF THE POET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Thomas Amrhein and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+
+
+COLLECTED AND EDITED BY
+ALBERT MORDELL
+
+
+KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y.
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+
+1920 by Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+Reissued in 1967 by Kennikat Press
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The Centenary Celebration of James Russell Lowell last year showed that
+he has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet.
+Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work rather
+than in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of his
+life. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame of his youth did
+not continue to glow, but he resigned himself to his fate; nevertheless,
+it should be remembered that "The Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Biglow
+Papers," and "The Commemoration Ode" are enough to make the reputation
+of any poet.
+
+The present volume sustains Lowell's right to be considered one of the
+great American critics. The literary merit of some of the essays herein
+is in many respects nowise inferior to that in some of the volumes he
+collected himself. The articles are all exquisitely and carefully
+written, and the style of even the book reviews displays that quality
+found in his best writings which Ferris Greenslet has appropriately
+described as "savory." That such a quantity of good literature by so
+able a writer as Lowell should have been allowed to repose buried in the
+files of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact that
+Lowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute all
+the more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews on
+ephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in book
+form.
+
+The essays herein represent the matured author as they were written in
+the latter part of his life, between his thirty-sixth and fifty-seventh
+years. The only early essay is the one on Poe. It appeared in _Graham's
+Magazine_ for February, 1845, and was reprinted by Griswold in his
+edition of Poe. It has also been reprinted in later editions of Poe, but
+has never been included in any of Lowell's works. This was no doubt due
+to the slight break in the relations between Poe and Lowell, due to
+Poe's usual accusations of plagiarism. The essay still remains one of
+the best on Poe ever written.
+
+Though Lowell became in later life quite conservative and academic, it
+should not be thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberal
+ideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, and
+had good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first works
+of Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men,
+indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers will
+enjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, the
+raps at spiritualism here and there. Moreover, there is a passage in the
+first essay showing that Lowell, before Freud, understood the
+psychoanalytic theory of genius in its connection with childhood
+memories. The passage follows Lowell's narration of the story of little
+Montague.
+
+None of the essays in this volume has appeared in book form except a few
+fragments from some of the opening five essays which were reported from
+Lowell's lectures in the _Boston Advertiser_, in 1855, and were
+privately printed some years ago. Charles Eliot Norton performed a
+service to the world when he published in the _Century Magazine_ in 1893
+and 1894 some lectures from Lowell's manuscripts. These lectures are now
+collected and form the first five essays in this book. I have also
+retained Professor Norton's introductions and notes. Attention is called
+to his remark that "The Function of the Poet" is not unworthy to stand
+with Sidney's and Shelley's essays on poetry.
+
+The rest of the essays in this volume appeared in Lowell's lifetime in
+the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _North American Review_, and the _Nation_.
+They were all anonymous, but are assigned to Lowell by George Willis
+Cooke in his "Bibliography of James Russell Lowell." Lowell was editor
+of the _Atlantic_ from the time of its founding in 1857 to May, 1861. He
+was editor of the _North American Review_ from January, 1864, to the
+time he left for Europe in 1872. With one exception (that on "Poetry and
+Nationalism" which formed the greater part of a review of the poems of
+Howells's friend Piatt), all the articles from these two magazines,
+reprinted in this volume, appeared during Lowell's editorship. These
+articles include reviews of poems by his friends Longfellow and
+Whittier. And in his review of "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Lowell
+makes effective use of his scholarship to introduce a lengthy and
+interesting discourse on the dactylic hexameter.
+
+While we are on the subject of the New England poets a word about the
+present misunderstanding and tendency to underrate them may not be out
+of place. Because it is growing to be the consensus of opinion that the
+two greatest poets America has produced are Whitman and Poe, it does not
+follow that the New-Englanders must be relegated to the scrap-heap. Nor
+do I see any inconsistency in a man whose taste permits him to enjoy
+both the free verse and unpuritanic (if I may coin a word) poems of
+Masters and Sandburg, and also Whittier's "Snow-Bound" and Longfellow's
+"Courtship of Miles Standish." Though these poems are not profound,
+there is something of the universal in them. They have pleasant
+school-day memories for all of us and will no doubt have such for our
+children.
+
+Lowell's cosmopolitan tastes may be seen in his essays on men so
+different as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows that
+he even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray to
+Dickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree with
+him. As a young man he hated Swift, but he gives us a sane study of him.
+The review of Plutarch's "Essays" edited by Goodwin, with an
+introduction by Emerson, is also of interest.
+
+The last essay in the volume on "A Plea for Freedom from Speech and
+Figures of Speech-Makers" shows Lowell's satirical powers at their best.
+Ferris Greenslet tells us, in his book on Lowell, that the Philip Vandal
+whose eloquence Lowell ridicules is Wendell Phillips. The essay gives
+Lowell's humorous comments on various matters, especially on
+contemporary types of orators, reformers, and heroes. It represents
+Lowell as he is most known to us, the Lowell who is always ready with
+fun and who set the world agog with his "Biglow Papers."
+
+Lowell's work as a critic dates from the rare volume "Conversations on
+Some of the Old Poets," published in 1844 in his twenty-fifth year,
+includes his best-known volumes "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows,"
+and most fitly concludes with the "Latest Literary Essays," published in
+the year of his death in 1891. My sincere hope is that this book will
+not be found to be an unworthy successor to these volumes.
+
+Though some of Lowell's literary opinions are old-fashioned to us (one
+author even wrote an entire volume to demolish Lowell's reputation as a
+critic), there is much in his work that the world will not let die. He
+is highly regarded abroad, and he is one of the few men in our
+literature who produced creative criticism.
+
+Thanks and acknowledgments are due the _Century Magazine_ and the
+literary representatives of Lowell, for permission to reprint in this
+volume the first five essays, which are copyrighted and were published
+in the _Century Magazine_.
+
+ALBERT MORDELL
+
+_Philadelphia, January 13, 1920_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
+  _Century Magazine_, January, 1894
+
+HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
+  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
+  _Century Magazine_, November, 1893
+
+THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS (HOMER, DANTE,
+CERVANTES, GOETHE, SHAKESPEARE)
+  _Century Magazine_, December, 1893
+
+THE IMAGINATION
+  _Century Magazine_, March, 1894
+
+CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
+  _Century Magazine_, May, 1894
+    I. Life in Literature and Language
+    II. Style and Manner
+    III. Kalevala
+
+
+REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
+
+HENRY JAMES: JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES
+  _The Nation_, June 24, 1875
+
+LONGFELLOW: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1859
+
+TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
+  _North American Review_, January, 1864
+
+WHITTIER: IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
+  _North American Review_, January, 1864
+
+HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1860
+
+SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
+  _North American Review_, April, 1866
+
+POETRY AND NATIONALITY
+  _North American Review_, October, 1868
+
+W.D. HOWELLS: VENETIAN LIFE
+  _North American Review_, October, 1866
+
+EDGAR A. POE
+  _Graham's Magazine_, February, 1845;
+  R.W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)
+
+THACKERAY: ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
+  _North American Review_, April, 1864
+
+
+TWO GREAT AUTHORS
+
+SWIFT: FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT
+  _The Nation_, April 13 and 20, 1876
+
+PLUTARCH'S MORALS
+  _North American Review_, April, 1871
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1860
+
+
+
+
+ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+
+
+This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before
+the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never
+printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions
+were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in
+composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print.
+How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the
+broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his
+essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and
+1867--essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew,
+though not treated at large.
+
+But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the
+enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths
+it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression
+of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline
+alike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand with
+Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm
+and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less
+than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture
+Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."
+
+_Charles Eliot Norton_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a
+great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in
+friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels
+out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the
+development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up
+out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest
+pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions
+that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what
+little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
+barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
+everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
+certain outward respects, but essentially the same.
+
+And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
+the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
+the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
+of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
+highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer
+and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the _epea
+pteroenta_, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored
+future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise
+and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by,
+as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is
+Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey,"
+"whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"--the gift of conferring
+good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as
+they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the
+desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust,
+because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the
+future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
+were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their
+ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries
+ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have
+poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up
+by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some
+provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for
+a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The
+historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as
+they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave
+them.
+
+The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have
+a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves
+continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older
+epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.
+Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances;
+for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the
+generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for
+a purposeless moment, and reënter the dark again after they have
+performed the nothing they came for.
+
+Gradually, however, the poet as the "seer" became secondary to the
+"maker." His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher. But
+always something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has now
+come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing
+is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep,
+too. If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral,
+that man is Shakespeare. But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which
+does not see through his tragic--yes, and his comic--masks awful eyes
+that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic
+meaning--a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all
+human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself
+unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness
+that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the
+errand that was laid upon him:
+
+  Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
+  And made myself a motley to the view,
+  Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
+  Made old offences of affections new;
+  Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
+  Askance and strangely;
+
+the application of which is made clear by the next sonnet, in which he
+distinctly alludes to his profession.
+
+There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets--that, however
+in little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes a
+great and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bear
+themselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language. There
+is not a mature play of Shakespeare's in which great ideas do not jut up
+in mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces of
+thought, and known afar to many kindreds of men.
+
+And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for any
+faculty of observation and description, that we value the poet. It is in
+proportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not a
+juggler with words. It is by means of this that for every generation of
+man he plays the part of "namer." Before him, as before Adam, the
+creation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then the
+world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever a
+great imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging the
+outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away
+in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth
+beneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggests
+the invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. His
+imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his
+characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also
+perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract
+thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.
+
+Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel
+something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of
+contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change,
+he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and
+conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with
+their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as
+utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which
+faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.
+History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the
+world for a village. This life could only become other than
+phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something
+that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power
+unseen--that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits
+stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy. In the "Odyssey"
+we find pure allegory.
+
+Now, under all these names--praiser, seer, soothsayer--we find the same
+idea lurking. The poet is he who can best see and best say what is
+ideal--what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he
+celebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as it
+appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still
+clings to him; he is the revealer of Deity. He may be unconscious of his
+mission; he may be false to it; but in proportion as he is a great poet,
+he rises to the level of it the more often. He does not always directly
+rebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel what
+delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil, it is with
+such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that
+the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great
+poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to
+a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever
+learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean
+and bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly
+on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that
+they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead
+of speaking the true universal language of imagination. He who
+translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
+is the reverse of a poet.
+
+The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same
+thing--imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him the
+power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks
+about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace,
+which whoso has on understands the language of all created things. And
+as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole
+of himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said a
+thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as
+there are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than an
+interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between
+man and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, the
+possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected
+treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under
+the dusty path of our daily life.
+
+And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,--a thing which
+enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,--but
+all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
+every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the
+dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping
+news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately
+ships,--"the city on the inconstant billows dancing,"--as there is
+between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybody
+remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to
+the chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful
+chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a
+fair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw
+himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and
+fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced
+together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the
+visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to
+him again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are
+typified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscences
+of the stately home of our childhood,--for we are all of us poets and
+geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of
+every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,--and we all remember
+the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there. But
+somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty
+taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end--till
+suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and
+of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to our
+true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature
+that the poet reintroduces us.
+
+But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power
+of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank
+materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show
+its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was
+sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or
+no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
+with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
+against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
+Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
+matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
+was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
+reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
+the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
+you so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bone
+broken."
+
+And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
+character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
+phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
+For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
+not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
+purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
+What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
+less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
+eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
+defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.
+
+No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
+beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
+the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
+and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
+practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
+that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
+this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
+after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with
+which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
+common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
+visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
+two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
+the same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do we
+depend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but upon
+observation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternal
+promontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lower
+system.
+
+But it seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late,
+that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and all that is
+left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
+railroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in Brother
+Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But because _he_
+is a materialist, shall there be no more poets? When we have said that
+we live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant more
+than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
+foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at any
+rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespeare
+was richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such a
+pair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his to
+report it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, who
+continues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less
+than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he
+lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not
+sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his
+little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more
+quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have
+drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of
+affairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground for
+the public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere
+piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such
+ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick
+and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink.
+It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespeare
+received everything that came along,--of what a _present_ man he
+was,--that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought into
+England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.
+
+It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for that very
+reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation
+contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. When the
+poet comes, he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the
+passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not
+to have lived in Homer's day, or Dante's, but to be alive now. To be
+alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live
+in the past, and men yet unborn that live in the future. We are like
+Hans in Luck, forever exchanging the burdensome good we have for
+something else, till at last we come home empty-handed.
+
+That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton
+whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even
+now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and
+thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus
+that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their
+triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy,
+looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to
+behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted
+and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when there
+was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.
+
+The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its
+costume. And that is what makes it prosaic--that we have not faith
+enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented
+to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is
+that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue
+of Sir Robert Peel,--a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding
+gracefully to the present,--in which the sculptor had done his best to
+travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when
+England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of
+this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord
+Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to
+the rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, "Thus sat
+Francis Bacon"--not "Cneius Pompeius"--"Viscount Verulam." Those men had
+faith even in their own shoe-strings.
+
+After all, how is our poor scapegoat of a nineteenth century to blame?
+Why, for not being the seventeenth, to be sure! It is always raining
+opportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago who
+were intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up. We are like
+beggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must be
+counterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece of
+familiar copper. And so, as we stand in our mendicancy by the wayside,
+Time tosses carefully the great golden to-day into our hats, and we turn
+it over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised at
+finding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes. Till Dante's time
+the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings
+into but Latin,--and indeed a dead tongue was the best for dead
+thoughts,--but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men
+bargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of the
+world around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang.
+
+In our day, it is said despairingly, the understanding reigns
+triumphant: it is the age of common sense. If this be so, the wisest way
+would be to accept it manfully. But, after all, what is the meaning of
+it? Looking at the matter superficially, one would say that a striking
+difference between our science and that of the world's gray fathers is
+that there is every day less and less of the element of wonder in it.
+What they saw written in light upon the great arch of heaven, and, by a
+magnificent reach of sympathy, of which we are incapable, associated
+with the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only a
+professor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn and
+unapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanized
+among the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in every
+calyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The stars
+can no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is a
+conjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sends
+thither its special reporter with his telescope. Over those arcana of
+life where once a mysterious presence brooded, we behold scientific
+explorers skipping like so many incarnate notes of interrogation. We pry
+into the counsels of the great powers of nature, we keep our ears at the
+keyhole, and know everything that is going to happen. There is no longer
+any sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, and
+life turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needs
+no more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" We
+have found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription upon
+it, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted.
+
+Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in our
+cradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples the
+day with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimation
+of demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material for
+thought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, as
+sapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathy
+with man or nature as a town history with its genealogies of Mr.
+Nobody's great-grandparents.
+
+We have utilized everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar
+system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a
+symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass
+through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a
+museum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum of
+supernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has been
+going on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern and
+historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of
+the death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic
+imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus.
+
+Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On those
+sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.
+It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see
+farther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom of
+a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all this
+is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced
+itself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are not
+arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set
+all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In my
+opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful
+than the discoveries themselves."
+
+But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if it
+would, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination. No two
+men have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, that
+something more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that a
+logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as
+every man's _own_ logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a
+structure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring
+together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one.
+When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if a
+leaf has fallen. I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in the
+pulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have not sometimes
+found the popular giant as provokingly insensible. The [sqrt of -x] is
+nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower
+which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day
+of childhood. Demonstration may lead to the very gate of heaven, but
+there she makes us a civil bow, and leaves us to make our way back again
+to Faith, who has the key. That science which is of the intellect alone
+steps with indifferent foot upon the dead body of Belief, if only she
+may reach higher or see farther.
+
+But we cannot get rid of our wonder--we who have brought down the wild
+lightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be our
+errand-boy and penny-postman. Wonder is crude imagination; and it is
+necessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exact
+knowledge is not enough. Do we get nearer the truth or farther from it
+that we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit? We
+go on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it? The evasive
+genius flits into something else, and defies us. The powers of the outer
+and inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connection
+man is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps
+it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was
+vainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it
+wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man of
+science remakes the old spirit. But we seem to have created too many
+wonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, when
+asked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them. But
+nature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best but
+scotch it, not kill it. In this day of newspapers and electric
+telegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole
+continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as
+Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!
+Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster on
+Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblin
+is laid at last!"--and while I mused the tables were turning, and the
+chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have a
+neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed
+out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son,
+and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with
+it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so
+brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp.
+
+It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
+sort or other. If they cannot get the best they will get some substitute
+for it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine's slur that it is wine
+of devils. The mind bound down too closely to what is practical either
+becomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wilderness
+of "isms." The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted some
+persons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and found
+refreshment in taking a scalp now and then. Nature insists above all
+things upon balance. She contrives to maintain a harmony between the
+material and spiritual, nor allows the cerebrum an expansion at the cost
+of the cerebellum. If the character, for example, run on one side into
+religious enthusiasm, it is not unlikely to develop on the other a
+counterpoise of worldly prudence. Thus the Shaker and the Moravian are
+noted for thrift, and mystics are not always the worst managers. Through
+all changes of condition and experience man continues to be a citizen of
+the world of idea as well as the world of fact, and the tax-gatherers of
+both are punctual.
+
+And these antitheses which we meet with in individual character we
+cannot help seeing on the larger stage of the world also, a moral
+accompanying a material development. History, the great satirist, brings
+together Alexander and the blower of peas to hint to us that the tube of
+the one and the sword of the other were equally transitory; but
+meanwhile Aristotle was conquering kingdoms out of the unknown, and
+establishing a dynasty of thought from whose hand the sceptre has not
+yet passed. So there are Charles V, and Luther; the expansion of trade
+resulting from the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, and the
+Elizabethan literature; the Puritans seeking spiritual El Dorados while
+so much valor and thought were spent in finding mineral ones. It seems
+to be the purpose of God that a certain amount of genius shall go to
+each generation, particular quantities being represented by individuals,
+and while no _one_ is complete in himself, all collectively make up a
+whole ideal figure of a man. Nature is not like certain varieties of the
+apple that cannot bear two years in succession. It is only that her
+expansions are uniform in all directions, that in every age she
+completes her circle, and like a tree adds a ring to her growth be it
+thinner or thicker.
+
+Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, the one trivial and
+ordinary, the other sacred and recluse; the one which he carries to the
+dinner-table and to his daily work, which grows old with his body and
+dies with it, the other that which is made up of the few inspiring
+moments of his higher aspiration and attainment, and in which his youth
+survives for him, his dreams, his unquenchable longings for something
+nobler than success. It is this life which the poets nourish for him,
+and sustain with their immortalizing nectar. Through them he feels once
+more the white innocence of his youth. His faith in something nobler
+than gold and iron and cotton comes back to him, not as an upbraiding
+ghost that wrings its pale hands and is gone, but beautiful and
+inspiring as a first love that recognizes nothing in him that is not
+high and noble. The poets are nature's perpetual pleaders, and protest
+with us against what is worldly. Out of their own undying youth they
+speak to ours. "Wretched is the man," says Goethe, "who has learned to
+despise the dreams of his youth!" It is from this misery that the
+imagination and the poets, who are its spokesmen, rescue us. The world
+goes to church, kneels to the eternal Purity, and then contrives to
+sneer at innocence and ignorance of evil by calling it green. Let every
+man thank God for what little there may be left in him of his vernal
+sweetness. Let him thank God if he have still the capacity for feeling
+an unmarketable enthusiasm, for that will make him worthy of the society
+of the noble dead, of the companionship of the poets. And let him love
+the poets for keeping youth young, woman womanly, and beauty beautiful.
+
+There is as much poetry as ever in the world if we only knew how to find
+it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more
+prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped
+of material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying
+mountain-farm of imagination, which did not appear in the schedule of
+his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though he
+never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great
+poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.
+
+There is no reason why our continent should not sing as well as the
+rest. We have had the practical forced upon us by our position. We have
+had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we are
+descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright
+wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the
+Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
+be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or
+they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are
+States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.
+
+But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poetical
+people. Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men in
+visible types. He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap of
+invisibility and the purse of Fortunatus. These were once stories for
+grown men, and not for the nursery as now. We are apt ignorantly to
+wonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction the
+absurdity of which any of our primary-school children could demonstrate.
+But we forget that the world's gray fathers were children themselves,
+and that in their little world, with its circle of the black unknown all
+about it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in the
+dark. Look at a child's toys, and we shall understand the matter well
+enough. Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still),
+at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which she
+has been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, and
+a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.
+
+But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet. In her
+railroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness. Fine-Ear herself
+could not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listen
+in Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans. And what need of
+Aladdin's lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill? The
+office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these
+miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there
+is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there
+is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed
+that fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the
+lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul
+of poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does not
+seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the
+"Merchant of Venice" in it. Themes of song are waiting everywhere for
+the right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one can
+pull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more trouble
+than in plucking a violet.
+
+John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford, many years ago,
+reckoned the number of whale-ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
+out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as
+a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that
+those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever must
+be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity,
+but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that a
+race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty
+Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces.
+Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every port
+of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies
+dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert
+only flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot
+Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space
+occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!
+They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible
+as the soul.
+
+Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not as the
+mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme il
+faut_ for a great nation, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy,
+for its power of making men better by arousing in them a perception of
+their own instincts for what is beautiful, and therefore sacred and
+religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not
+have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a
+people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our
+little mother-island sunk beneath the sea, or, worse, were she conquered
+by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakespeare would be an immortal England,
+and would conquer countries, when the bones of her last sailor had kept
+their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched
+thunders of her navy.
+
+Old Purchas in his "Pilgrims" tells of a sacred caste in India who, when
+they go out into the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world
+out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And
+it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to
+pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever
+of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in
+the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its
+activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty,
+if it be bewildered or thwarted by an outward profession of faith
+covering up a practical unbelief in anything higher and holier than the
+world of sense, it will find vent in such wretched holes and corners as
+table-tippings and mediums who sell news from heaven at a quarter of a
+dollar the item. Imagination cannot be banished out of the world. She
+may be made a kitchen-drudge, a Cinderella, but there are powers that
+watch over her. When her two proud sisters, the intellect and
+understanding, think her crouching over her ashes, she startles and
+charms by her splendid apparition, and Prince Soul will put up with no
+other bride.
+
+The practical is a very good thing in its way--if it only be not another
+name for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root
+which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from
+Parthia--which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they
+were some great matter till he died.
+
+One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes him
+feel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankind
+were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism
+which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy old
+world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany,
+talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till
+bedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and
+beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. But
+divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and
+messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as
+having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of
+Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the
+sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit
+second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of
+Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity,
+"trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of
+sunsets.
+
+No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with every
+child. It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon. Every age
+says to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I am
+like"; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, has
+need of seers and will have them. Our time is not an unpoetical one. We
+are in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces of
+unsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though they
+may be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone. It is nothing against us
+that we are a commercial people. Athens was a trading community; Dante
+and Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was already
+commercial when she produced Shakespeare.
+
+This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
+the noble, and the true, will never cease out of the world till the God
+from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselves
+in an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as new
+duties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of the
+poet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soul
+endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while
+there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will
+still send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hang
+their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God with us is
+forever the mystical name of the hour that is passing. The lives of the
+great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt
+most deeply the meaning of the present.
+
+
+
+
+HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+In the winter of 1855, when Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a
+course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His
+subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive
+lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the
+imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first
+characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the
+advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads,"
+especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of
+real life--the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative
+of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8,
+Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On
+Poetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotistic
+imaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Function
+and Prospects of Poetry."
+
+These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period of
+delivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, but
+they came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues of
+familiar studies and long reflection. No such criticism, at once
+abundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished by
+breadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, had
+been heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiastic
+audiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as the
+ablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as the
+foremost of American men of letters.
+
+In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard
+University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in
+special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of
+the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed
+Minister of the United States to Spain.
+
+During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses of
+lectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they were
+given more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject of
+these courses was in general the "Study of Literature," treating in
+different years of different special topics, from the literature of
+Northern to that of Southern Europe, from the Kalevala and the
+Niebelungen Lied to the Provençal poets; from Wolfram von Eschenbach to
+Rousseau; from the cycle of romances of Charlemagne and his peers to
+Dante and Shakespeare. Some of these lectures, or parts of them, were
+afterward prepared for publication, with such changes as were required
+to give them proper literary form; and the readers of Lowell's prose
+works know what gifts of native power, what large and solid acquisitions
+of learning, what wide and delightful survey of the field of life and of
+letters, are to be found in his essays on Shakespeare, on Dante, on
+Dryden, and on many another poet or prose writer. The abundance of his
+resources as critic in the highest sense have never been surpassed, at
+least in English literature.
+
+But considerable portions of the earlier as well as of the later
+lectures remain unprinted, partly, no doubt, because his points of view
+changed with the growth of his learning, and the increasing depth as
+well as breadth of his vision. There is but little in manuscript which
+he would himself, I believe, have been inclined to print without
+substantial change. Yet these unprinted remains contain so much that
+seems to me to possess permanent value that, after some question and
+hesitation, I have come to the conclusion that selections from them
+should be published. The fragments must be read with the fact constantly
+held in mind that they do not always represent Lowell's mature opinions;
+that, in some instances, they give but the first form of thoughts
+developed in other connections in one or other of his later essays; that
+they have not received his last revision; that they have the form of
+discourse addressed to the ear, rather than that of literary work
+finished for the eye.
+
+If so read, I trust that the reader, while he may find little in them to
+increase Lowell's well-established reputation, may find much in them to
+confirm a high estimate of his position as one of the rare masters of
+English prose as well as one of the most capable of critics; much to
+interest him alike in their intrinsic character, and in their
+illustration of the life and thought of the writer; and much to make him
+feel a keen regret that they are the final contributions of their author
+to the treasures of English literature.
+
+_Charles Eliot Norton_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hippel, the German satirist, divides the life of man into five periods,
+according to the ruling desires which successively displace each other
+in the human soul. Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, the
+second for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourth
+for money, and the fifth for a "place" in the country. I think he has
+overlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point of
+time--the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master of
+a chamber to one's self.
+
+How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that
+independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!
+How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small
+chamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor pores
+over the "Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks," his longing heightened
+as the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney.
+There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties his
+pockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of the
+housemaid. There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment of
+Schwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel the
+cool shadow of the discoverer's laurel. There the antiquary begins his
+collections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistles
+of Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late the
+property of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate,
+who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to make
+his children the ornaments of society. There the potential Dibdin or
+Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf--more fair to him
+than the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe," and
+"Gulliver," perhaps "Gil Blas," Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and
+Rome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds," the "Parent's Assistant," and
+(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," with other narratives
+of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.
+With these are admitted also "Viri Romae," Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and
+even the Latin grammar, because they _count_, playing here upon these
+mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators,
+a rôle in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated
+volumes--the "books without which no gentleman's library can be
+complete."
+
+I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery
+of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was
+first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of
+that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my
+unmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adorn
+it. The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints
+which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather's study,
+but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story
+till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther. These
+were heads of ancient worthies[1]--Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca,
+and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortly
+banished again with a _quousque tandem!_ Besides those I have mentioned,
+there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the
+slave of tradition, I called Heraclitus--an error which my excellent
+schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by
+the judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded the
+birth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree of
+knowledge, whose advantages could Adam have enjoyed during early life,
+he had known better than to have yielded to the temptation of any other.
+
+[Footnote 1: Some readers may recall the reference to these "heads of
+ancient wise men" in "An Interview with Miles Standish."--C.E.N.]
+
+Well, over my chimney hung those two antithetical philosophers--the one
+showing his teeth in an eternal laugh, while the tears on the cheek of
+the other forever ran, and yet, like the leaves on Keats's Grecian urn,
+could never be shed. I used to wonder at them sometimes, believing, as I
+did firmly, that to weep and laugh had been respectively the sole
+business of their lives. I was puzzled to think which had the harder
+time of it, and whether it were more painful to be under contract for
+the delivery of so many tears _per diem_, or to compel that [Greek:
+anêrithmon gelasma][1] I confess, I pitied them both; for if it be
+difficult to produce on demand what Laura Matilda would call the "tender
+dew of sympathy," he is also deserving of compassion who is expected to
+be funny whether he will or no. As I grew older, and learned to look on
+the two heads as types, they gave rise to many reflections, raising a
+question perhaps impossible to solve: whether the vices and follies of
+men were to be washed away, or exploded by a broadside of honest
+laughter. I believe it is Southwell who says that Mary Magdalene went to
+Heaven by water, and it is certain that the tears that people shed for
+themselves are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved
+by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers
+should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber
+enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while
+on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves
+of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits
+they can upon their fat.
+
+[Footnote 1: Countless--_i.e._, perpetual--smile.]
+
+On the other hand, man has a wholesome dread of laughter, as he is the
+only animal capable of that phenomenon--for the laugh of the hyena is
+pronounced by those who have heard it to be no joke, and to be classed
+with those [Greek: gelasmata agelasta] which are said to come from the
+other side of the mouth. Whether, as Shaftesbury will have it, ridicule
+be absolutely the test of truth or no, we may admit it to be relatively
+so, inasmuch as by the _reductio ad absurdum_ it often shows that
+abstract truth may become falsehood, if applied to the practical affairs
+of life, because its relation to other truths equally important, or to
+human nature, has been overlooked. For men approach truth from the
+circumference, and, acquiring a knowledge at most of one or two points
+of that circle of which God is the centre, are apt to assume that the
+fixed point from which it is described is that where they stand.
+Moreover, "Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat?"
+
+I side rather with your merry fellow than with Dr. Young when he says:
+
+  Laughter, though never censured yet as sin,
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Is half immoral, be it much indulged;
+  By venting spleen, or dissipating thought,
+  It shows a scorner, or it makes a fool;
+  And sins, as hurting others or ourselves.
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Yet would'st thou laugh (but at thine own expense),
+  This counsel strange should I presume to give--
+  "Retire, and read thy Bible, to be gay."
+
+With shame I confess it, Dr. Young's "Night Thoughts" have given me as
+many hearty laughs as any humorous book I ever read.
+
+Men of one idea,--that is, who have one idea at a time,--men who
+accomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, are
+inevitably destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be
+great and noble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversity
+of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a
+single idea, and that a small and rickety one--some seven months' child
+of thought--that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to
+the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no
+satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if
+Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For
+example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy
+to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two
+hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick
+Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great
+antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in
+Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person
+who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm,
+the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine
+to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm
+likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would
+have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the
+spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an
+epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"
+exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's
+axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable
+satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I
+have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks,
+Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never
+succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the
+collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus
+unconsciously by our passive enthusiast?
+
+I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see
+certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of
+the comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without
+laughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the _haruspex haruspicem_)
+and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secret
+I will keep yours." In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be
+implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body
+and soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm
+would lead us an endless dance.
+
+The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of one
+idea--for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two. He is the
+universal disenchanter. He makes himself quite as much the subject of
+ironical study as his neighbor. Is he inclined to fancy himself a great
+poet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sit
+down because a certain part of him was made of glass, and muses
+smilingly, "There are many forms of hypochondria." This duality in his
+mind which constitutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of his
+character. He is futile in action because in every path he is confronted
+by the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusion
+that nothing is very much worth the while. If he be independent of
+exertion, his life commonly runs to waste. If he turn author, it is
+commonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and "Don Quixote" was
+the fruit of a debtors' prison.
+
+It seems to be an instinct of human nature to analyze, to define, and to
+classify. We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away in
+the mind, and feel as if we knew them better when we have named them.
+And so to a certain extent we do. The mere naming of things by their
+appearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom;
+and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combines
+appearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the senses
+by impression, is poetry. A great part of criticism is scientific, but
+as the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possible
+in this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far as
+that, at some kind of classification that may help us toward that
+excellent property--compactness of mind.
+
+Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodness
+produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say that
+this was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is there
+in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne,
+Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic of
+all of them. Ben Jonson says that
+
+  When some one peculiar quality
+  Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
+  All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
+  In their constructions all to run one way,
+  This may be truly said to be a humor.
+
+But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,--of a good
+subject for the humorist,--such as Don Quixote, for example.
+
+Humor--taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous,
+and to give it expression--seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.
+Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused
+through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great
+comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their
+faces, or before they have spoken a word.
+
+The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the
+understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the
+English, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let us
+not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take
+the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.
+Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which
+arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the
+impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great
+humorist, defines it thus:
+
+    Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to
+    set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it
+    beside the great--that it may annihilate both, because in the
+    presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal,
+    only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality,
+    the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance
+    of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of
+    little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the
+    Scoffer.
+
+We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor,
+while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of
+lightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without our
+being able to put our finger on any passage, and say, "It is here." Wit
+must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wise
+deacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of human
+natur' in man," he might have added that there was a good deal more in
+some men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may be
+humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence
+of mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase,
+this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be
+instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and its
+impression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. As Galiani said of
+Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes
+every time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime
+oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art of
+saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where
+it is forbidden to say anything." Wit must also have the quality of
+unexpectedness. "Sometimes," says Barrow, "an affected simplicity,
+sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it rises
+only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty
+wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one
+knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are
+unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless
+rovings of fancy and windings of language."
+
+That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected
+likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at
+what is called a _conceit_, which has all the qualities of wit--except
+wit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long
+poem called "Albion's England," which had an immense contemporary
+popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of
+language. In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.
+Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,
+
+  Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
+  Soft were those lips that bled.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This, and one or two of the following illustrations, were
+used again by Mr. Lowell in his "Shakespeare Once More": _Works_
+(Riverside edition), III, 53.]
+
+This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good
+as a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a
+pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have
+been,--to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,--it
+should read:
+
+  Hard was the _hand_ that gave the blow,
+  Soft were those lips that bled,
+
+for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word "hard" as
+applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper
+logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which
+belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:
+
+  Her heart and morning broke together
+  In tears,
+
+which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might
+almost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionally
+violated in the word _broke_, and the sentence becomes absurd, though
+not funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of
+the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it,
+though here, again, there would be no true wit:
+
+  His heart and Biddle broke together
+  On 'change.
+
+Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of
+"Hudibras," certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose
+wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost
+rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a
+contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject. Butler says of loyalty
+that it is
+
+  True as the dial to the sun
+  Although it be not shined upon.
+
+Now what is the difference between this and the examples from Warner and
+Morris which I have just quoted? Simply that the comparison turning upon
+the word _true_, the mind is satisfied, because the analogy between the
+word as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave no
+gap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over. But it is precisely this
+jolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discompose
+our thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the object
+of a pun to give us. Wit of this kind treats logic with every possible
+outward demonstration of respect--"keeps the word of promise to the ear,
+and breaks it to the sense." Dean Swift's famous question to the man
+carrying the hare, "Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?" is
+perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an
+equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood
+abounds in examples of this sort of fun--only that his analogies are of
+a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old sailor he
+says,
+
+  His head was turned, and so he chewed
+  His pigtail till he died.
+
+This is inimitable, like all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is
+perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind
+is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical _non sequiturs_. And
+yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in
+the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of his
+ear-trumpet:
+
+  I don't pretend with horns of mine,
+  Like some in the advertising line,
+  To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales
+  That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale's.
+
+  There was Mrs. F. so very deaf
+  That she might have worn a percussion cap
+  And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
+  Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
+  She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.
+
+Again, his definition of deafness:
+
+  Deaf as the dog's ears in Enfield's "Speaker."
+
+So, in his description of the hardships of the wild beasts in the
+menagerie,
+
+  Who could not even prey
+  In their own way,
+
+and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning
+with the lion; but
+
+  Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
+  When Nero bolted him.
+
+In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit
+always suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostling
+together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.
+Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down in
+a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but
+once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn,
+they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. In
+the droll complaint of the lover,
+
+  Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
+  But why did you kick me down-stairs?
+
+the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the
+word "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking
+downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.
+Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole
+sentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment of
+Huon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that
+makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.
+
+Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as
+distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so
+full is it of quaint fancy:
+
+  Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
+  As but the offscouring of the British sand,
+  And so much earth as was contributed
+  By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
+  Or what by ocean's slow alluvium fell
+  Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
+  This indigestful vomit of the sea
+  Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
+
+  Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore
+  They, with mad labor, fished their land to shore,
+  And dived as desperately for each piece
+  Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese
+  Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
+  Less than what building swallows bear away,
+  Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll.
+  Transfusing into them their sordid soul.
+
+  How did they rivet with gigantic piles
+  Thorough the centre their new-catchèd miles,
+  And to the stake a struggling country bound,
+  Where barking waves still bait the forcèd ground!
+
+  Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid.
+  And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played,
+  As if on purpose it on land had come
+  To show them what's their _mare liberum_;
+  The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
+  And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest;
+  And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs tan
+  Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban,
+  And, as they over the new level ranged,
+  For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.
+  Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
+  Something like government among them brings;
+  And as among the blind the blinkard reigns
+  So rules among the drowned he that drains;
+  Who best could know to pump on earth a leak,
+  Him they their lord and Country's Father speak.
+  To make a bank was a great plot of state,
+  Invent a shovel and be a magistrate;
+  Hence some small dykegrave, unperceived, invades
+  The power, and grows, as 't were, a king of spades.
+
+I have cited this long passage not only because Marvell (both in his
+serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is
+as good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off
+into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that
+constitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny,
+hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an
+epigram of two lines:
+
+  Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
+  May man undam you and God damn you all.
+
+Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the
+most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
+With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus," and
+wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
+Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a
+place "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat," and this
+hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is
+certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the
+Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and
+disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But
+commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him
+rather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an example
+from the "Day of Judgment":
+
+  With a whirl of thought oppressed
+  I sank from reverie to rest,
+  A horrid vision seized my head,
+  I saw the graves give up their dead!
+  Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
+  And thunder roars, and lightning flies!
+  Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
+  The world stands trembling at his throne!
+  While each pale sinner hung his head,
+  Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said:
+  "Offending race of human kind;
+  By nature, reason, learning, blind,
+  You who through frailty stepped aside.
+  And you who never fell through pride,
+  You who in different sects were shammed,
+  And come to see each other damned
+  (So some folks told you--but they knew
+  No more of Jove's designs than you)--
+  The world's mad business now is o'er,
+  And I resent these pranks no more--
+  I to such blockheads set my wit!
+  I damn such fools! Go, go! you're bit!"
+
+The unexpectedness of the conclusion here, after the somewhat solemn
+preface, is entirely of the essence of wit. So, too, is the sudden flirt
+of the scorpion's tail to sting you. It is almost the opposite of humor
+in one respect--namely, that it would make us think the solemnest things
+in life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humor
+delights in exposing. This further difference is also true: that wit
+makes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none of
+its point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and droller
+the oftener we read it. If we cannot safely deny that Swift was a
+humorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gone
+through the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid. We should
+never forget that he died mad. Satirists of this kind, while they have
+this quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower,
+differ from their nobler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is always
+to the disadvantage of the higher. They purposely disenchant us--while
+the others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted at
+all.
+
+Ben Jonson, who had in respect of sturdy good sense very much the same
+sort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose "Discoveries," as he
+calls them, are well worth reading for the sound criticism they contain,
+says:
+
+    The parts of a comedy are the same with [those of] a tragedy, and
+    the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach: the
+    comics are called _didaskaloi_[1] of the Greeks, no less than the
+    tragics. Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy;
+    that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling.
+    For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in
+    comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's
+    nature without a disease. As a wry face moves laughter, or a
+    deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using
+    her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made
+    the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise
+    man. So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in
+    the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly
+    stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And
+    therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests
+    upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and
+    sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did
+    move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and
+    scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands
+    the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.
+
+[Footnote 1: Teachers.]
+
+He then goes on to say of Aristophanes that
+
+    he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous,
+    oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be
+    corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter
+    with that beast the multitude. They love nothing that is right and
+    proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them
+    the better it is.
+
+In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a
+little bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructed
+according to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault
+in comedy. I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniably
+true, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon the
+stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the
+writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than
+as movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the
+greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in
+limbo, qualifies him with the title of _satiro_.
+
+But if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?
+Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor? Yes; but, as it
+appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree,
+from any other ancient. I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies
+not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends,
+but for the fun of the thing. I am so poor a Grecian that I have no
+doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. But
+even through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out
+more or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was a
+master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands--puts forth
+buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it
+feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.
+Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps
+we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts
+as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent
+being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems
+too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the
+definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true
+flavor of Falstaff in him--"a million a minute and your expenses paid."
+As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file." Now
+they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come
+tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the
+circus, with a "Here we are!" I can think of nothing like it but
+Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the _go_
+out of words. They do not merely play with words; they romp with them,
+tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.
+
+I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in "The Clouds" or "The
+Birds," but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs," nor does
+the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of
+humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he
+has nothing like the scene in "The Frogs," where Bacchus is terrified
+with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries,
+and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor
+tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess,
+the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the
+ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been
+degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within
+the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those
+hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet
+saw in Tartary?
+
+Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on
+the same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, the
+greatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not,--and I am inclined
+to believe he did,--he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his
+esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human
+character--the imagination and understanding. There is a great deal more
+than this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book is
+often little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested. The
+plot is of the meagrest. A country gentleman of La Mancha, living very
+much by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances of
+chivalry, becomes at last the victim of a monomania on this one subject,
+and resolves to revive the order of chivalry in his own proper person.
+He persuades a somewhat prosaic neighbor of his to accompany him as
+squire. They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which
+they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting.
+Now if this were all of "Don Quixote," it would be simply broad farce,
+as it becomes in Butler's parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far
+as mere external characteristics are concerned. The latter knight and
+his squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficient
+reason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that they
+furnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom. They
+represent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing.
+
+I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfect
+character ever drawn. As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense,
+always a gentleman,--that is, as he is guilty of no crime that is
+technically held to operate in defeasance of his title to that name as a
+man of the world,--so is Don Quixote, in everything that does not
+concern his monomania, a perfect gentleman and a good Christian besides.
+He is not the merely technical gentleman of three descents--but the
+_true_ gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness,
+generosity, and fear of God can make. And with what consummate skill are
+the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just
+so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill
+event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from
+his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's
+treatment of him in the second part--which followed the other after an
+interval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they delude
+themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides
+shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castle
+are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.
+
+Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooner
+or later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal good
+by material means. Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is the
+type of the man with common sense. He always sees things in the daylight
+of reason. He is never taken in by his master's theory of
+enchanters,--although superstitious enough to believe such things
+possible,--but he _does_ believe, despite all reverses, in his promises
+of material prosperity and advancement. The island that has been
+promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before
+Macbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And,
+fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island
+of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate--because statesmanship
+depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on
+precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS
+
+(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)
+
+
+The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result
+in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of
+ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such
+men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light
+upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as
+the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an
+accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the
+scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth
+only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to
+know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were
+contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting
+with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from
+the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the
+New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise
+and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy
+and cumbrous--the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men;
+generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space,
+mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of
+something better than provincial scholarship.
+
+But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier
+moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can
+say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long
+steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the
+carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts.
+What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vast
+combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up
+to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with all
+large mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the first
+solid result of thought, however small--the nucleus of speculation. The
+true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and
+sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of
+science.
+
+It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it
+democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy
+of thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it has
+taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it
+has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of
+reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had few
+books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it
+over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.
+Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and
+precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would
+hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of
+Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books;
+for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift.
+When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three
+hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently
+survived until our day.
+
+In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we
+admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those
+better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon
+that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is
+deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is
+forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual
+progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his
+dethroned gods.
+
+There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very
+few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I
+should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so
+universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally
+true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European
+branch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and there
+needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than
+this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the "Iliad" and the
+"Odyssey." The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work
+of one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so
+nobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I should
+place the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, in which the history of the
+spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of
+outline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same
+universal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural man
+set before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squire
+Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature--the
+imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. This
+is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly
+independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural
+history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the
+projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable
+result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only
+ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally
+represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral
+significance there may be in certain episodes of the "Odyssey," the man
+of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the
+understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive.
+There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is
+nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry,
+than that passage in the eleventh book of the "Odyssey," where the shade
+of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest
+shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades
+of Hades. Dante's poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man
+from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral
+conversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the great
+camp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so
+representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all
+men. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction
+between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the
+transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect;
+and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual
+culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness,
+and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, but
+human, and record certain phases of man's nature, certain stages of his
+moral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It will
+remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it
+remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and
+harmonious development.
+
+I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a
+different category. Though they mark the very highest level of human
+genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the
+individual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life
+as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain
+definite conditions. We all of us _may_ be in the position of Macbeth or
+Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds
+potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of
+our common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books I
+have mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us grow
+up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time,
+sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape
+our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with
+Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and
+with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the
+intellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do not
+mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them,
+in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and
+perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts
+for their permanence, and insures their immortality.
+
+
+
+
+THE IMAGINATION[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: A small portion of this lecture appeared at the time of its
+delivery, in January, 1855, in a report printed in the _Boston Daily
+Advertiser_.]
+
+Imagination is the wings of the mind; the understanding, its feet. With
+these it may climb high, but can never soar into that ampler ether and
+diviner air whence the eye dominates so uncontrolled a prospect on every
+hand. Through imagination alone is something like a creative power
+possible to man. It is the same in Aeschylus as in Shakespeare, though
+the form of its manifestation varies in some outward respects from age
+to age. Being the faculty of vision, it is the essential part of
+expression also, which is the office of all art.
+
+But in comparing ancient with modern imaginative literature, certain
+changes especially strike us, and chief among them a stronger infusion
+of sentiment and what we call the picturesque. I shall endeavor to
+illustrate this by a few examples. But first let us discuss imagination
+itself, and give some instances of its working.
+
+"Art," says Lord Verulam, "is man added to Nature" (_homo additus
+naturae_); and we may modernize his statement, and adapt it to the
+demands of aesthetics, if we define art to be Nature infused with and
+shaped by the imaginative faculty of man; thus, as Bacon says elsewhere,
+"conforming the shows of things to the desires of the mind." Art always
+platonizes: it results from a certain finer instinct for form, order,
+proportion, a certain keener sense of the rhythm there is in the eternal
+flow of the world about us, and its products take shape around some idea
+preëxistent in the mind, are quickened into life by it, and strive
+always (cramped and hampered as they are by the limitations and
+conditions of human nature, of individual temperament, and outward
+circumstances) toward ideal perfection--toward what Michelangelo called
+
+  Ideal form, the universal mould.
+
+Shakespeare, whose careless generalizations have often the exactness of
+scientific definitions, tells us that
+
+  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
+  Are of imagination all compact;
+
+that
+
+              as imagination bodies forth
+  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
+  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
+  A local habitation and a name.
+
+And a little before he had told us that
+
+  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
+  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
+  More than cool reason ever comprehends.
+
+Plato had said before him (in his "Ion") that the poet is possessed by a
+spirit not his own, and that he cannot poetize while he has a particle
+of understanding left. Again he says that the bacchantes, possessed by
+the god, drink milk and honey from the rivers, and cannot believe, _till
+they recover their senses_, that they have been drinking mere water.
+Empedocles said that "the mind could only conceive of fire by being
+fire."
+
+All these definitions imply in the imaginative faculty the capabilities
+of ecstasy and possession, that is, of projecting itself into the very
+consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by
+the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the
+tone, the color, and the temperature thereof. Shakespeare is the highest
+example of this--for example, the parting of Romeo and Juliet. There the
+poet is so possessed by the situation, has so mingled his own
+consciousness with that of the lovers, that all nature is infected too,
+and is full of partings:
+
+  Look, love, what envious streaks
+  Do lace the _severing_ clouds in yonder east.
+
+In Shelley's "Cenci," on the other hand, we have an instance of the
+poet's imagination giving away its own consciousness to the object
+contemplated, in this case an inanimate one.
+
+  Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
+  Crosses a deep ravine; 't is rough and narrow,
+  And winds with short turns down the precipice;
+  And in its depth there is a mighty rock
+  Which has, from unimaginable years,
+  Sustained itself with terror and with toil
+  Over a gulf, and with the agony
+  With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
+  Even as a wretched soul hour after hour
+  Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
+  And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
+  In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag,
+  Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
+  The melancholy mountain yawns.
+
+The hint of this Shelley took from a passage in the second act of
+Calderon's "Purgatorio de San Patricio."
+
+  No ves ese peñasco que parece
+  Que se esta sustentando con trabajo,
+  Y con el ansia misma que padece
+  Ha tantos siglos que se viene abajo?
+
+which, retaining the measure of the original, may be thus paraphrased:
+
+  Do you not see that rock there which appeareth
+  To hold itself up with a throe appalling,
+  And, through the very pang of what it feareth,
+  So many ages hath been falling, falling?
+
+You will observe that in the last instance quoted the poet substitutes
+his own _impression_ of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his
+own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all
+sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose
+excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the
+main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its
+excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and
+healthy expression. Thus Shakespeare in his ninety-seventh sonnet:
+
+  How like a winter hath my absence been
+  From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
+  What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
+  What old December's bareness everywhere!
+  And yet this time remov'd was summer's time.
+
+It is only when it becomes a habit, instead of a mood of the mind, that
+it is a token of disease. Then it is properly dyspepsia,
+liver-complaint--what you will, but certainly not imagination as the
+handmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: one
+as the _plastic_ or _shaping_ faculty, which gives form and proportion,
+and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unity
+foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as
+the _realizing_ energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts,
+not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and
+coherence.
+
+We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, in
+the one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intense
+sympathy--a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as a
+Cordelia, a Caliban as a Prospero. There is a passage in Chaucer's
+"House of Fame" which very prettily illustrates this latter function:
+
+  Whan any speche yeomen ys
+  Up to the paleys, anon ryght
+  Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
+  Which that the worde in erthe spak,
+  Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
+  And so were hys lykenesse,
+  And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
+  That it the same body be,
+  Man or woman, he or she.
+
+We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind
+of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive,
+sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of
+body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "the
+dull substance of his flesh were thought." It is not in mere intensity
+of phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, or
+the situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witness
+of itself in expression. I know nothing more profoundly imaginative
+therefore in its bald simplicity than a line in Webster's "Duchess of
+Malfy." Ferdinand has procured the murder of his sister the duchess.
+When her dead body is shown to him he stammers out:
+
+  Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.
+
+The difference between subjective and objective in poetry would seem to
+be that the aim of the former is to express a mood of the mind, often
+something in itself accidental and transitory, while that of the latter
+is to convey the impression made upon the mind by something outside of
+it, but taken up into the mind and idealized (that is, stripped of all
+unessential particulars) by it. The one would fain set forth your view
+of the thing (modified, perhaps, by your breakfast), the other would set
+forth the very thing itself in its most concise individuality.
+Subjective poetry may be profound and imaginative if it deal with the
+primary emotions of our nature, with the soul's inquiries into its own
+being and doing, as was true of Wordsworth; but in the very proportion
+that it is profound, its range is limited. Great poetry should have
+breadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere on
+the open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on their
+occasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploring
+expeditions among the crypts of metaphysics.
+
+But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengage
+what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse
+the vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things are
+gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. It
+is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that
+can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to
+itself. That the power of abstraction has something to do with the
+imagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is a
+dramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep.
+His acquaintances walk and talk before him on the stage of dream
+precisely as in life. When he wakes, his genius has flown away with his
+sleep. It was indeed nothing more than that his mind was not distracted
+by the multiplicity of details which the senses force upon it by day. He
+thinks of Smith, and it is no longer a mere name on a doorplate or in a
+directory; but Smith himself is there, with those marvellous
+commonplaces of his which, could you only hit them off when you were
+awake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too,
+that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforced
+his remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the corner
+of the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a week
+of newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination
+_bodies forth_? It is indeed the _verbum caro factum_--the word made
+flesh and blood.
+
+I said that the imagination always idealizes, that in its highest
+exercise, for example, as in the representation of character, it goes
+behind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types of
+human nature, as in Don Quixote and Hamlet, Antigone and Cordelia,
+Alcestis and Amelia. By this I mean that those features are most
+constantly insisted upon, not in which they differ from other men but
+from other kinds of men. For example, Don Quixote is never set before us
+as a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when you
+analyze it, of a very noble kind--nothing less, indeed, than devotion to
+an unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginative
+men for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats and
+disillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice at
+intervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one of
+Beethoven's symphonies, a kind of clue to guide us through those
+intricacies of harmony. So in Lear, one of Shakespeare's profoundest
+psychological studies, the weakness of the man is emphasized, as it
+were, and forced upon our attention by his outbreaks of impotent
+violence; so in Macbeth, that imaginative bias which lays him open to
+the temptation of the weird sisters is suggested from time to time
+through the whole tragedy, and at last unmans him, and brings about his
+catastrophe in his combat with Macduff. This is what I call ideal and
+imaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries of
+character, not by arbitrary lines drawn at this angle or that, according
+to the whim of the tracer, but by those mountain-ranges of human nature
+which divide man from man and temperament from temperament. And as the
+imagination of the reader must reinforce that of the poet, reducing the
+generic again to the specific, and defining it into sharper
+individuality by a comparison with the experiences of actual life, so,
+on the other hand, the popular imagination is always poetic, investing
+each new figure that comes before it with all the qualities that belong
+to the genus; Thus Hamlet, in some one or other of his characteristics
+has been the familiar of us all, and so from an ideal and remote figure
+is reduced to the standard of real and contemporary existence; while
+Bismarck, who, if we knew him, would probably turn out to be a
+comparatively simple character, is invested with all the qualities which
+have ever been attributed to the typical statesman, and is clearly as
+imaginative a personage as the Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's "Don
+Carlos." We are ready to accept any _coup de théâtre_ of him. Now, this
+prepossession is precisely that for which the imagination of the poet
+makes us ready by working on our own.
+
+But there are also lower levels on which this idealization plays its
+tricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may be
+called the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to
+delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from the
+associations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroic
+stature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar face
+in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the
+countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful
+reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most
+penetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ of
+expression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor were
+wrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at any
+rate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual and
+trivial. Their stage showed nothing that could be met in the streets. We
+barbarians, on the other hand, take delight precisely in that. We admire
+the novels of Trollope and the groups of Rogers because, as we say, they
+are so _real_, while it is only because they are so matter-of-fact, so
+exactly on the level with our own trivial and prosaic apprehensions.
+When Dante lingers to hear the dispute between Sinon and Master Adam,
+Virgil, type of the higher reason and the ideal poet, rebukes him, and
+even angrily.
+
+  E fa ragion ch'io ti sia sempre allato
+  Si più avvien che fortuna t' accoglia
+  Ove sien genti in simigliante piato;
+  Chè voler ciò udire è bassa voglia.
+
+  Remember, _I_ am always at thy side,
+  If ever fortune bring thee once again
+  Where there are people in dispute like this,
+  For wishing to hear that is vulgar wish.
+
+Verse is another of these expedients for producing that frame of mind,
+that prepossession, on the part of hearer or reader which is essential
+to the purpose of the poet, who has lost much of his advantage by the
+invention of printing, which obliges him to appeal to the eye rather
+than the ear. The rhythm is no arbitrary and artificial contrivance. It
+was suggested by an instinct natural to man. It is taught him by the
+beating of his heart, by his breathing, hastened or retarded by the
+emotion of the moment. Nay, it may be detected by what seems the most
+monotonous of motions, the flow of water, in which, if you listen
+intently, you will discover a beat as regular as that of the metronome.
+With the natural presumption of all self-taught men, I thought I had
+made a discovery in this secret confided to me by Beaver Brook, till
+Professor Peirce told me it was always allowed for in the building of
+dams. Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not only
+metre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outward
+nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray
+out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to
+spray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands
+an embodied ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of proportion, number,
+and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen the
+blue river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been ravished by the
+visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and
+downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
+how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
+flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
+vault below? At least there can be no doubt that metre, by its
+systematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes the
+senses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself in
+sympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predisposition
+to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose
+of the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right
+way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own
+sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The right
+reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary
+condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mind
+both in poet and hearer. The imagination must be sensitized ere it will
+take the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced and
+fixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun. Then
+that becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of the
+brain. Your own passion must penetrate and mingle with that of the
+artist that you may interpret him aright. You must, I say, be
+prepossessed, for it is the mind which shapes and colors the reports of
+the senses. Suppose you were expecting the bell to toll for the burial
+of some beloved person and the church-clock should begin to strike. The
+first lingering blow of the hammer would beat upon your very heart, and
+thence the shock would run to all the senses at once; but after a few
+strokes you would be undeceived, and the sound would become commonplace
+again. On the other hand, suppose that at a certain hour you knew that a
+criminal was to be executed; then the ordinary striking of the clock
+would have the sullen clang of a funeral bell. So in Shakespeare's
+instance of the lover, does he not suddenly find himself sensible of a
+beauty in the world about him before undreamed of, because his passion
+has somehow got into whatever he sees and hears? Will not the rustle of
+silk across a counter stop his pulse because it brings back to his sense
+the odorous whisper of Parthenissa's robe? Is not the beat of the
+horse's hoofs as rapid to Angelica pursued as the throbs of her own
+heart huddling upon one another in terror, while it is slow to Sister
+Anne, as the pulse that pauses between hope and fear, as she listens on
+the tower for rescue, and would have the rider "spur, though mounted on
+the wind"?
+
+Dr. Johnson tells us that that only is good poetry which may be
+translated into sensible prose. I greatly doubt whether any very
+profound emotion can be so rendered. Man is a metrical animal, and it is
+not in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joy
+over the new centre of hope and terror that is sucking life from her
+breast. Translate passion into sensible prose and it becomes absurd,
+because subdued to workaday associations, to that level of common sense
+and convention where to betray intense feeling is ridiculous and
+unmannerly. Shall I ask Shakespeare to translate me his love "still
+climbing trees in the Hesperides"? Shall I ask Marlowe how Helen could
+"make him immortal with a kiss," or how, in the name of all the Monsieur
+Jourdains, at once her face could "launch a thousand ships and burn the
+topless towers of Ilion"? Could Aeschylus, if put upon the stand, defend
+his making Prometheus cry out,
+
+  O divine ether and swift-winged winds,
+  Ye springs of rivers, and of ocean waves
+  The innumerable smile, all mother Earth,
+  And Helios' all-beholding round, I call:
+  Behold what I, a god, from gods endure!
+
+Or could Lear justify his
+
+  I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
+  I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you children!
+
+No; precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain
+any more than we can describe a perfume. There is a little quatrain of
+Gongora's quoted by Calderon in his "Alcalde of Zalamea" which has an
+inexplicable charm for me:
+
+  Las flores del romero,
+    Niña Isabel,
+  Hoy son flores azules,
+    Y mañana serán miel.
+
+If I translate it, 't is nonsense, yet I understand it perfectly, and it
+will, I dare say, outlive much wiser things in my memory. It is the very
+function of poetry to free us from that witch's circle of common sense
+which holds us fast in its narrow enchantment. In this disenthralment,
+language and verse have their share, and we may say that language also
+is capable of a certain idealization. Here is a passage from the XXXth
+song of Drayton's "Poly-Olbion":
+
+  Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every Hill
+  Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring valleys fill;
+  Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
+  From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
+  From whose stone-trophied head, it on to Wendrosse went,
+  Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent,
+  That Broadwater therewith within her banks astound,
+  In sailing to the sea, told it in Egremound.
+
+This gave a hint to Wordsworth, who, in one of his "Poems on the Naming
+of Places," thus prolongs the echo of it:
+
+  Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
+  That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
+  The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
+  Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again;
+  The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
+  Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
+  And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
+  A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
+  And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
+  Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
+  Carried the Lady's voice,--old Skiddaw blew
+  His speaking-trumpet;--back out of the clouds
+  Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
+  And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.
+
+Now, this passage of Wordsworth I should call the
+idealization of that of Drayton, who becomes poetical
+only in the "stone-trophied head of Dunbalrase";
+and yet the thought of both poets is the same.
+
+Even what is essentially vulgar may be idealized by seizing and dwelling
+on the generic characteristics. In "Antony and Cleopatra" Shakespeare
+makes Lepidus tipsy, and nothing can be droller than the drunken gravity
+with which he persists in proving himself capable of bearing his part in
+the conversation. We seem to feel the whirl in his head when we find his
+mind revolving round a certain fixed point to which he clings as to a
+post. Antony is telling stories of Egypt to Octavius, and Lepidus, drawn
+into an eddy of the talk, interrupts him:
+
+  _Lepidus_: You gave strange serpents there.
+
+  _Antony_ [_trying to shake him off_]: Ay, Lepidus.
+
+  _Lepidus_: Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud
+  by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.
+
+  _Antony_ [_thinking to get rid of him_]: They are so.
+
+Presently Lepidus has revolved again, and continues, as if he had been
+contradicted:
+
+  Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies' pyramises
+  are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard
+  that.
+
+And then, after another pause, still intent on proving himself sober, he
+asks, coming round to the crocodile again:
+
+  What manner o' thing is your crocodile?
+
+Antony answers gravely:
+
+  It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath
+  breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own
+  organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements
+  once out of it, it transmigrates.
+
+  _Lepidus_: What color is it of?
+
+  _Antony_: Of its own color, too.
+
+  _Lepidus_ [_meditatively_]: 'T is a strange serpent.
+
+The ideal in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades
+embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the
+dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic
+sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though
+these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this
+that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was
+supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and
+something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg
+encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas
+the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the
+mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this
+was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and
+personification with that typical expression which is the true function
+of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.
+
+        Revenge impatient rose;
+  He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
+        And, with a withering look,
+      The war-denouncing trumpet took,
+      And blew a blast so loud and dread,
+    Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of woe!
+        And ever and anon he beat
+        The doubling drum with furious heat.
+
+"Words, words, Horatio!" Now let us hear Chaucer with his single
+stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the
+murderous tread behind us:
+
+  The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.
+
+Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it--Collins's noise
+or Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you will
+perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness
+which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention.
+Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as
+the two points most apt to impress the imagination.
+
+The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on the
+other hand, adorns, illustrates, and commonly amplifies. The one is
+suggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander," I
+read--
+
+  Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,
+  And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
+  How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine,
+  For her love's sake, that with immortal wine
+  Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease
+  Than there was water in the Sestian seas.
+
+In the epithet "star," Hero's thought implies the beauty and brightness
+of her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune's
+skies" we have not only the simple fact that the waters are the
+atmosphere of the sea-god's realm, but are reminded of that reflected
+heaven which Hero must have so often watched as it deepened below her
+tower in the smooth Hellespont. I call this as high an example of fancy
+as could well be found; it is picture and sentiment combined--the very
+essence of the picturesque.
+
+But when Keats calls Mercury "the star of Lethe," the word "star" makes
+us see him as the poor ghosts do who are awaiting his convoy, while the
+word "Lethe" intensifies our sympathy by making us feel his coming as
+they do who are longing to drink of forgetfulness. And this again reacts
+upon the word "star," which, as it before expressed only the shining of
+the god, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitual
+association of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothing
+can be more fanciful than this bit of Henry More the Platonist:
+
+                        What doth move
+  The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?
+  The thrush or lark that, mounting high above,
+  Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn
+  Heavily hanging in the dewy morn?
+
+But compare this with Keats again:
+
+  The voice I hear this passing night was heard
+  In ancient days by emperor and clown;
+  Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
+  Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home,
+  She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
+
+The imagination has touched that word "alien," and we see the field
+through Ruth's eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, not
+merely through those of the poet.
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
+
+I. LIFE IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
+
+
+It is the office and function of the imagination to renew life in lights
+and sounds and emotions that are outworn and familiar. It calls the soul
+back once more under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest bush
+burn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible presence of God. And it
+works the same miracle for language. The word it has touched retains the
+warmth of life forever. We talk about the age of superstition and fable
+as if they were passed away, as if no ghost could walk in the pure white
+light of science, yet the microscope that can distinguish between the
+disks that float in the blood of man and ox is helpless, a mere dead
+eyeball, before this mystery of Being, this wonder of Life, the sympathy
+which puts us in relation with all nature, before that mighty
+circulation of Deity in which stars and systems are but as the
+blood-disks in our own veins. And so long as wonder lasts, so long will
+imagination find thread for her loom, and sit like the Lady of Shalott
+weaving that magical web in which "the shows of things are accommodated
+to the desires of the mind."
+
+It is precisely before this phenomenon of life in literature and
+language that criticism is forced to stop short. That it is there we
+know, but what it is we cannot precisely tell. It flits before us like
+the bird in the old story. When we think to grasp it, we already hear it
+singing just beyond us. It is the imagination which enables the poet to
+give away his own consciousness in dramatic poetry to his characters, in
+narrative to his language, so that they react upon us with the same
+original force as if they had life in themselves.
+
+
+II. STYLE AND MANNER
+
+
+Where Milton's style is fine it is _very_ fine, but it is always liable
+to the danger of degenerating into mannerism. Nay, where the imagination
+is absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theological
+discussions in "Paradise Lost," it becomes mannerism of the most
+wearisome kind. Accordingly, he is easily parodied and easily imitated.
+Philips, in his "Splendid Shilling," has caught the trick exactly:
+
+  Not blacker tube nor of a shorter size
+  Smokes Cambrobriton (versed in pedigree,
+  Sprung from Cadwallader and Arthur, kings
+  Full famous in romantic tale) when he,
+  O'er many a craggy hill and barren cliff,
+  Upon a cargo of famed Cestrian cheese
+  High overshadowing rides, with a design
+  To vend his wares or at the Arvonian mart.
+  Or Maridunum, or the ancient town
+  Yclept Brechinia, or where Vaga's stream
+  Encircles Ariconium, fruitful soil.
+
+Philips has caught, I say, Milton's trick; his real secret he could
+never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable. But all
+authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies
+less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become
+mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily
+imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his
+time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence
+has in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined by
+him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is
+circumlocution in the crow of a cock. Cowper was only saved by mixing
+equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind of
+cross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we should
+not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that
+no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the
+majesty and compass of the organ. He was as much composer as poet.
+
+How is it with Shakespeare? did he have no style? I think I find the
+proof that he had it, and that of the very highest and subtlest kind, in
+the fact that I can nowhere put my finger on it, and say it is here or
+there.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: In his essay, "Shakespeare Once More" (_Works_, in, pp.
+36-42), published in 1868, Mr. Lowell has treated of Shakespeare's style
+in a passage of extraordinary felicity and depth of critical judgment.]
+
+I do not mean that things in themselves artificial may not be highly
+agreeable. We learn by degrees to take a pleasure in the mannerism of
+Gibbon and Johnson. It is something like reading Latin as a living
+language. But in both these cases the man is only present by his
+thought. It is the force of that, and only that, which distinguishes
+them from their imitators, who easily possess themselves of everything
+else. But with Burke, who has true style, we have a very different
+experience. If we _go_ along with Johnson or Gibbon, we are _carried_
+along by Burke. Take the finest specimen of him, for example, "The
+Letter to a Noble Lord." The sentences throb with the very pulse of the
+writer. As he kindles, the phrase glows and dilates, and we feel
+ourselves sharing in that warmth and expansion. At last we no longer
+read, we seem to hear him, so livingly is the whole man in what he
+writes; and when the spell is over, we can scarce believe that those
+dull types could have held such ravishing discourse. And yet we are told
+that when Burke spoke in Parliament he always emptied the house.
+
+I know very well what the charm of mere words is. I know very well that
+our nerves of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the violin is
+said to do, to certain modulations, so that we receive them with a
+readier sympathy at every repetition. This is a part of the sweet charm
+of the classics. We are pleased with things in Horace which we should
+not find especially enlivening in Mr. Tupper. Cowper, in one of his
+letters, after turning a clever sentence, says, "There! if that had been
+written in Latin seventeen centuries ago by Mr. Flaccus, you would have
+thought it rather neat." How fully any particular rhythm gets possession
+of us we can convince ourselves by our dissatisfaction with any
+emendation made by a contemporary poet in his verses. Posterity may
+think he has improved them, but we are jarred by any change in the old
+tune. Even without any habitual association, we cannot help recognizing
+a certain power over our fancy in mere words. In verse almost every ear
+is caught with the sweetness of alliteration. I remember a line in
+Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" which owes much of its fascination to
+three _m's_, where he speaks of the Hebrid Isles
+
+  Far placed amid the melancholy main.
+
+I remember a passage in Prichard's "Races of Man" which had for me all
+the moving quality of a poem. It was something about the Arctic regions,
+and I could never read it without the same thrill. Dr. Prichard was
+certainly far from being an inspired or inspiring author, yet there was
+something in those words, or in their collocation, that affected me as
+only genius can. It was probably some dimly felt association, something
+like that strange power there is in certain odors, which, in themselves
+the most evanescent and impalpable of all impressions on the senses,
+have yet a wondrous magic in recalling, and making present to us, some
+forgotten experience.
+
+Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems are
+full of those little pitfalls for the fancy. Whatever you have read,
+whether in the classics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stir
+you with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable. Gray
+makes use of the same artifice, and with the same success.
+
+There is a charm in the arrangement of words also, and that not only in
+verse, but in prose. The finest prose is subject to the laws of metrical
+proportion. For example, in the song of Deborah and Barak: "Awake,
+awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, utter a song! Arise, Barak, and lead thy
+captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam!" Or again, "At her feet he
+bowed; he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he
+bowed, there he fell down dead."
+
+Setting aside, then, all charm of association, all the influence to
+which we are unconsciously subjected by melody, by harmony, or even by
+the mere sound of words, we may say that style is distinguished from
+manner by the author's power of projecting his own emotion into what he
+writes. The stylist is occupied with the impression which certain things
+have made upon him; the mannerist is wholly concerned with the
+impression he shall make on others.
+
+
+III. KALEVALA
+
+
+But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which
+imagination may display itself--as an active power or as a passive
+quality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receives
+from nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latter
+reproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration by
+conventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by the
+conscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself with
+expression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we call
+art, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in a
+vivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet was
+conscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have not
+communicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have come
+down to us to which every generation adds some new significance out of
+its own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for the
+understanding, and, passing into the common currency of speech, become
+the property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, which
+is the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is the
+property of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always here
+a certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrases
+and images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditions
+remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy
+combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and
+natural relation with the world about him, however little or however
+much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious
+and incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomes
+with the advance of every generation in literary culture and social
+refinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never produced
+among cultivated people. Like the mayflower, they love the woods, and
+will not be naturalized in the garden. Now, the advantage of that
+primitive kind of poetry of which I was just speaking is that it finds
+its imaginative components ready made to its hand. But an illustration
+is worth more than any amount of discourse. Let me read you a few
+passages from a poem which grew up under the true conditions of natural
+and primitive literature--remoteness, primitiveness of manners, and
+dependence on native traditions. I mean the epic of Finland--Kalevala.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This translation is Mr. Lowell's, and, so far as I know,
+has not been printed.--C.E. NORTON.]
+
+  I am driven by my longing,
+  Of my thought I hear the summons
+  That to singing I betake me,
+  That I give myself to speaking,
+  That our race's lay I utter,
+  Song for ages handed downward.
+  Words upon my lips are melting,
+  And the eager tones escaping
+  Will my very tongue outhasten,
+  Will my teeth, despite me, open.
+
+  Golden friend, beloved brother,
+  Dear one that grew up beside me,
+  Join thee with me now in singing,
+  Join thee with me now in speaking,
+  Since we here have come together,
+  Journeying by divers pathways;
+  Seldom do we come together,
+  One comes seldom to the other,
+  In the barren fields far-lying,
+  On the hard breast of the Northland.
+
+  Hand in hand together clasping,
+  Finger fast with finger clasping,
+  Gladly we our song will utter,
+  Of our lays will give the choicest--
+  So that friends may understand it.
+  And the kindly ones may hear it.
+  In their youth which now is waxing,
+  Climbing upward into manhood:
+  These our words of old tradition,
+  These our lays that we have borrowed
+  From the belt of Wainamoinen,
+  From the forge of Ilmarinen,
+  From the sword of Kaukomeli,
+  From the bow of Jonkahainen,
+  From the borders of the ice-fields,
+  From the plains of Kalevala.
+
+  These my father sang before me,
+  As the axe's helve he fashioned;
+  These were taught me by my mother,
+  As she sat and twirled her spindle,
+  While I on the floor was lying,
+  At her feet, a child was rolling;
+  Never songs of Sampo failed her.
+  Magic songs of Lonhi never;
+  Sampo in her song grew aged,
+  Lonhi with her magic vanished,
+  In her singing died Wipunen,
+  As I played, died Lunminkainen.
+  Other words there are a many,
+  Magic words that I have taught me,
+  Which I picked up from the pathway,
+  Which I gathered from the forest,
+  Which I snapped from wayside bushes,
+  Which I gleaned from slender grass-blades,
+  Which I found upon the foot-bridge.
+  When I wandered as a herd-boy.
+  As a child into the pastures,
+  To the meadows rich in honey,
+  To the sun-begoldened hilltops,
+  Following the black Maurikki
+  By the side of brindled Kimmo.
+
+  Lays the winter gave me also,
+  Song was given me by the rain-storm,
+  Other lays the wind-gusts blew me,
+  And the waves of ocean brought them;
+  Words I borrowed of the song-birds,
+  And wise sayings from the tree-tops.
+
+  Then into a skein I wound them,
+  Bound them fast into a bundle,
+  Laid upon my ledge the burthen,
+  Bore them with me to my dwelling,
+  On the garret beams I stored them,
+  In the great chest bound with copper.
+
+  Long time in the cold they lay there,
+  Under lock and key a long time;
+  From the cold shall I forth bring them?
+  Bring my lays from out the frost there
+  'Neath this roof so wide-renownèd?
+  Here my song-chest shall I open,
+  Chest with runic lays o'errunning?
+  Shall I here untie my bundle,
+  And begin my skein unwinding?
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Now my lips at last must close them
+  And my tongue at last be fettered;
+  I must leave my lay unfinished,
+  And must cease from cheerful singing;
+  Even the horses must repose them
+  When all day they have been running;
+  Even the iron's self grows weary
+  Mowing down the summer grasses;
+  Even the water sinks to quiet
+  From its rushing in the river;
+  Even the fire seeks rest in ashes
+  That all night hath roared and crackled;
+  Wherefore should not music also,
+  Song itself, at last grow weary
+  After the long eve's contentment
+  And the fading of the twilight?
+  I have also heard say often,
+  Heard it many times repeated,
+  That the cataract swift-rushing
+  Not in one gush spends its waters,
+  And in like sort cunning singers
+  Do not spend their utmost secret,
+  Yea, to end betimes is better
+  Than to break the thread abruptly.
+
+  Ending, then, as I began them,
+  Closing thus and thus completing,
+  I fold up my pack of ballads,
+  Roll them closely in a bundle,
+  Lay them safely in the storeroom,
+  In the strong bone-castle's chamber,
+  That they never thence be stolen,
+  Never in all time be lost thence,
+  Though the castle's wall be broken,
+  Though the bones be rent asunder,
+  Though the teeth may be pried open,
+  And the tongue be set in motion.
+
+  How, then, were it sang I always
+  Till my songs grew poor and poorer,
+  Till the dells alone would hear me,
+  Only the deaf fir-trees listen?
+  Not in life is she, my mother,
+  She no longer is aboveground;
+  She, the golden, cannot hear me,
+  'T is the fir-trees now that hear me,
+  'T is the pine-tops understand me,
+  And the birch-crowns full of goodness,
+  And the ash-trees now that love me!
+  Small and weak my mother left me,
+  Like a lark upon the cliff-top,
+  Like a young thrush 'mid the flintstones
+  In the guardianship of strangers,
+  In the keeping of the stepdame.
+  She would drive the little orphan.
+  Drive the child with none to love him,
+  To the cold side of the chimney,
+  To the north side of the cottage.
+  Where the wind that felt no pity,
+  Bit the boy with none to shield him.
+  Larklike, then, I forth betook me,
+  Like a little bird to wander.
+  Silent, o'er the country straying
+  Yon and hither, full of sadness.
+  With the winds I made acquaintance
+  Felt the will of every tempest.
+  Learned of bitter frost to shiver,
+  Learned too well to weep of winter.
+
+  Yet there be full many people
+  Who with evil voice assail me,
+  And with tongue of poison sting me,
+  Saying that my lips are skilless,
+  That the ways of song I know not,
+  Nor the ballad's pleasant turnings.
+  Ah, you should not, kindly people,
+  Therein seek a cause to blame me,
+  That, a child, I sang too often,
+  That, unfledged, I twittered only.
+  I have never had a teacher,
+  Never heard the speech of great men,
+  Never learned a word unhomely,
+  Nor fine phrases of the stranger.
+  Others to the school were going,
+  I alone at home must keep me,
+  Could not leave my mother's elbow,
+  In the wide world had her only;
+  In the house had I my schooling,
+  From the rafters of the chamber.
+  From the spindle of my mother,
+  From the axehelve of my father,
+  In the early days of childhood;
+  But for this it does not matter,
+  I have shown the way to singers,
+  Shown the way, and blazed the tree-bark,
+  Snapped the twigs, and marked the footpath;
+  Here shall be the way in future,
+  Here the track at last be opened
+  For the singers better-gifted,
+  For the songs more rich than mine are,
+  Of the youth that now are waxing,
+  In the good time that is coming!
+
+Like Virgil's husbandman, our minstrel did not know how well off he was
+to have been without schooling. This, I think, every one feels at once
+to be poetry that sings itself. It makes its own tune, and the heart
+beats in time to its measure. By and by poets will begin to say, like
+Goethe, "I sing as the bird sings"; but this poet sings in that fashion
+without thinking of it or knowing it. And it is the very music of his
+race and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos.
+Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners to
+the old national lays grow fewer every day. Before long the Fins will be
+writing songs in the manner of Heine, and dramas in imitation of
+"Faust." Doubtless the material of original poetry lies in all of us,
+but in proportion as the mind is conventionalized by literature, it is
+apt to look about it for models, instead of looking inward for that
+native force which makes models, but does not follow them. This rose of
+originality which we long for, this bloom of imagination whose perfume
+enchants us--we can seldom find it when it is near us, when it is part
+of our daily lives.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
+
+
+
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales_. By Henry James, Jr.
+Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co.
+_Transatlantic Sketches_. By the same author.]
+
+Whoever takes an interest, whether of mere curiosity or of critical
+foreboding, in the product and tendency of our younger literature, must
+have had his attention awakened and detained by the writings of Mr.
+James. Whatever else they may be, they are not common, and have that air
+of good breeding which is the token of whatever is properly called
+literature. They are not the overflow of a shallow talent for
+improvisation too full of self to be contained, but show everywhere the
+marks of intelligent purpose and of the graceful ease that comes only of
+conscientious training. Undoubtedly there was a large capital of native
+endowment to start from--a mind of singular subtlety and refinement; a
+faculty of rapid observation, yet patient of rectifying afterthought;
+senses daintily alive to every aesthetic suggestion; and a frank
+enthusiasm, kept within due bounds by the double-consciousness of humor.
+But it is plain that Mr. James is fortunate enough to possess, or to be
+possessed by, that finer sixth sense which we call the artistic, and
+which controls, corrects, and discontents. His felicities, therefore,
+are not due to a lucky turn of the dice, but to forethought and
+afterthought. Accordingly, he is capable of progress, and gives renewed
+evidence of it from time to time, while too many of our authors show
+premature marks of arrested development. They strike a happy vein of
+starting, perhaps, and keep on grubbing at it, with the rude helps of
+primitive mining, seemingly unaware that it is daily growing more and
+more slender. Even should it wholly vanish, they persist in the vain
+hope of recovering it further on, as if in literature two successes of
+precisely the same kind were possible Nay, most of them have hit upon no
+vein at all, but picked up a nugget rather, and persevere in raking the
+surface of things, if haply they may chance upon another. The moral of
+one of Hawthorne's stories is that there is no element of treasure-trove
+in success, but that true luck lies in the deep and assiduous
+cultivation of our own plot of ground, be it larger or smaller. For
+indeed the only estate of man that savors of the realty is in his mind.
+Mr. James seems to have arrived early at an understanding of this, and
+to have profited by the best modern appliances of self-culture. In
+conception and expression is he essentially an artist and not an
+irresponsible _trouvère_. If he allow himself an occasional
+carelessness, it is not from incaution, but because he knows perfectly
+well what he is about. He is quite at home in the usages of the best
+literary society. In his writing there is none of that hit-or-miss
+playing at snapdragon with language, of that clownish bearing-on in what
+should be the light strokes, as if mere emphasis were meaning, and
+naturally none of the slovenliness that offends a trained judgment in
+the work of so many of our writers later, unmistakably clever as they
+are. In short, he has _tone_, the last result and surest evidence of an
+intellect reclaimed from the rudeness of nature, for it means
+self-restraint. The story of Handel's composing always in full dress
+conveys at least the useful lesson of a gentlemanlike deference for the
+art a man professes and for the public whose attention he claims. Mr.
+James, as we see in his sketches of travel, is not averse to the
+lounging ease of a shooting-jacket, but he respects the usages of
+convention, and at the canonical hours is sure to be found in the
+required toilet. He does not expect the company to pardon his own
+indolence as one of the necessary appendages of originality. Always
+considerate himself, his readers soon find reason to treat him with
+consideration. For they soon come to see that literature may be light
+and at the same time thoughtful; that lightness, indeed, results much
+more surely from serious study than from the neglect of it.
+
+We have said that Mr. James was emphatically a man of culture, and we
+are old-fashioned enough to look upon him with the more interest as a
+specimen of exclusively _modern_ culture. Of any classical training we
+have failed to detect the traces in him. His allusions, his citations,
+are in the strictest sense contemporary, and indicate, if we may trust
+our divination, a preference for French models, Balzac, De Musset,
+Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, especially the three
+latter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, their
+clever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by direct
+bluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is an
+admirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable by
+example. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to be
+called our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the French
+small-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows the
+graceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a man
+distinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of letting
+us feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusively
+aware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of his
+character by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be made
+always in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes and
+prejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proof
+of indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any fault
+with Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, it
+would be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like
+_bouder, se reconnaît, banal_, and the like), where our English, without
+being driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite as
+good and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow as
+near surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who so
+generally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us a
+disagreeable alien like _abandon_ (used as a noun), as if it could show
+an honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster.
+Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance that
+escapes our obtuser sense, a sweetness, it may be, of early association,
+for he tells us somewhere that in his boyhood he was put to school in
+Geneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into the
+rusticism that "remembers of" a thing.
+
+But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligent
+study of French models, it is plain that a much larger share of Mr.
+James's education has been acquired by travel and through the eyes of a
+thoughtful observer of men and things. He has seen more cities and
+manners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and if
+with less gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of his
+artistic apprehensiveness and scope that is of far greater value to him.
+We do not mean to imply that Mr. James lacks what is called knowledge of
+the world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in
+him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination
+ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity.
+He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in
+a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening
+the ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line he
+has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character
+and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of
+society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and
+art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr.
+James does not see things with his eyes alone. His vision is always
+modified by his imaginative temperament. He is the last man we should
+consult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow of
+sensitive impression, and are positively better than the actual
+pilgrimage. We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, but
+hardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. _Et ego in
+Arcadia_, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not the
+name we found in our guide-book. It is always _Dichtung und Wahrheit_
+(Goethe knew very well what he was about when he gave precedence to the
+giddier sister)--it is always fact seen through imagination and
+transfigured by it. A single example will best show what we mean. "It is
+partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened
+that the aqueducts are so impressive. _They seem the very source of the
+solitude in which they stand_; they look like architectural spectres,
+and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede
+along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out
+of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's
+pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance
+crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice,"
+or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it
+stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose.
+But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased. Mr. James tempts us
+into many byways of serious and fruitful thought. Especially valuable
+and helpful have we found his _obiter dicta_ on the arts of painting,
+sculpture, and architecture; for example, when he says of the Tuscan
+palaces that "in their large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty of
+effect, [they] reproduce more than other modern styles the simple
+nobleness of Greek architecture." And we would note also what he says of
+the Albani Antinoüs. It must be a nimble wit that can keep pace with Mr.
+James's logic in his aesthetic criticism. It is apt to spring airily
+over the middle term to the conclusion, leaving something in the
+likeness of a ditch across the path of our slower intelligences, which
+look about them and think twice before taking the leap. Courage! there
+are always fresh woods and pastures new on the other side. A curious
+reflection has more than once flashed upon our minds as we lingered with
+Mr. James over his complex and refined sensations: we mean the very
+striking contrast between the ancient and modern traveller. The former
+saw with his bodily eyes, and reported accordingly, catering for the
+curiosity of homely wits as to the outsides and appearances of things.
+Even Montaigne, habitually introspective as he was, sticks to the old
+method in his travels. The modern traveller, on the other hand,
+superseded by the guide-book, travels in himself, and records for us the
+scenery of his own mind as it is affected by change of sky and the
+various weather of temperament.
+
+Mr. James, in his sketches, frankly acknowledges his preference of the
+Old World. Life--which here seems all drab to him, without due lights
+and shades of social contrast, without that indefinable suggestion of
+immemorial antiquity which has so large a share in picturesque
+impression--is there a dome of many-colored glass irradiating both
+senses and imagination. We shall not blame him too gravely for this, as
+if an American had not as good a right as any ancient of them all to
+say, _Ubi libertas, ibi patria_. It is no real paradox to affirm that a
+man's love of his country may often be gauged by his disgust at it. But
+we think it might fairly be argued against him that the very absence of
+that distracting complexity of associations might help to produce that
+solitude which is the main feeder of imagination. Certainly, Hawthorne,
+with whom no modern European can be matched for the subtlety and power
+of this marvellous quality, is a strong case on the American side of the
+question.
+
+Mr. James's tales, if without any obvious moral, are sure to have a
+clearly defined artistic purpose. They are careful studies of character
+thrown into dramatic action, and the undercurrent of motive is, as it
+should be, not in the circumstances but in the characters themselves. It
+is by delicate touches and hints that his effects are produced. The
+reader is called upon to do his share, and will find his reward in it,
+for Mr. James, as we cannot too often insist, is first and always an
+artist. Nowhere does he show his fine instinct more to the purpose than
+in leaving the tragic element of tales (dealing as they do with
+contemporary life, and that mainly in the drawing-room) to take care of
+itself, and in confining the outward expression of passion within the
+limits of a decorous amenity. Those who must have their intellectual
+gullets tingled with the fiery draught of coarse sensation must go
+elsewhere for their dram; but whoever is capable of the aroma of the
+more delicate vintages will find it here. In the volume before us
+"Madame de Mauves" will illustrate what we mean. There is no space for
+detailed analysis, even if that were ever adequate to give the true
+impression of stories so carefully worked out and depending so much for
+their effect on a gradual cumulation of particulars each in itself
+unemphatic. We have said that Mr. James shows promise as well as
+accomplishment, gaining always in mastery of his material. It is but a
+natural inference from this that his "Roderick Hudson" is the fullest
+and most finished proof of his power as a story-teller. Indeed, we may
+say frankly that it pleases us the more because the characters are drawn
+with a bolder hand and in more determined outline, for if Mr. James need
+any friendly caution, it is against over-delicacy of handling.
+
+
+
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
+
+
+The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon English
+soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was
+first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre
+remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel
+Harvey,--a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,--whose chief claim to
+remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was
+the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure
+Letters" (1592) he says, "If I never deserve anye better remembraunce,
+let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English Hexameter,
+whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and excellent Sir
+Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and elsewhere."
+This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an afterthought
+with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him and Spenser in
+1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a collaborator with
+Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of Surrey is said to have
+been the first who wrote thus in English. The most successful person,
+however, was William Webb, who translated two of Virgil's Eclogues with
+a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in his "Schoolmaster" (1570),
+had already suggested the adoption of the ancient hexameter by English
+poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham in his "Art of Poesie")
+thought the number of monosyllabic words in English an insuperable
+objection to verses in which there was a large proportion of dactyls,
+and recommended, therefore, that a trial should be made with iambics.
+Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have tried his hand at the new
+kind of verse. He says:
+
+    I like your late Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I
+    also enure my penne sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or
+    chiefest hardnesse, whych seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime
+    gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that
+    it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, as in
+    _Carpenter_; the middle sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when
+    it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that
+    draweth one legge after hir and _Heaven_, being used shorte as one
+    sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a _Diastole_, is
+    like a lame dogge that holdes up one legge. But it is to be wonne
+    with Custome, and rough words must be subdued with Vse. For why a
+    God's name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of our
+    owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the Sounde, reserving the
+    Quantitie to the Verse?
+
+The amiable Edmonde seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this
+sentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue
+English to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for
+example, make the vowel in "debt" long, in the teeth of use and wont.
+
+We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the ear
+of Master Gabriel Harvey,--an ear that must have been long by position,
+in virtue of its place on his head.
+
+  Not the like _Discourser_, for Tongue and head to be fóund out;
+  Not the like _resolute Man_, for great and serious áffayres;
+  Not the like _Lynx_, to spie out secretes and priuities óf States;
+  _Eyed_ like to _Argus_, _Earde_ like to _Midas_, _Nosd_ like to _Naso_,
+  Winged like to _Mercury_, fittst of a Thousand for to be émployed.
+
+And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the
+"Aeneid."
+
+  Laocoon storming from Princelie Castel is hastning,
+  And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine
+  Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie?
+  Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,
+  Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlisses
+  So soone forgotten? My life for an haulfpennie (Trojans), etc.
+
+Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:--
+
+  Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,
+  And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed.
+
+Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff, "that
+drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill,
+like the waye betwixt Stamford and Beechfeeld, and goes like a horse
+plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to the
+saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It will be noticed that his
+prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England at
+that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so far
+useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's "Defence of Ryme" (1603),
+one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also, in his
+"Satires," condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for their
+grave beauty and strength.
+
+The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich
+Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to
+the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His
+"Odyssey" (1783), his "Iliad" (1791), and his "Luise" (1795), were
+confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann and
+Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modern
+hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other classic metres
+into England, and we should be grateful to him, at least, for having
+given the model for Canning's "Knife-grinder." The exotic, however,
+again refused to take root, and for many years after we have no example
+of English hexameters. It was universally conceded that the temper of
+our language was unfriendly to them.
+
+It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only
+tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of the
+Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but "Evangeline"
+(1847), though encumbered with too many descriptive irrelevancies, was
+so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made converts by
+thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than this, it made
+Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary English poets.
+Clough's "Bothie"--poem whose singular merit has hitherto failed of the
+wide appreciation it deserves--followed not long after; and Kingsley's
+"Andromeda" is yet damp from the press.
+
+While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by "Evangeline" is a
+striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have
+never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a
+dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform
+for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow
+into prose,--as in the verse
+
+  Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,
+
+and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his style
+in other metres, as where he says
+
+  Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_,
+
+using a word as essentially unpoetic as "surtout or pea-jacket." We
+think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms
+the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented
+sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of
+phrase.
+
+But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as
+frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles
+Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the
+narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with a
+firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness, and
+simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest
+artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the
+picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is with
+a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and characters
+of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of Priscilla
+spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We feel charmed
+to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the little old
+familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are astonished,
+like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius could be
+contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot associate
+sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins may be
+consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot
+Desmoulins--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.
+
+Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary
+popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait
+for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any
+general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to
+receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in
+itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and
+always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly
+popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the
+great poets--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and
+naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which
+brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed
+expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that is
+a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one who
+is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr.
+Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics
+are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done,
+because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault is
+a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his readers,
+which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be drawn from
+any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two stanzas could
+be cut off from "The Two Angels," a poem which, without them, is as
+perfect as anything in the language.
+
+Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain jewels
+in Maga's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should, perhaps,
+have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of our most
+precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some very
+unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it seemed to
+us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original poet. The
+writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more complex or
+more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite with the
+few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and not
+personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the development
+of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the gratitude and
+love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace
+and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr.
+Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets,
+deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic
+narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In
+our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red
+pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to
+overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if,
+since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative
+than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Apart from its intrinsic
+beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful
+consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict
+of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no
+fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that
+which charms now and charms always,--true power and originality, without
+grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic type
+of strength.
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
+
+
+It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular of
+American, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of his
+nature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of his
+images, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justify
+the public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation will
+settle into fame. That he has not _this_ of Tennyson, nor _that_ of
+Browning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other things
+that are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in his
+verse that make day for a moment in this dim cavern of consciousness
+where we grope; but there is an equable sunshine that touches the
+landscape of life with a new charm, and lures us out into healthier air.
+If he fall short of the highest reaches of imagination, he is none the
+less a master within his own sphere--all the more so, indeed, that he is
+conscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving to
+be other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as in
+these latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poets
+like that of Irving among our prose-writers. Make whatever deductions
+and qualifications, and they still keep their place in the hearts and
+minds of men. In point of time he is our Chaucer--the first who imported
+a finer foreign culture into our poetry.
+
+His present volume shows a greater ripeness than any of its
+predecessors. We find a mellowness of early autumn in it. There is the
+old sweetness native to the man, with greater variety of character and
+experience. The personages are all drawn from the life, and sketched
+with the light firmness of a practised art. They have no more
+individuality than is necessary to the purpose of the poem, which
+consists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellers
+gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its
+sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a
+natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of
+his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the
+same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities
+of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes,
+and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease of
+style which is, of all things, the hardest to attain. The verse flows
+clear and sweet as honey, and with a faint fragrance that tells, but not
+too plainly, of flowers that grew in many fields. We are made to feel
+that, however tedious the processes of culture may be, the ripe result
+in facile power and scope of fancy is purely delightful. We confess that
+we are so heartily weary of those cataclysms of passion and sentiment
+with which literature has been convulsed of late,--as if the main object
+were, not to move the reader, but to shake the house about his
+ears,--that the homelike quiet and beauty of such poems as these is like
+an escape from noise to nature.
+
+As regards the structure of the work looked at as a whole, it strikes us
+as a decided fault, that the Saga of King Olaf is so disproportionately
+long, especially as many of the pieces which compose it are by no means
+so well done as the more strictly original ones. We have no quarrel with
+the foreign nature of the subject as such,--for any good matter is
+American enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking
+that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for
+freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself
+felt. Put into English, the Saga seems _too_ Norse; and there is often a
+hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for
+literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but
+hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the
+ethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent"
+is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," which
+he learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland,
+where he played as a boy. We are willing, however, to pardon the parts
+which we find somewhat ineffectual, in favor of the "Nun of Nidaros,"
+which concludes, and in its gracious piety more than redeems, them all.
+
+
+
+
+WHITTIER
+
+IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
+
+
+It is a curious illustration of the attraction of opposites, that, among
+our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in
+the Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a
+drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to
+the tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of
+our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burns
+all the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is not
+as a singular antithesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity of
+his is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as illustrating
+how deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon the
+commonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sect
+they chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of the
+Puritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englander
+is too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens to
+reverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of a
+sincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poetic
+sentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitiful
+snobbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of the
+Puritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest men
+brought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of the
+democracy which was to develop itself from their institutions. They
+brought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly nature
+of the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate and
+disperse itself. The same conditions have produced the same results also
+at the South, and nothing but slavery blocks the way to a perfect
+sympathy between the two sections.
+
+Mr. Whittier is essentially a lyric poet, and the fervor of his
+temperament gives his pieces of that kind a remarkable force and
+effectiveness. Twenty years ago many of his poems were in the nature of
+_conciones ad populum_, vigorous stump-speeches in verse, appealing as
+much to the blood as the brain, and none the less convincing for that.
+By regular gradations ever since his tone has been softening and his
+range widening. As a poet he stands somewhere between Burns and Cowper,
+akin to the former in patriotic glow, and to the latter in intensity of
+religious anxiety verging sometimes on morbidness. His humanity, if it
+lack the humorous breadth of the one, has all the tenderness of the
+other. In love of outward nature he yields to neither. His delight in it
+is not a new sentiment or a literary tradition, but the genuine passion
+of a man born and bred in the country, who has not merely a visiting
+acquaintance with the landscape, but stands on terms of lifelong
+friendship with hill, stream, rock, and tree. In his descriptions he
+often catches the _expression_ of rural scenery, a very different thing
+from the mere _looks_, with the trained eye of familiar intimacy. A
+somewhat shy and hermitical being we take him to be, and more a student
+of his own heart than of men. His characters, where he introduces such,
+are commonly abstractions, with little of the flesh and blood of real
+life in them, and this from want of experience rather than of sympathy;
+for many of his poems show him capable of friendship almost womanly in
+its purity and warmth. One quality which we especially value in him is
+the intense home-feeling which, without any conscious aim at being
+American, gives his poetry a flavor of the soil surprisingly refreshing.
+Without being narrowly provincial, he is the most indigenous of our
+poets. In these times, especially, his uncalculating love of country has
+a profound pathos in it. He does not flare the flag in our faces, but
+one feels the heart of a lover throbbing in his anxious verse.
+
+Mr. Whittier, if the most fervid of our poets, is sometimes hurried away
+by this very quality, in itself an excellence, into being the most
+careless. He draws off his verse while the fermentation is yet going on,
+and before it has had time to compose itself and clarify into the ripe
+wine of expression. His rhymes are often faulty beyond the most
+provincial license even of Burns himself. Vigor without elegance will
+never achieve permanent success in poetry. We think, also, that he has
+too often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path to
+which his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, into
+metaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real life
+of his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a _smudge_, and gives
+evidence of itself in smoke instead of flame. Where he follows his truer
+instincts, he is often admirable in the highest sense, and never without
+the interest of natural thought and feeling naturally expressed.
+
+
+
+
+HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
+
+
+The natural product of a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man
+and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard
+Barton. _His_ verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the
+sect; for from title-page to colophon there was no sin either in the way
+of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse,
+that brewed a cup, neither cheering unduly nor inebriating, out of the
+emptyings of Wordsworth's teapot. How that little busy B. improved each
+shining hour, how neatly he laid his wax, it gives us a cold shiver to
+think of--_ancora ci raccappriccia!_ Against a copy of verses signed
+"B.B.," as we remember them in the hardy Annuals that went to seed so
+many years ago, we should warn our incautious offspring as an
+experienced duck might her brood against a charge of B.B. shot. It
+behooves men to be careful; for one may chance to suffer lifelong from
+these intrusions of cold lead in early life, as duellists sometimes
+carry about all their days a bullet from which no surgery can relieve
+them. Memory avenges our abuses of her, and, as an awful example, we
+mention the fact that we have never been able to forget certain stanzas
+of another B.B., who, under the title of "Boston Bard," whilom obtained
+from newspaper columns that concession which gods and men would
+unanimously have denied him.
+
+George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on
+established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him
+crazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else it
+might be, was surely not of that kind "that never was on land or sea."
+There has been much that was poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in
+the men themselves. Poetry demands a richer and more various culture,
+and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias
+Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth is
+something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of
+the same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as
+they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate
+for the waste of human life as the Journal of an average Quaker.
+Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing
+springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness.
+
+Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, who
+can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she
+made a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choice
+between Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on the
+whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. He
+sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery. He has not forgiven the
+Puritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admires
+them for all that, calls on his countrymen as
+
+  Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
+  Answering Charles's royal mandate with a stern "Thus saith the Lord,"
+
+and at heart, we suspect, has more sympathy with Miles Standish than
+with Mary Dyer. Indeed,
+
+  Sons of men who sat in meeting with their broadbrims o'er their brow,
+  Answering Charles's royal mandate with a _thee_ instead of _thou_,
+
+would hardly do. Whatever Mr. Whittier may lack, he has the prime merit
+that he smacks of the soil. It is a New England heart he buttons his
+straight-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain now
+and then. Even the native idiom crops out here and there in his verses.
+He makes _abroad_ rhyme with _God_, _law_ with _war_, _us_ with _curse_,
+_scorner_ with _honor_, _been_ with _men_, _beard_ with _shared_. For
+the last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest
+we can make no terms whatever,--they must march out with no honors of
+war. The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give
+a flavor of _essence-pennyr'y'l_ to the very Beatitudes. It differs from
+Lowland Scotch as a _patois_ from a dialect.
+
+But criticism is not a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has other
+and better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in the
+heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soil
+might have made him a Burns or a Béranger for us. New England is dry and
+hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the
+magnolia grows after a fashion. It is all very nice to say to our poets,
+"You have sky and wood and waterfall and men and women--in short, the
+entire outfit of Shakespeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere"; and
+when the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir of
+approval. But it is all _bosh_, nevertheless. Nature is _not_ the same
+here, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled his
+being with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped in
+history, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere of
+thought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition. Nature without an
+ideal background is nothing. We may claim whatever merits we like (and
+our orators are not too bashful), we may be as free and enlightened as
+we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We may
+be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to
+the political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has little
+of that marvellous bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finer
+issues than a gregarious activity in hoarding. The Puritans left us a
+fine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but they
+disinherited us of the past. Not a single stage-property of poetry did
+they bring with them but the good old Devil, with his graminivorous
+attributes, and even he could not stand the climate. Neither horn nor
+hoof nor tail of him has been seen for a century. He is as dead as the
+goat-footed Pan, whom he succeeded, and we tenderly regret him.
+
+Mr. Whittier himself complains somewhere of
+
+  The rigor of our frozen sky,
+
+and he seems to have been thinking of our clear, thin, intellectual
+atmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artists
+complain that it rounds no edges. We have sometimes thought that his
+verses suffered from a New England taint in a too great tendency to
+metaphysics and morals, which may be the bases on which poetry rests,
+but should not be carried too high above-ground. Without this, however,
+he would not have been the typical New England poet that he is. In the
+present volume there is little of it. It is more purely objective than
+any of its forerunners, and is full of the most charming rural pictures
+and glimpses, in which every sight and sound, every flower, bird, and
+tree, is neighborly and homely. He makes us see
+
+        the old swallow-haunted barns,
+  Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
+  Through which the moted sunlight streams.
+  And winds blow freshly in to shake
+  The red plumes of the roosted cocks
+  And the loose hay-mow's scented locks,--
+
+                the cattle-yard
+  With the white horns tossing above the wall,
+
+the spring-blossoms that drooped over the river,
+
+  Lighting up the swarming shad,--
+
+and
+
+        the bulged nets sweeping shoreward
+  With their silver-sided haul.
+
+Every picture is full of color, and shows that true eye for Nature which
+sees only what it ought, and that artistic memory which brings home
+compositions and not catalogues. There is hardly a hill, rock, stream,
+or sea-fronting headland in the neighborhood of his home that he has not
+fondly remembered. Sometimes, we think, there is too much description,
+the besetting sin of modern verse, which has substituted what should be
+called wordy-painting for the old art of painting in a single word. The
+essential character of Mr. Whittier's poetry is lyrical, and the rush of
+the lyric, like that of a brook, allows few pictures. Now and then there
+may be an eddy where the feeling lingers and reflects a bit of scenery,
+but for the most part it can only catch gleams of color that mingle with
+the prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it. This volume
+contains some of the best of Mr. Whittier's productions in this kind.
+"Skipper Ireson's Ride" we hold to be by long odds the best of modern
+ballads. There are others nearly as good in their way, and all, with a
+single exception, embodying native legends. In "Telling the Bees," Mr.
+Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of exquisite
+grace and feeling. "The Garrison of Cape Ann" would have been a fine
+poem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at the
+end of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point of a sword. It is
+pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton
+Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad
+English and worse Latin. With all his faults, that conceited old pedant
+contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on
+this side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the trouble
+to give us a tolerably correct edition of it. Absurdity is common
+enough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightful
+gift.
+
+This last volume has given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier's
+powers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his
+earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third
+stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said
+Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer
+and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The
+half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and,
+we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia." The
+years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richer
+quality in these verses where the ferment is over and the _rile_ has
+quietly settled. We have had no more purely American poet than Mr.
+Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous
+expression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been
+so true to the present.
+
+
+
+
+SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
+
+
+At the close of his poem Mr. Whittier utters a hope that it may recall
+some pleasant country memories to the overworked slaves of our great
+cities, and that he may deserve those thanks which are all the more
+grateful that they are rather divined by the receiver than directly
+expressed by the giver. The reviewer cannot aspire to all the merit of
+this confidential privacy and pleasing shyness of gratitude, but he may
+fairly lay claim to a part of it, inasmuch as, though obliged to speak
+his thanks publicly, he need not do it to the author's face. We are
+again indebted to Mr. Whittier, as we have been so often before, for a
+very real and a very refined pleasure. The little volume before us has
+all his most characteristic merits. It is true to Nature and in local
+coloring, pure in sentiment, quietly deep in feeling, and full of those
+simple touches which show the poetic eye and the trained hand. Here is a
+New England interior glorified with something of that inward light which
+is apt to be rather warmer in the poet than the Quaker, but which,
+blending the qualities of both in Mr. Whittier, produces that kind of
+spiritual picturesqueness which gives so peculiar a charm to his verse.
+There is in this poem a warmth of affectionate memory and religious
+faith as touching as it is uncommon, and which would be altogether
+delightful if it did not remind us that the poet was growing old. Not
+that there is any other mark of senescence than the ripened sweetness of
+a life both publicly and privately well spent. There is fire enough, but
+it glows more equably and shines on sweeter scenes than in the poet's
+earlier verse. It is as if a brand from the camp-fire had kindled these
+logs on the old homestead's hearth, whose flickering benediction touches
+tremulously those dear heads of long ago that are now transfigured with
+a holier light. The father, the mother, the uncle, the schoolmaster, the
+uncanny guest, are all painted in warm and natural colors, with perfect
+truth of detail and yet with all the tenderness of memory. Of the family
+group the poet is the last on earth, and there is something deeply
+touching in the pathetic sincerity of the affection which has outlived
+them all, looking back to before the parting, and forward to the assured
+reunion.
+
+But aside from its poetic and personal interest, and the pleasure it
+must give to every one who loves pictures from the life, "Snow-Bound"
+has something of historical interest. It describes scenes and manners
+which the rapid changes of our national habits will soon have made as
+remote from us as if they were foreign or ancient. Already, alas! even
+in farmhouses, backlog and forestick are obsolescent words, and
+close-mouthed stoves chill the spirit while they bake the flesh with
+their grim and undemonstrative hospitality. Already are the railroads
+displacing the companionable cheer of crackling walnut with the dogged
+self-complacency and sullen virtue of anthracite. Even where wood
+survives, he is too often shut in the dreary madhouse cell of an
+airtight, round which one can no more fancy a social mug of flip
+circling than round a coffin. Let us be thankful that we can sit in Mr.
+Whittier's chimney-corner and believe that the blaze he has kindled for
+us shall still warm and cheer, when a wood fire is as faint a tradition
+in New as in Old England.
+
+We have before had occasion to protest against Mr. Whittier's
+carelessness in accents and rhymes, as in pronouncing "ly'ceum," and
+joining in unhallowed matrimony such sounds as _awn_ and _orn_, _ents_
+and _ence_. We would not have the Muse emulate the unidiomatic
+preciseness of a normal school-mistress, but we cannot help thinking
+that, if Mr. Whittier writes thus on principle, as we begin to suspect,
+he errs in forgetting that thought so refined as his can be fitly
+matched only with an equal refinement of expression, and loses something
+of its charm when cheated of it. We hope he will, at least, never mount
+Pega'sus, or water him in Heli'con, and that he will leave Mu'seum to
+the more vulgar sphere and obtuser sensibilities of Barnum. Where Nature
+has sent genius, she has a right to expect that it shall be treated with
+a certain elegance of hospitality.
+
+
+
+
+POETRY AND NATIONALITY[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: This essay, to which I have given the above title, forms
+the greater part of a review of poems by John James Piatt. The brief,
+concluding portion of the review is of little value and is omitted here.
+Piatt died several years ago. He was a great friend of William Dean
+Howells, and once published a volume of poems in collaboration with him.
+A.M.]
+
+One of the dreams of our earlier horoscope-mongers was, that a poet
+should come out of the West, fashioned on a scale somewhat proportioned
+to our geographical pretensions. Our rivers, forests, mountains,
+cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in him their antitype
+and voice. Shaggy he was to be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties,
+unhampered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse, half-alligator
+breed. By him at last the epos of the New World was to be fitly sung,
+the great tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for all time. It
+was a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judicious
+prophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its
+terms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dare
+affirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he was
+impossible? And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless.
+
+Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturally
+levy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images and
+illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhere
+outside of the life that lay immediately about him. Life in its large
+sense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, is
+the only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always close
+at hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the
+difference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota is
+almost inappreciable. Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always to
+underlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it. The Iliad
+and the Odyssey paint manners that are only here and there incidentally
+true to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either never
+existed or had long since passed away. Had Dante's scope been narrowed
+to contemporary Italy, the "Divina Commedia" would have been a
+picture-book merely. But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspired
+him was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theories
+as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shakespeare shows us less of
+the England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time.
+The struggle of Goethe's whole life was to emancipate himself from
+Germany, and fill his lungs for once with a more universal air.
+
+Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in these rare fruits, some
+gift of the sun peculiar to the region that ripened them. If we are ever
+to have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality will be of
+this subtile essence, something that shall make him unspeakably nearer
+to us, while it does not provincialize him for the rest of mankind. The
+popular recipe for compounding him would give us, perhaps, the most
+sublimely furnished bore in human annals. The novel aspects of life
+under our novel conditions may give some freshness of color to our
+literature; but democracy itself, which many seem to regard as the
+necessary Lucina of some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract an
+influence to serve for any such purpose. If any American author may be
+looked on as in some sort the result of our social and political ideal,
+it is Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the traditional, in the
+irresponsible freedom of his speculation, and his faith in the absolute
+value of his own individuality, is certainly, to some extent, typical;
+but if ever author was inspired by the past, it is he, and he is as far
+as possible from the shaggy hero of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, who
+have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may
+safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our
+representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the
+credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hope
+for better things.
+
+[Footnote 1: This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is
+mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. The
+Howells essay appeared two years before the above. A.M.]
+
+The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; and
+if a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and the
+gift of the right word,--for it is these, and not sublime spaces, that
+make a poet,--he will be original rather in spite of democracy than in
+consequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite as much to the
+accumulations of the Old World as to the promises of the New. But for a
+long while yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not, perhaps, for
+the birth of such a man, but for his development and culture. At
+present, with the largest reading population in the world, perhaps no
+country ever offered less encouragement to the higher forms of art or
+the more thorough achievements of scholarship. Even were it not so, it
+would be idle to expect us to produce any literature so peculiarly our
+own as was the natural growth of ages less communicative, less open to
+every breath of foreign influence. Literature tends more and more to
+become a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality. Any
+more Cids, or Songs of Roland, or Nibelungens, or Kalewalas are out of
+the question,--nay, anything at all like them; for the necessary
+insulation of race, of country, of religion, is impossible, even were it
+desirable. Journalism, translation, criticism, and facility of
+intercourse tend continually more and more to make the thought and turn
+of expression in cultivated men identical all over the world. Whether we
+like it or not, the costume of mind and body is gradually becoming of
+one cut.
+
+
+
+
+W.D. HOWELLS
+
+VENETIAN LIFE
+
+
+Those of our readers who watch with any interest the favorable omens of
+our literature from time to time, must have had their eyes drawn to
+short poems, remarkable for subtilty of sentiment and delicacy of
+expression, and bearing the hitherto unfamiliar name of Mr. Howells.
+Such verses are not common anywhere; as the work of a young man they are
+very uncommon. Youthful poets commonly begin by trying on various
+manners before they settle upon any single one that is prominently their
+own. But what especially interested us in Mr. Howells was, that his
+writings were from the very first not merely tentative and preliminary,
+but had somewhat of the conscious security of matured _style_. This is
+something which most poets arrive at through much tribulation. It is
+something which has nothing to do with the measure of their intellectual
+powers or of their moral insight, but is the one quality which
+essentially distinguishes the artist from the mere man of genius. Among
+the English poets of the last generation, Keats is the only one who
+early showed unmistakable signs of it, and developed it more and more
+fully until his untimely death. Wordsworth, though in most respects a
+far profounder man, attained it only now and then, indeed only once
+perfectly,--in his "Laodamia." Now, though it be undoubtedly true from
+one point of view that what a man has to say is of more importance than
+how he says it, and that modern criticism especially is more apt to be
+guided by its moral and even political sympathies than by aesthetic
+principles, it remains as true as ever that only those things have been
+said finally which have been said perfectly, and that this finished
+utterance is peculiarly the office of poetry, or of what, for want of
+some word as comprehensive as the German _Dichtung_, we are forced to
+call imaginative literature. Indeed, it may be said that, in whatever
+kind of writing, it is style alone that is able to hold the attention of
+the world long. Let a man be never so rich in thought, if he is clumsy
+in the expression of it, his sinking, like that of an old Spanish
+treasureship, will be hastened by the very weight of his bullion, and
+perhaps, after the lapse of a century, some lucky diver fishes up his
+ingots and makes a fortune out of him.
+
+That Mr. Howells gave unequivocal indications of possessing this fine
+quality interested us in his modest preludings. Marked, as they no doubt
+were, by some uncertainty of aim and indefiniteness of thought, that
+"stinting," as Chaucer calls it, of the nightingale "ere he beginneth
+sing," there was nothing in them of the presumption and extravagance
+which young authors are so apt to mistake for originality and vigor.
+Sentiment predominated over reflection, as was fitting in youth; but
+there was a refinement, an instinctive reserve of phrase, and a felicity
+of epithet, only too rare in modern, and especially in American writing.
+He was evidently a man more eager to make something good than to make a
+sensation,--one of those authors more rare than ever in our day of
+hand-to-mouth cleverness, who has a conscious ideal of excellence, and,
+as we hope, the patience that will at length reach it. We made occasion
+to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase
+our interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the
+rough-and-ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with
+no advantage of college-training, who, passing from the compositor's
+desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of
+the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated. A
+singular fruit, we thought, of our shaggy democracy,--as interesting a
+phenomenon in that regard as it has been our fortune to encounter. Where
+is the rudeness of a new community, the pushing vulgarity of an
+imperfect civilization, the licentious contempt of forms that marks our
+unchartered freedom, and all the other terrible things which have so
+long been the bugaboos of European refinement? Here was a natural
+product, as perfectly natural as the deliberate attempt of "Walt
+Whitman" to answer the demand of native and foreign misconception was
+perfectly artificial. Our institutions do not, then, irretrievably doom
+us to coarseness and to impatience of that restraining precedent which
+alone makes true culture possible and true art attainable. Unless we are
+mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells
+which is a better argument for the American social and political system
+than any empirical theories that can be constructed against it.
+
+We know of no single word which will so fitly characterize Mr. Howells's
+new volume about Venice as "delightful." The artist has studied his
+subject for four years, and at last presents us with a series of
+pictures having all the charm of tone and the minute fidelity to nature
+which were the praise of the Dutch school of painters, but with a higher
+sentiment, a more refined humor, and an airy elegance that recalls the
+better moods of Watteau. We do not remember any Italian studies so
+faithful or the result of such continuous opportunity, unless it be the
+"Roba di Roma" of Mr. Story, and what may be found scattered in the
+works of Henri Beyle. But Mr. Story's volumes recorded only the chance
+observations of a quick and familiar eye in the intervals of a
+profession to which one must be busily devoted who would rise to the
+acknowledged eminence occupied by their author; and Beyle's mind, though
+singularly acute and penetrating, had too much of the hardness of a man
+of the world and of Parisian cynicism to be altogether agreeable. Mr.
+Howells, during four years of that consular leisure which only Venice
+could make tolerable, devoted himself to the minute study of the superb
+prison to which he was doomed, and his book is his "Prigioni." Venice
+has been the university in which he has fairly earned the degree of
+Master. There is, perhaps, no European city, not even Bruges, not even
+Rome herself, which, not yet in ruins, is so wholly of the past, at once
+alive and turned to marble, like the Prince of the Black Islands in the
+story. And what gives it a peculiar fascination is that its antiquity,
+though venerable, is yet modern, and, so to speak, continuous; while
+that of Rome belongs half to a former world and half to this, and is
+broken irretrievably in two. The glory of Venice, too, was the
+achievement of her own genius, not an inheritance; and, great no longer,
+she is more truly than any other city the monument of her own greatness.
+She is something wholly apart, and the silence of her watery streets
+accords perfectly with the spiritual mood which makes us feel as if we
+were passing through a city of dream. Fancy now an imaginative young man
+from Ohio, where the log-hut was but yesterday turned to almost less
+enduring brick and mortar, set down suddenly in the midst of all this
+almost immemorial permanence of grandeur. We cannot think of any one on
+whom the impression would be so strangely deep, or whose eyes would be
+so quickened by the constantly recurring shock of unfamiliar objects.
+Most men are poor observers, because they are cheated into a delusion of
+intimacy with the things so long and so immediately about them; but
+surely we may hope for something like seeing from fresh eyes, and those
+too a poet's, when they open suddenly on a marvel so utterly alien to
+their daily vision and so perdurably novel as Venice. Nor does Mr.
+Howells disappoint our expectation. We have here something like a
+full-length portrait of the Lady of the Lagoons.
+
+We have been struck in this volume, as elsewhere in writings of the same
+author, with the charm of _tone_ that pervades it. It is so constant as
+to bear witness, not only to a real gift, but to the thoughtful
+cultivation of it. Here and there Mr. Howells yields to the temptation
+of _execution_, to which persons specially felicitous in language are
+liable, and pushes his experiments of expression to the verge of being
+unidiomatic, in his desire to squeeze the last drop of significance from
+words; but this is seldom, and generally we receive that unconscious
+pleasure in reading him which comes of naturalness, the last and highest
+triumph of good writing. Mr. Howells, of all men, does not need to be
+told that, as wine of the highest flavor and most delicate _bouquet_ is
+made from juice pressed out by the unaided weight of the grapes, so in
+expression we are in danger of getting something like acridness if we
+crush in with the first sprightly runnings the skins and kernels of
+words in our vain hope to win more than we ought of their color and
+meaning. But, as we have said, this is rather a temptation to which he
+now and then shows himself liable, than a fault for which he can often
+be blamed. If a mind open to all poetic impressions, a sensibility too
+sincere ever to fall into maudlin sentimentality, a style flexible and
+sweet without weakness, and a humor which, like the bed of a stream, is
+the support of deep feeling, and shows waveringly through it in spots of
+full sunshine,--if such qualities can make a truly delightful book, then
+Mr. Howells has made one in the volume before us. And we give him
+warning that much will be expected of one who at his years has already
+shown himself capable of so much.
+
+
+
+
+EDGAR A. POE[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: The following notice of Mr. Poe's life and works was
+written at his own request, and accompanied a portrait of him published
+in _Graham's Magazine_ for February, 1845. It is here [in R.W.
+Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)] given with a few alterations
+and omissions.]
+
+The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or,
+if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into
+many systems, each revolving round its several sun, and often presenting
+to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capital
+city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from which
+life and vigor radiate to the extremities, but resembles more an
+isolated umbilicus, stuck down as near as may be to the centre of the
+land, and seeming rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to
+serve any present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its
+literature almost more distinct than those of the different dialects of
+Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one of her own, of
+which some articulate rumor barely has reached us dwellers by the
+Atlantic.
+
+Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism of
+contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give praise where
+it is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often seduces
+the iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she writes what
+seems rather like an epitaph than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as
+an alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into any man's hat. The
+critic's ink may suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls
+or of sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we
+might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding-place
+of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we usually find
+mixed with it.
+
+Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life of
+imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and
+peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of a
+romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by
+Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed the
+warranty of a large estate to the young poet. Having received a
+classical education in England, he returned home and entered the
+University of Virginia, where, after an extravagant course, followed by
+reformation at the last extremity, he was graduated with the highest
+honors of his class. Then came a boyish attempt to join the fortunes of
+the insurgent Greeks, which ended at St. Petersburg, where he got into
+difficulties through want of a passport, from which he was rescued by
+the American consul, and sent home.[1] He now entered the military
+academy at West Point from which he obtained a dismissal on hearing of
+the birth of a son to his adopted father, by a second marriage, an event
+which cut off his expectations as an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, in
+whose will his name was not mentioned, soon after relieved him of all
+doubt in this regard, and he committed himself at once to authorship for
+a support. Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) a
+small volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, and
+excited high expectations of its author's future distinction in the
+minds of many competent judges.
+
+[Footnote 1: There is little evidence for this story, which some
+biographers have dismissed as a myth created by Poe himself. See
+Woodberry's _Poe_, v. i, p. 337.]
+
+That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet's earliest lispings
+there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare's first poems, though
+brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness, give but a very faint
+promise of the directness, condensation, and overflowing moral of his
+maturer works. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare is hardly a case in point,
+his "Venus and Adonis" having been published, we believe, in his
+twenty-sixth year. Milton's Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye for
+nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint
+of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all
+the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and
+eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow
+namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius
+which he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lost
+more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator
+of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is
+called) the interest of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke
+White's promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey
+but surely with no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a
+traditional piety, which, to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less
+objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment
+of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning
+pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional
+simple, lucky beauty. Burns, having fortunately been rescued by his
+humble station from the contaminating society of the "best models" wrote
+well and naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough to
+have had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from
+which, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from
+the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever
+of that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest,
+most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's
+"Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid
+and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is
+but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early
+poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient
+investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer
+of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
+who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and
+more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest
+specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that
+ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions
+of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope
+of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a
+wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for
+rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional
+combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate
+physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only
+remarkable when it displays an effort of _reason_, and the rudest verses
+in which we can trace some conception of the ends of poetry, are worth
+all the miracles of smooth juvenile versification. A schoolboy, one
+would say, might acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by an
+association with the motion of the play-ground tilt.
+
+Mr. Poe's early productions show that he could see through the verse to
+the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the life
+and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of the
+other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever
+read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of
+purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre.
+Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express
+by the contradictory phrase of _innate experience_. We copy one of the
+shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a
+little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and symmetry of the
+outline are such as few poets ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosia
+about it.
+
+  TO HELEN
+
+  Helen, thy beauty is to me
+    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
+  That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
+    The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
+    To his own native shore.
+
+  On desperate seas long wont to roam,
+    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
+  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
+    To the glory that was Greece
+    And the grandeur that was Rome.
+
+  Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
+    How statue-like I see thee stand!
+  The agate lamp within thy hand,
+    Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
+    Are Holy Land!
+
+It is the _tendency_ of the young poet that impresses us. Here is no
+"withering scorn," no heart "blighted" ere it has safely got into its
+teens, none of the drawing-room sans-culottism which Byron had brought
+into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the Greek
+Helicon in it. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It is not of
+that kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of the
+fingers. It is of that finer sort which the inner ear alone can
+estimate. It seems simple, like a Greek column, because of its
+perfection. In a poem named "Ligeia," under which title he intended to
+personify the music of nature, our boy-poet gives us the following
+exquisite picture:
+
+  Ligeia! Ligeia!
+    My beautiful one,
+  Whose harshest idea
+    Will to melody run,
+  _Say, is it thy will_,
+    _On the breezes to toss_,
+  _Or, capriciously still_,
+    _Like the lone albatross_,
+  _Incumbent on night_,
+    _As she on the air_,
+  _To keep watch with delight_
+    _On the harmony there_?
+
+John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too long
+capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similar
+passages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.
+
+Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to call
+_genius_. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there
+is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power. Let
+talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such magnetism.
+Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting. Talent
+sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of
+clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so
+that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton, and if
+Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses
+shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may
+make friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the
+divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to
+what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has
+not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are
+allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away
+by their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely
+prisoned in the pommel of its sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of
+the spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive the
+ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man of
+mere talent ever flung his inkstand at the devil.
+
+When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he has
+produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it at all
+is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence for the
+trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and the greenest
+laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses and Aristotles of our
+newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order to
+render a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness of
+attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is,
+according to these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of
+the country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable
+residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude
+be, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of their
+idiosyncrasy.
+
+Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous
+yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first
+of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge
+of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to
+conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a
+correct outline, while the second groups, fills up, and colors. Both of
+these Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his prose
+works, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the first in his
+later ones. In judging of the merit of an author, and assigning him his
+niche among our household gods, we have a right to regard him from our
+own point of view, and to measure him by our own standard. But, in
+estimating the amount of power displayed in his works, we must be
+governed by his own design, and, placing them by the side of his own
+ideal, find how much is wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions
+of the objects of art. He esteems that object to be the creation of
+Beauty, and perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that we
+disagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we shall
+take his own standard as our guide. The temple of the god of song is
+equally accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it for
+all who bring offerings, or seek an oracle.
+
+In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that
+dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable
+into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a
+very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a
+power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of
+mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a
+button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the
+predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded,
+analysis. It is this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at once
+reaches forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bring
+about certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate parts
+tend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to
+his own mind. To him _x_ is a known quantity all along. In any picture
+that he paints, he understands the chemical properties of all his
+colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the
+shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a
+geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with
+_Mysticism_. The Mystic dwells _in_ the mystery, is enveloped with it;
+it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and
+the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other
+hand, is a spectator _ab extrà_. He analyzes, he dissects, he watches
+
+  ----with an eye serene,
+  The very pulse of the machine,
+
+for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and piston-rods,
+all working to produce a certain end.
+
+This analyzing tendency of his mind balances the poetical, and, by
+giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful
+reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great
+power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to
+trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of
+horror, also, he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by a
+dusky hint some terrible _doubt_ which is the secret of all horror. He
+leaves to imagination the task of finishing the picture, a task to which
+only she is competent.
+
+  For much imaginary work was there;
+  Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
+  That for Achilles' image stood his spear
+  Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind
+  Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind.
+
+Beside the merit of conception, Mr. Poe's writings have also that of
+form. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly classical. It
+would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied
+powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales,
+"The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque
+and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one
+could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre
+beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been
+enough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master of a classic
+style. In this tale occurs, perhaps, the most beautiful of his poems.
+
+The great masters of imagination have seldom resorted to the vague and
+the unreal as sources of effect. They have not used dread and horror
+alone, but only in combination with other qualities, as means of
+subjugating the fancies of their readers. The loftiest muse has ever a
+household and fireside charm about her. Mr. Poe's secret lies mainly in
+the skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mystery
+and terror. In this his success is so great and striking as to deserve
+the name of art, not artifice. We cannot call his materials the noblest
+or purest, but we must concede to him the highest merit of construction.
+
+As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient. Unerring in his
+analysis of dictions, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in the
+faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art. His criticisms are,
+however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic.
+They have the exactness, and at the same time, the coldness of
+mathematical demonstrations. Yet they stand in strikingly refreshing
+contrast with the vague generalisms and sharp personalities of the day.
+If deficient in warmth, they are also without the heat of partizanship.
+They are especially valuable as illustrating the great truth, too
+generally overlooked, that analytic power is a subordinate quality of
+the critic.
+
+On the whole, it may be considered certain that Mr. Poe has attained an
+individual eminence in our literature, which he will keep. He has given
+proof of power and originality. He has done that which could only be
+done once with success or safety, and the imitation or repetition of
+which would produce weariness.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
+
+
+The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death of
+Thackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still our
+social and literary capital. Not even the loss of Irving called forth so
+universal and strong an expression of sorrow. And yet it had been the
+fashion to call Thackeray a cynic. We must take leave to doubt whether
+Diogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been so
+tenderly regretted. We think there was something more in all this than
+mere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius. There was
+a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,--a
+true man.
+
+Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist,
+and could not have been one if he would. Your true cynic is a sceptic
+also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish
+suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself,
+but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest quality
+always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees,
+and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is
+and man as he might be, between the real snob and the ideal image of his
+Creator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm;
+the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from
+the harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to
+say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and
+teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of
+all manner of _shams_, an equally intense love for every kind of
+manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye
+for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever
+it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to
+betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have
+been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison
+between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid
+light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that
+flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that
+_ingenium perfervidum_ of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-Mall
+Jeremiah after all.
+
+It is curious to see how often Nature, original and profuse as she is,
+repeats herself; how often, instead of sending one complete mind like
+Shakespeare, she sends two who are the complements of each
+other,--Fielding and Richardson, Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and George
+Sand, and now again Thackeray and Dickens. We are not fond of
+comparative criticism, we mean of that kind which brings forward the
+merit of one man as if it depreciated the different merit of another,
+nor of supercilious criticism, which measures every talent by some ideal
+standard of possible excellence, and, if it fall short, can find nothing
+to admire. A thing is either good in itself or good for nothing. Yet
+there is such a thing as a contrast of differences between two eminent
+intellects by which we may perhaps arrive at a clearer perception of
+what is characteristic in each. It is almost impossible, indeed, to
+avoid some sort of parallel _à la_ Plutarch between Thackeray and
+Dickens. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they may
+be equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a few
+striking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints
+character, and Dickens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages are
+all men, those of Dickens personified oddities. The one is an artist,
+the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.
+Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the
+illustrations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as
+we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for Dickens
+invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is
+perfect, that of Dickens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast
+less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.
+Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from the
+reporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of the
+greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more
+types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is
+marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is
+very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had
+pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are
+masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon
+by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never
+act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.
+
+Thackeray's style is beyond praise,--so easy, so limpid, showing
+everywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture,
+it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was natural
+to him,--his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond," for example)
+being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respects
+the most finished example we have of what is called a man of the world.
+In the pardonable eulogies which were uttered in the fresh grief at his
+loss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked above
+Fielding,--a position which no one would have been so eager in
+disclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on their
+pedestals. Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written in
+English since Shakespeare. Of a broader and deeper nature, of a larger
+brain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter is
+Society. The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common was
+Richard Steele, as these "Roundabout Papers" show plainly enough. He
+admired Fielding, but he loved Steele.
+
+
+
+
+TWO GREAT AUTHORS
+
+
+
+
+SWIFT[1]
+
+I
+
+
+[Footnote 1: [A review of _The Life of Jonathan Swift_, by John Forster.]]
+
+The cathedral of St. Patrick's, dreary enough in itself seems to grow
+damper and chillier as one's footsteps disturb the silence between the
+grave of its famous Dean and that of Stella, in death as in life near
+yet divided from him, as if to make their memories more inseparable and
+prolong the insoluble problem of their relation to each other. Nor was
+there wanting, when we made our pilgrimage thither, a touch of grim
+humor in the thought that our tipsy guide (Clerk of the Works he had
+dubbed himself for the nonce), as he monotonously recited his
+contradictory anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane," varied by times with
+an irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinary
+biographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled our
+cicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse into
+rhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind of
+conjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servant
+Patrick, but in that sad presence his grotesqueness was as shocking as
+the clown in one of Shakespeare's tragedies to Châteaubriand. A shilling
+sent him back to the neighboring pot-house whence a half-dozen ragged
+volunteers had summoned him, and we were left to our musings. One
+dominating thought shouldered aside all others--namely, how strange a
+stroke of irony it was, how more subtle even than any of the master's
+own, that our most poignant association with the least sentimental of
+men should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to that
+of Abélard and Héloïse should invest the memory of him who had done more
+than all others together to strip life and human nature of their last
+instinctive decency of illusion. His life, or such accounts as we had of
+it, had been full of antitheses as startling as if some malign enchanter
+had embodied one of Macaulay's characters as a conundrum to bewilder the
+historian himself. A generous miser; a sceptical believer; a devout
+scoffer; a tender-hearted misanthrope; a churchman faithful to his order
+yet loathing to wear its uniform; an Irishman hating the Irish, as Heine
+did the Jews,[1] because he was one of them, yet defending them with the
+scornful fierceness of one who hated their oppressors more; a man honest
+and of statesmanlike mind, who lent himself to the basest services of
+party politics for purely selfish ends; a poet whose predominant faculty
+was that of disidealizing; a master of vernacular style, in whose works
+an Irish editor finds hundreds of faults of English to correct;
+strangest of all, a middle-aged clergyman of brutal coarseness, who
+could inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with a
+fruitless passion that broke her heart, the other with a love that
+survived hope and faith to suck away the very sources of that life
+whereof it was the only pride and consolation. No wonder that a new life
+of so problematic a personage as this should be awaited with eagerness,
+the more that it was to be illustrated with much hitherto unpublished
+material and was to be written by the practised hand of Mr. Forster.
+Inconsistency of conduct, of professed opinion, whether of things or
+men, we can understand; but an inconsistent character is something
+without example, and which nature abhors as she does false logic.
+Opportunity may develop, hindrance may dwarf, the prevailing set of
+temptation may give a bent to character, but the germ planted at birth
+can never be wholly disnatured by circumstance any more than soil or
+exposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it is
+cumulative, whether for good or ill; the general tenor of the life is a
+logical sequence from it, and a man can always explain himself to
+himself, if not to others, as a coherent whole, because he always knows,
+or thinks he knows, the value of _x_ in the personal equation. Were it
+otherwise, that sense of conscious identity which alone makes life a
+serious thing and immortality a rational hope, would be impossible. It
+is with the means of finding out this unknown quantity--in other words,
+of penetrating to the man's motives or his understanding of them--that
+the biographer undertakes to supply us, and unless he succeed in this,
+his rummaging of old papers but raises a new cloud of dust to darken our
+insight.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lowell was mistaken. Heine never lost his love for the
+Jews. He regretted his apostasy and always regarded himself as a Jew,
+and not a Christian. His own genius was Hebraic, and not, as Matthew
+Arnold thought, Hellenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowell
+had great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitchell once told
+me that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even wished that he
+had a Hebraic nose. Several documents attest to Lowell's ideas on the
+subject. He even claimed that his middle name "Russell" showed that he
+had Jewish blood. A.M.]
+
+If Mr. Forster's mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality of
+genius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for his
+task. The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which is
+beset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer. A finer sense might recoil
+before investigations whose importance is not at first so clear as their
+promise of unsavoriness. So far as Mr. Forster has gone, we think he has
+succeeded in the highest duty of a biographer: that of making his
+subject interesting and humanly sympathetic to the reader--a feat surely
+of some difficulty with a professed cynic like Swift. He lets him in the
+main tell his own story--a method not always trustworthy, to be sure,
+but safer in the case of one who, whatever else he may have been, was
+almost brutally sincere when he could be so with safety or advantage.
+Still, it should always be borne in mind that he _could_ lie with an air
+of honest candor fit to deceive the very elect. The author of the
+"Battle of the Books" (written in 1697) tells us in the preface to the
+Third Part of Temple's "Miscellanea" (1701) that he "cannot well inform
+the reader upon what occasion" the essay upon Ancient and Modern
+Learning "was writ, having been at that time in another kingdom"; and
+the professed confidant of a ministry, whom the Stuart Papers have
+proved to have been in correspondence with the Pretender, puts on an air
+of innocence (in his "Enquiry into the Behavior of the Queen's last
+Ministry") and undertakes to convince us that nothing could be more
+absurd than to accuse them of Jacobitism. It may be, as Orrery asserted,
+that Swift was "employed, not trusted," but this is hardly to be
+reconciled with Lewis's warning him on the Queen's death to burn his
+papers, or his own jest to Harley about the one being beheaded and the
+other hanged. The fact is that, while in certain contingencies Swift was
+as unscrupulous a liar as Voltaire, he was naturally open and truthful,
+and showed himself to be so whenever his passions or his interest would
+let him. That Mr. Forster should make a hero of the man whose life he
+has undertaken to write is both natural and proper; for without sympathy
+there can be no right understanding, and a hearty admiration is alone
+capable of that generosity in the interpretation of conduct to which all
+men have a right, and which he needs most who most widely transcends the
+ordinary standards or most resolutely breaks with traditionary rules.
+That so virile a character as Swift should have been attractive to women
+is not wonderful, but we think Mr. Forster has gone far towards proving
+that he was capable of winning the deep and lasting affection of men
+also. Perhaps it may not always be safe to trust implicitly the fine
+phrases of his correspondents; for there can be no doubt that Swift
+inspired fear as well as love. Revengefulness is the great and hateful
+blot on his character; his brooding temper turned slights into injuries,
+gave substance to mere suspicion, and once in the morbid mood he was
+utterly reckless of the means of vengeance. His most playful scratch had
+poison in it. His eye was equally terrible for the weak point of friend
+and foe. But giving this all the value it may deserve, the weight of the
+evidence is in favor of his amiability. The testimony of a man so
+sweet-natured and fair-minded as Dr. Delany ought to be conclusive, and
+we do not wonder that Mr. Forster should lay great stress upon it. The
+depreciatory conclusions of Dr. Johnson are doubtless entitled to
+consideration; but his evidence is all from hearsay, and there were
+properties in Swift that aroused in him so hearty a moral repulsion as
+to disenable him for an unprejudiced opinion. Admirable as the
+rough-and-ready conclusions of his robust understanding often are, he
+was better fitted to reckon the quantity of a man's mind than the
+quality of it--the real test of its value; and there is something almost
+comically pathetic in the good faith with which he applies his
+beer-measure to juices that could fairly plead their privilege to be
+gauged by the wine standard. Mr. Forster's partiality qualifies him for
+a fairer judgment of Swift than any which Johnson was capable of
+forming, or, indeed, would have given himself the trouble to form.
+
+But this partiality in a biographer, though to be allowed and even
+commended as a quickener of insight, should not be strong enough to warp
+his mind from its judicial level. While we think that Mr. Forster is
+mainly right in his estimate of Swift's character, and altogether so in
+insisting on trying him by documentary rather than hearsay evidence, it
+is equally true that he is sometimes betrayed into overestimates, and
+into positive statement, where favorable inference would have been
+wiser. Now and then his exaggeration is merely amusing, as where he
+tells us that Swift, "as early as in his first two years after quitting
+Dublin, was _accomplished in French_," the only authority for such a
+statement being a letter of recommendation from Temple saying that he
+"had _some French_." Such compulsory testimonials are not on their _voir
+dire_ any more than epitaphs. So, in speaking of Betty Jones, with whom
+in 1689 Swift had a flirtation that alarmed his mother, Mr. Forster
+assumes that she "was an educated girl" on the sole ground, so far as
+appears, of "her mother and Swift's being cousins." Swift, to be sure,
+thirty years later, on receiving some letters from his old sweetheart,
+"suspects them to be counterfeit" because "she spells like a
+kitchen-maid," and this, perhaps, may be Mr. Forster's authority. But,
+as the letters _were_ genuine, the inference should have been the other
+way. The "letters to Eliza," by the way, which Swift in 1699 directs
+Winder, his successor at Kilroot, to burn, were doubtless those
+addressed to Betty Jones. Mr. Forster does not notice this; but that
+Swift should have preserved them, or copies of them, is of some
+consequence, as tending to show that they were mere exercises in
+composition, thus confirming what he says in the remarkable letter to
+Kendall, written in 1692, when he was already off with the old love and
+on with a new.
+
+These instances of the temptation which most easily besets Mr. Forster
+are trifles, but the same leaning betrays him sometimes into graver
+mistakes of overestimate. He calls Swift the best letter-writer in the
+language, though Gray, Walpole, Cowper, and Lamb be in some essential
+qualities his superiors. He praises his political writing so
+extravagantly that we should think he had not read the "Examiner," were
+it not for the thoroughness of his work in other respects. All that
+Swift wrote in this kind was partisan, excellently fitted to its
+immediate purpose, as we might expect from his imperturbable good sense,
+but by its very nature ephemeral. There is none of that reach of
+historical imagination, none of that grasp of the clue of fatal
+continuity and progression, none of that eye for country which divines
+the future highways of events, that makes the occasional pamphlets of
+Burke, with all their sobs of passionate sentiment, permanent
+acquisitions of political thinking. Mr. Forster finds in Swift's
+"Examiners" all the characteristic qualities of his mind and style,
+though we believe that a dispassionate reader would rather conclude that
+the author, as we have little doubt was the fact, was trying all along
+to conceal his personality under a disguise of decorous commonplace. In
+the same uncritical way Mr. Forster tells us that "the ancients could
+show no such humor and satire as the 'Tale of a Tub' and the 'Battle of
+the Books.'" In spite of this, we shall continue to think Aristophanes
+and even Lucian clever writers, considering the rudeness of the times in
+which they lived. The "Tale of a Tub" has several passages of
+rough-and-tumble satire as good as any of their kind, and some hints of
+deeper suggestion, but the fable is clumsy and the execution unequal and
+disjointed. In conception the "Battle" is cleverer, and it contains
+perhaps the most perfect apologue in the language, but the best strokes
+of satire in it are personal (that of Dryden's helmet, for instance),
+and we enjoy them with an uneasy feeling that we are accessaries in
+something like foul play. Indeed, it may be said of Swift's humor
+generally that it leaves us uncomfortable, and that it too often
+impregnates the memory with a savor of mortal corruption proof against
+all disinfectants. Pure humor cannot flow from so turbid a source as
+_soeva indignatio_, and if man be so filthy and disgusting a creature as
+Swift represents him to be, if he be truly "by nature, reason, learning,
+blind," satire is thrown away upon him for reform and cruel as
+castigation.
+
+Mr. Forster not only rejects the story of Stella's marriage with Swift
+as lacking substantial evidence, but thinks that the limits of their
+intercourse were early fixed and never overpassed. According to him,
+their relation was to be, from the first, one "of affection, not
+desire." We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only woman
+Swift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, that
+he probably did marry her,[1] but only when all hope of the old
+open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault,
+if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa,
+and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no
+explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief
+folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened
+his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with
+remorseful self-contempt. Nothing could be more galling to a proud man
+than the feeling that he had been betrayed by his vanity. It is commonly
+assumed that pride is incompatible with its weaker congener. But pride,
+after all, is nothing more than a stiffened and congealed vanity, and
+melts back to its original ductility when exposed to the milder
+temperature of female partiality. Swift could not deny himself the
+flattery of Vanessa's passion, and not to forbid was to encourage. He
+could not bring himself to administer in time the only effectual remedy,
+by telling her that he was pledged to another woman. When at last he did
+tell her it was too late; and he learned, like so many before and since,
+that the most dangerous of all fires to play with is that of love. This
+was the extent of his crime, and it would have been none if there had
+been no such previous impediment. This alone gives any meaning to what
+he says when Vanessa declared her love:
+
+  Cadenus felt within him rise
+  _Shame_, disappointment, _guilt_, surprise.
+
+[Footnote 1: Most of the authorities conclude that Swift never married
+Stella. A.M.]
+
+Shame there might have been, but surely no guilt on any theory except
+that of an implicit engagement with Stella. That there was something of
+the kind, more or less definite, and that it was of some ten years'
+standing when the affair with Vanessa came to a crisis, we have no
+doubt. When Tisdall offered her marriage in 1704, and Swift wrote to him
+"that if my fortunes and humor served me to think of that state, I
+should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice," she
+accepted the implied terms and rejected her suitor, though otherwise not
+unacceptable to her. She would wait. It is true that Swift had not
+absolutely committed himself, but she had committed him by dismissing
+Tisdall. Without assuming some such tacit understanding, his letters to
+her are unintelligible. He repeatedly alludes to his absence from her as
+only tolerable because it was for her sake no less than his own, and the
+details of his petty economies would be merely vulgar except to her for
+whom their motive gave them a sweetness of humorous pathos. The evidence
+of the marriage seems to be as conclusive as that of a secret can well
+be. Dr. Delany, who ought to have been able to judge of its probability,
+and who had no conceivable motive of misstatement, was assured of it by
+one whose authority was Stella herself. Mr. Monck-Berkeley had it from
+the widow of Bishop Berkeley, and she from her husband, who had it from
+Dr. Ashe, by whom they were married. These are at least unimpeachable
+witnesses. The date of the marriage is more doubtful, but Sheridan is
+probably not far wrong when he puts it in 1716. It was simply a
+reparation, and no union was implied in it. Delany intimates that
+Vanessa, like the young Chevalier, vulgarized her romance in drink. More
+than this, however, was needful to palliate even in Swift the brutal
+allusion to her importunacy in "Gulliver," unless, as is but too
+possible, the passage in question be an outbreak of ferocious spleen
+against her victorious rival. Its coarseness need not make this seem
+impossible, for that was by no means a queasy age, and Swift continued
+on intimate terms with Lady Betty Germaine after the publication of the
+nasty verses on her father. The communication of the secret to Bishop
+Berkeley (who was one of Vanessa's executors) may have been the
+condition of the suppressing Swift's correspondence with her, and would
+have exasperated him to ferocity.
+
+
+II
+
+
+We cannot properly understand Swift's cynicism and bring it into any
+relation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiability
+without taking his whole life into account. Few give themselves the
+trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough
+to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature
+was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it
+effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet.
+With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole
+which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of
+momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the Cowleian
+Pindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint of
+Parisian rather than Theban origin. If the master was but a fresh
+example of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of the
+flying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not even
+the secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earth
+while with perfect good faith he went through all the motions of
+soaring? Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment,
+though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and
+the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent. He who
+could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if
+he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the
+simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a
+trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything
+something else than it was, he would see things as they were--or as, in
+his sullen disgust, they seemed to be--and call them all by their right
+names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a
+Hottentot--nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble
+compromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and not
+ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious
+exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical
+fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with the
+brutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed
+and aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with
+himself. He despised mankind because he found something despicable in
+Jonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion to
+their likeness with himself. He had more or less consciously sacrificed
+self-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man's
+accidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, as
+no other "man of his level" in Ireland was, to being happy with the
+woman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and the
+independence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude after
+all. "Money," he was fond of saying, "is freedom," but he never learned
+that self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect. With a
+hearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yet
+bring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier of
+three royal strumpets. How should he be happy who had defined happiness
+to be "the perpetual possession of being well deceived," and who could
+never be deceived himself? It may well be doubted whether what he
+himself calls "that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of
+things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries
+that in the inside they are good for nothing," be of so penetrative an
+insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather
+that to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had the
+microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the
+loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that
+tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with
+all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his
+shallow friend Gay that life was a jest. To his nobler temper it was
+always profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, we
+suspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears. The lesson is
+worth remembering that _his_ apples of Sodom, like those of lesser men,
+were plucked from boughs of his own grafting.
+
+But there are palliations for him, even if the world were not too ready
+to forgive a man everything if he will only be a genius. Sir Robert
+Walpole used to say "that it was fortunate so few men could be prime
+ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking
+wickedness of mankind." Swift, from his peculiar relation to two
+successive ministries, was in a position to know all that they knew, and
+perhaps, as a recognized place-broker, even more than they knew, of the
+selfish servility of men. He had seen the men who figure so imposingly
+in the stage-processions of history too nearly. He knew the real Jacks
+and Toms as they were over a pot of ale after the scenic illusion was
+done with. He saw the destinies of a kingdom controlled by men far less
+able than himself; the highest of arts, that of politics, degraded to a
+trade in places, and the noblest opportunity, that of office, abused for
+purposes of private gain. His disenchantment began early, probably in
+his intimacy with Sir William Temple, in whom (though he says that all
+that was good and great died with him) he must have seen the weak side
+of solemn priggery and the pretension that made a mystery of statecraft.
+In his twenty-second year he writes:
+
+  Off fly the vizards and discover all:
+    How plain I see through the deceit!
+    How shallow and how gross the cheat!
+       *       *       *       *       *
+    On what poor engines move
+  The thoughts of monarchs and designs of states!
+  What petty motives rule their fates!
+
+      I to such blockheads set my wit!
+      I damn such fools! go, go, you're bit!
+
+Mr. Forster's own style (simpler now than when he was under the
+immediate influence of Dickens, if more slipshod than when repressed by
+Landor) is not in essentials better or worse than usual. It is not
+always clear nor always idiomatic. On page 120 he tells us that "Scott
+did not care to enquire if it was likely that stories of the kind
+referred to should have contributed to form a character, or if it were
+not likelier still that they had grown and settled round a character
+already famous as well as formed." Not to speak of the confusion of
+moods and tenses, the phrase "to form a character" has been so long
+appropriated to another meaning than that which it has here, that the
+sense of the passage vacillates unpleasantly. He tells us that Swift was
+"under engagement to Will Frankland to christen _the baby his wife is
+near bringing to bed_." Parthenogenesis is a simple matter to this. And
+why _Will_ Frankland, _Joe_ Beaumont, and the like? We cannot claim so
+much intimacy with them as Swift, and the eighteenth century might be
+allowed to stand a little on its dignity. If Mr. Forster had been
+quoting the journal to Stella, there would be nothing to say except that
+Swift took liberties with his friends in writing to her which he would
+not have ventured on before strangers. In the same odd jargon, which the
+English journals are fond of calling American, Mr. Forster says that
+"Tom [Leigh] was not _popular_ with Swift." Mr. Forster is not only no
+model for contemporary English, but (what is more serious) sometimes
+mistakes the meaning of words in Swift's day, as when he explains that
+"strongly engaged" meant "interceded with or pressed." It meant much
+more than that, as could easily be shown from the writings of Swift
+himself.
+
+All the earlier biographers of Swift Mr. Forster brushes contemptuously
+aside, though we do not find much that is important in his own biography
+which industry may not hit upon somewhere or other in the confused
+narrative of Sheridan, for whom and for his sources of information he
+shows a somewhat unjust contempt. He goes so far as sometimes to
+discredit anecdotes so thoroughly characteristic of Swift that he cannot
+resist copying them himself. He labors at needless length the question
+of Swift's standing in college, and seems to prove that it was not
+contemptible, though there can be no doubt that the contrary opinion was
+founded on Swift's own assertion, often repeated. We say he seems to
+prove it, for we are by no means satisfied which of the two Swifts on
+the college list, of which a facsimile is given, is the future Dean. Mr.
+Forster assumes that the names are ranked in the order of seniority, but
+they are more likely to have been arranged alphabetically, in which case
+Jonathan would have preceded Thomas, and at best there is little to
+choose between three _mediocriters_ and one _male_, one _bene_, and one
+_negligenter_. The document, whatever we may think of its importance,
+has been brought to light by Mr. Forster. Of his other materials
+hitherto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving that
+Swift's Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707. This
+shows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whig
+to Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his former
+associates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency if
+not of desertion to the enemy. Whatever the motives of his change, it
+would have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty,
+and in spite of Mr. Forster's assertion that Addison continued to love
+and trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was any
+cordiality in their intercourse after 1710. No one familiar with Swift's
+manner of thinking will deem his political course of much import in
+judging of his moral character. At the bottom of his heart he had an
+impartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aims
+of both were more or less consciously selfish. Even if sincere, the
+matters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment as
+that which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput. With him the
+question was simply one between men who galled his pride and men who
+flattered it. Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceable
+inferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footing
+of friendship. To him they were all, more or less indifferently, rounds
+in the ladder by which he hoped to climb. He always claimed to have been
+a consistent Old Whig--that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchman
+who accepted the Revolution of 1688. This, to be sure, was not quite
+true, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on a
+Cavalier grandfather, and whose first known verses were addressed to the
+non-juring primate Sancroft after his deprivation, to become first a
+Tory and then a conniver at the restoration of the Stuarts as the best
+device for preventing a foreign succession and an endless chance of
+civil war. A man of Swift's way of thinking would hardly have balked at
+the scruple of creed, for he would not have deemed it possible that the
+Pretender should have valued a kingdom at any lower rate than his
+great-grandfather had done before him.
+
+The more important part of Mr. Forster's fresh material is to come in
+future volumes, if now, alas! we are ever to have them. For some of what
+he gives us in this we can hardly thank him. One of the manuscripts he
+has unearthed is the original version of "Baucis and Philemon" as it was
+before it had passed under the criticism of Addison. He seems to think
+it in some respects better than the revised copy though in our judgment
+it entirely justifies the wisdom of the critic who counselled its
+curtailment and correction. The piece as we have hitherto had it comes
+as near poetry as anything Swift ever wrote except "Cadenus and
+Vanessa," though neither of them aspires above the region of cleverness
+and fancy. Indeed, it is misleading to talk of the poetry of one whose
+fatal gift was an eye that disidealized. But we are not concerned here
+with the discussion of Swift's claim to the title of poet. What we are
+concerned about is to protest in the interests of good literature
+against the practice, now too common, of hunting out and printing what
+the author would doubtless have burned. It is unfair to the dead writer
+and the living reader by disturbing that unitary impression which every
+good piece of work aims at making, and is sure to make, only in
+proportion to the author's self-denial and his skill in
+
+  The last and greatest art, the art to blot.
+
+We do not wish, nor have we any right to know, those passages through
+which the castigating pen has been drawn.
+
+Mr. Forster may almost claim to have rediscovered Swift's journals to
+Esther Johnson, to such good purpose has he used them in giving life and
+light to his narrative. He is certainly wrong, however, in saying to the
+disparagement of former editors that the name Stella was not invented
+"till long after all the letters were written." This statement,
+improbable in itself as respects a man who forthwith refined Betty,
+Waring, and Vanhomrigh into Eliza, Varina, and Vanessa, is refuted by a
+passage in the journal of 14th October, 1710, printed by Mr. Forster
+himself. At least, we know not what "Stellakins" means unless it be
+"little Stella." The value of these journals for their elucidation of
+Swift's character cannot be overestimated, and Mr. Forster is quite
+right in insisting upon the importance of the "little language," though
+we are by no means sure that he is always so in his interpretation of
+the cipher. It is quite impossible, for instance, that ME can stand for
+Madam Elderly, and so for Dingley. It is certainly addressed, like the
+other endearing epithets, to Esther Johnson, and may mean My Esther or
+even Marry Esther, for anything we know to the contrary.
+
+Mr. Forster brings down his biography no farther than the early part of
+1710, so that we have no means of judging what his opinion would be of
+the conduct of Swift during the three years that preceded the death of
+Queen Anne. But he has told us what he thinks of his relations with
+Esther Johnson; and it is in them, as it seems to us, that we are to
+seek the key to the greater part of what looks most enigmatical in his
+conduct. At first sight, it seems altogether unworthy of a man of
+Swift's genius to waste so much of it and so many of the best years of
+his life in a sordid struggle after preferment in the church--a career
+in which such selfish ambitions look most out of place. How much better
+to have stayed quietly at Laracor and written immortal works! Very good:
+only that was not Swift's way of looking at the matter, who had little
+appetite for literary fame, and all of whose immortal progeny were
+begotten of the moment's overmastering impulse, were thrown nameless
+upon the world by their father, and survived only in virtue of the vigor
+they had drawn from his stalwart loins. But how if Swift's worldly
+aspirations, and the intrigues they involved him in, were not altogether
+selfish? How if he was seeking advancement, in part at least, for
+another, and that other a woman who had sacrificed for him not only her
+chances of domestic happiness, but her good name? to whom he was bound
+by gratitude? and the hope of repairing whose good fame by making her
+his own was so passionate in that intense nature as to justify any and
+every expedient, and make the patronage of those whom he felt to be his
+inferiors endurable by the proudest of men? We believe that this was the
+truth, and that the woman was Stella. No doubt there were other motives.
+Coming to manhood with a haughtiness of temper that was almost savage,
+he had forced himself to endure the hourly humiliation of what could not
+have been, however Mr. Forster may argue to the contrary, much above
+domestic servitude. This experience deepened in him the prevailing
+passions of his life, first for independence and next for consideration,
+the only ones which could, and in the end perhaps did, obscure the
+memory and hope of Stella. That he should have longed for London with a
+persistency that submitted to many a rebuff and overlived continual
+disappointment will seem childish only to those who do not consider that
+it was a longing for life. It was there only that his mind could be
+quickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dying
+daily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, if
+there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without
+impair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age.
+
+This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the world
+is just opening. In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, "I
+desire that you and all my friends will take a special care that my
+disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I have
+credible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from the
+twenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age." His contempt for
+mankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfuges
+by which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify and
+conceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of its
+cleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than being
+prime minister. How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody when
+his old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophic
+relief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty!
+
+Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose also
+with the "Tale of a Tub." Its levity, if it was not something worse,
+twice balked him of the mitre when it seemed just within his reach.
+Justly or not, he had the reputation of scepticism. Mr. Forster would
+have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to
+prove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimate
+friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him
+sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman.
+Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession
+which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect
+independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes.
+He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while he
+was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among
+savages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood
+in his way. A man's little faults are more often the cause of his
+greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever
+respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly
+had the advantage of him in that _savoir vivre_ which makes so large an
+element of worldly success. In judging him, however, we must take into
+account that his first literary hit was made when he was already
+thirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of others
+and distrust of himself.
+
+The reaction in Swift's temper and ambition told with the happiest
+effect on his prose. For its own purposes, as good working English, his
+style (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had no
+style at all), has never been matched. It has been more praised than
+studied, or its manifest shortcomings, its occasional clumsiness, its
+want of harmony and of feeling for the finer genialities of language,
+would be more often present in the consciousness of those who discourse
+about it from a superficial acquaintance. With him language was a means
+and not an end. If he was plain and even coarse, it was from choice
+rather than because he lacked delicacy of perception; for in badinage,
+the most ticklish use to which words can be put, he was a master.
+
+
+
+
+PLUTARCH'S MORALS[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: A review of the English translation edited by William W.
+Goodwin with an Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson.]
+
+Plutarch is perhaps the most eminent example of how strong a hold simple
+good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man
+of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make
+him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is
+more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be
+more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days
+in the rose's neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his
+temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he
+always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as
+shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born
+middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner
+and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the
+problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic
+interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his
+worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish
+to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better
+Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas
+Browne, love to lose himself in an _O, altitudo!_ yet the sky-piercing
+peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the
+horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually
+gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom
+invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook
+like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled
+amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming
+intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled
+predilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet like
+flowers." But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him
+and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother
+of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is
+most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that
+passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the
+volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the
+_atrium_ (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the
+great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and
+who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become
+human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his
+lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible
+virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion,
+patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which
+associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is
+theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson
+disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian
+unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended
+him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints
+which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch
+in the essay on "Physiognomy." After speaking of some "escripts encores
+plus révérez," he asks, in his idiomatic way, "à, quoy faire nous allons
+nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however,
+Montaigne liked him because he was _good talk_, as it is called, a
+better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are
+noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation
+between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style
+is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in
+Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived
+perhaps from authors much more ancient." But if they are borrowed, they
+have none of the discordant effect of the _purpureus pannus_, for the
+warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them
+his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly
+original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this
+selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural
+elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or
+sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We
+are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are
+trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and
+there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has
+flowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into the
+ports of every nation," says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction
+to Goodwin's Plutarch's "Morals." No doubt we are becalmed pretty often,
+and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation,
+so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and
+quotation.
+
+It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser,
+in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose
+mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative
+(if we take the "Lives" and the "Morals" together) in the thought and
+action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And on
+the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether
+good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them
+over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was his
+own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their
+purpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among men
+and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. His
+influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any
+other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the
+Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a
+remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years,
+living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had
+peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of
+his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect
+that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of
+us. Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past was
+inhabited by creatures like ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
+AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+
+
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
+AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+
+
+I must beg allowance to use the first person singular. I cannot, like
+old Weller, spell myself with a We. Ours is, I believe, the only
+language that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (to
+himself) as to erect the first personal pronoun into a kind of votive
+column to the dignity of human nature. Other tongues have, or pretend, a
+greater modesty.
+
+                     I
+
+What a noble letter it is! In it every reader sees himself as in a
+glass. As for me, without my I's, I should be as poorly off as the great
+mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of
+reason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess I
+always liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek drama
+which were well sprinkled with _ai ai_, they were so grandly simple. The
+force of great men is generally to be found in their intense
+individuality,--in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this
+essay will be similar.
+
+What I was going to say is this.
+
+My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics,
+which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun
+to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence and
+Statuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for human
+habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on very
+well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the
+fish which we cured, _more medicorum_, by laying them out. But this
+summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association.
+Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town
+wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain number
+of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their
+own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call
+their lectures "The Universal Brotherhood Course,"--for no other reason,
+that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.
+They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip
+Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, from
+what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the
+introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything like
+universal brotherhood. He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster,
+without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into the
+world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular.
+Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of
+vaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right of
+Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public
+Vituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand the
+nature of philanthropy.
+
+Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example. He loves his kind so much that
+he has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother's son of
+them. He goes about to save them by proving that not one of them is
+worth damning. And he does it all from the point of view of an early (a
+_knurly_) Christian. Let me illustrate. I was sauntering along Broadway
+once, and was attracted by a bird-fancier's shop. I like dealers in
+out-of-the-way things,--traders in bigotry and virtue are too
+common,--and so I went in. The gem of the collection was a terrier,--a
+perfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as a
+Cockney would say, than the 'ole British hairystocracy. "A'n't he a
+stunner?" said my disrespectable friend, the master of the shop. "Ah,
+you should see him worry a rat! He does it like a puffic Christian!"
+Since then, the world has been divided for me into Christians and
+_perfect_ Christians; and I find so many of the latter species in
+proportion to the former, that I begin to pity the rats. They (the rats)
+have at least one virtue,--they are not eloquent.
+
+It is, I think, a universally recognized truth of natural history, that
+a young lady is sure to fall in love with a young man for whom she feels
+at first an unconquerable aversion; and it must be on the same principle
+that the first symptoms of love for our neighbor almost always manifest
+themselves in a violent disgust at the world in general, on the part of
+the apostles of that gospel. They give every token of hating their
+neighbors consumedly; _argal_, they are going to be madly enamored of
+them. Or, perhaps, this is the manner in which Universal Brotherhood
+shows itself in people who wilfully subject themselves to infection as a
+prophylactic. In the natural way we might find the disease inconvenient
+and even expensive; but thus vaccinated with virus from the udders
+(whatever they may be) that yield the (butter-)milk of human kindness,
+the inconvenience is slight, and we are able still to go about our
+ordinary business of detesting our brethren as usual. It only shows that
+the milder type of the disease has penetrated the system, which will
+thus be enabled to out-Jenneral its more dangerous congener. Before long
+we shall have physicians of our ailing social system writing to the
+"Weekly Brandreth's Pill" somewhat on this wise:--"I have a very marked
+and hopeful case in Pequawgus Four Corners. Miss Hepzibah Tarbell,
+daughter of that archenemy of his kind, Deacon Joash T., attended only
+one of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most
+encouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family,--accusing
+her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno
+C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the
+magnetic needle. If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of Primitive
+Christian were well-founded, I think we may entertain them now."
+
+What I chiefly object to in the general-denunciation sort of reformers
+is that they make no allowance for character and temperament. They wish
+to repeal universal laws, and to patch our natural skins for us, as if
+they always wanted mending. That while they talk so much of the godlike
+nature of man, they should so forget the human natures of men! The
+Flathead Indian squeezes the child's skull between two boards till it
+shapes itself into a kind of gambrel roof against the rain,--the
+readiest way, perhaps, of uniforming a tribe that wear no clothes. But
+does he alter the inside of the head? Not a hair's-breadth. You remember
+the striking old gnomic poem that tells how Aaron, in a moment of
+fanatical zeal against that member by which mankind are so readily led
+into mischief, proposes a rhinotomic sacrifice to Moses? What is the
+answer of the experienced law-giver?
+
+  Says Moses to Aaron,
+  "'T is the fashion to wear 'em!'"
+
+Shall we advise the Tadpole to get his tail cut off, as a badge of the
+reptile nature in him, and to achieve the higher sphere of the Croakers
+at a single hop? Why, it is all he steers by; without it, he would be as
+helpless as a compass under the flare of Northern Lights; and he no
+doubt regards it as a mark of blood, the proof of his kinship with the
+preadamite family of the Saurians. Shall we send missionaries to the
+Bear to warn him against raw chestnuts, because they are sometimes so
+discomforting to our human intestines, which are so like his own? One
+sermon from the colic were worth the whole American Board.
+
+Moreover, as an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Street
+against a unanimity in goodness. Not to mention that a Quaker world, all
+faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,--what should
+we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, no
+literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a
+sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be
+thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as
+indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me
+monthly,--what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband
+forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The
+pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the
+very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and
+him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the
+curse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; she
+is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been
+feeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us.
+Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in Nathaniel
+Greene, and makes a general of him, to confute five generations of
+Broadbrims. The Puritans were good in their way, and we enjoy them
+highly as a preterite phenomenon; but they were _not_ good at cakes and
+ale, and that is one reason why they are a preterite phenomenon.
+
+I suppose we are all willing to let a public censor like P.V. run amuck
+whenever he likes,--so it be not down our street. I confess to a good
+deal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in No. 21, have
+plenty of stoicism to spare for the griefs of the dwellers in No. 23.
+Indeed, I agreed with our young Cato heartily in what he said about
+Statues. We must have an Act for the Suppression, either of Great Men,
+or else of Sculptors. I have not quite made up my mind which are the
+greater nuisances; but I am sure of this, that there are too many of
+both. They used to be _rare_ (to use a Yankeeism omitted by Bartlett),
+but nowadays they are overdone. I am half inclined to think that the
+sculptors club together to write folks up during their lives in the
+newspapers, quieting their consciences with the hope of some day making
+them look so mean in bronze or marble as to make all square again. Or do
+we really have so many? Can't they help growing twelve feet high in this
+new soil, any more than our maize? I suspect that Posterity will not
+thank us for the hereditary disease of Carrara we are entailing on him,
+and will try some heroic remedy, perhaps lithotripsy.
+
+Nor was I troubled by what Mr. Vandal said about the late Benjamin
+Webster. I am not a Boston man, and have, therefore, the privilege of
+thinking for myself. Nor do I object to his claiming for women the right
+to make books and pictures and (shall I say it?) statues,--only this
+last becomes a grave matter, if we are to have statues of all the great
+women, too! To be sure, there will not be the trousers-difficulty,--at
+least, not at present; what we may come to is none of my affair. I even
+go beyond him in my opinions on what is called the Woman Question. In
+the gift of speech, they have always had the advantage of us; and though
+the jealousy of the other sex have deprived us of the orations of
+Xantippe, yet even Demosthenes does not seem to have produced greater
+effects, if we may take the word of Socrates for it,--as I, for one,
+very gladly do.
+
+No,--what I complain of is not the lecturer's opinions, but the
+eloquence with which he expressed them. He does not like statues better
+than I do; but is it possible that he fails to see that the one nuisance
+leads directly to the other, and that we set up three images of Talkers
+for one to any kind of man who was useful in his generation? Let him
+beware, or he will himself be petrified after death. Boston seems to be
+specially unfortunate. She has more statues and more speakers than any
+other city on this continent. I have with my own eyes seen a book called
+"The Hundred Boston Orators." This would seem to give her a fairer title
+to be called the _tire_ than the _hub_ of creation. What with the
+speeches of her great men while they are alive, and those of her
+surviving great men about those aforesaid after they are dead, and those
+we look forward to from her _ditto ditto_ yet to be upon her _ditto
+ditto_ now in being, and those of her paulopost _ditto ditto_ upon her
+_ditto ditto_ yet to be, and those--But I am getting into the house that
+Jack built.
+
+And yet I remember once visiting the Massachusetts State House and being
+struck with the Pythagorean fish hung on high in the Representatives'
+Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to be
+observed except on Sundays. Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal to you as a
+man and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there are
+plenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-water
+that threatens the land. Let us adopt as our creed these two
+propositions:--
+
+I. _Tongues were given us to be held._
+
+II. _Dumbness sets the brute below the man: Silence elevates the man
+above the brute._
+
+Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than
+that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account
+how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be
+commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception
+is positively stunning.
+
+Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late
+Town Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA
+NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general.
+_He_, at least, never betrayed his clients. As it is, there is no end to
+it. We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal
+Schoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the same
+ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man
+had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.
+We are the victims of a droll antithesis. Daniel would not give in to
+Nebuchadnezzar's taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down
+and worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have
+gone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor. I do not
+think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one is
+so apt to encounter;--I met one once at an evening party. But I would be
+thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that
+statue. Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the
+monumental line! Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of
+convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late
+visit, got off without a single speech. The cheerful hospitalities of
+Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but
+nothing more melancholy. In his case I doubt the expediency of the
+omission. Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it
+would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers
+of the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together.
+
+In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts our
+friends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) are
+put to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay for
+it. The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the Stark
+Mills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for making
+a very dead bronze horse stand on his hind legs. For twenty-five cents I
+have seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful,--make a very
+living bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occurs
+to me that _hind legs_ is indelicate) posterior extremities to the
+wayward music of an out-of-town (_Scoticè_, out-o'-toon) band. Now, I
+will make a handsome offer to the public. I propose for twenty-five
+thousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of a
+distinguished general officer as he _would have_ appeared at the Battle
+of Buena Vista. This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown the
+new dome of the Capitol at Washington. By this happy contrivance, the
+horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth
+at all,--thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for
+originality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the
+horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which
+way the wind blows by going along with it. The inferior animal I have
+resolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection. In
+this way I shall combine two striking advantages. The advocates of the
+Ideal in Art cannot fail to be pleased with a charger which embodies, as
+it were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attention
+of the spectator will not be distracted from the principal figure. The
+material to be pure brass. I have also in progress an allegorical group
+commemorative of Governor Wise. This, like-Wise, represents only a
+potentiality. I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment when
+and the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury at
+Washington. His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of his
+speeches. Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling on
+his own steel pen; a broken telegraph wire hints at the weight of the
+thoughts to which it has found itself inadequate; while the Army and
+Navy of the United States are conjointly typified in a horse-marine who
+flies headlong with his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. I
+think I shall be able to have this ready for exhibition by the time Mr.
+Wise is nominated for the Presidency,--certainly before he is elected.
+The material to be plaster, made of the shells of those oysters with
+which Virginia shall have paid her public debt. It may be objected, that
+plaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itself
+could hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor's speeches. But
+it must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype,
+have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of the
+spectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some reasonable hope
+of silence. This design, also, is intended only _in terrorem_, and will
+be suppressed for an adequate consideration.
+
+I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The
+fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may
+deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves
+into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a
+wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other
+way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of
+the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with
+the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in
+the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new
+victims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the wooden
+horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr.
+Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever
+material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short
+of a general.
+
+Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures. He counsels us to sell our real
+estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's reputation with
+posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor. To
+a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose military
+reputation insures his cutting and running (I mean, of course, in marble
+and bronze), the question becomes an interesting one,--To whom, in case
+of a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have the land all
+to themselves,--until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancient
+heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness will
+revive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican Art. For my own
+part, I never look at one of them now without thinking of at least one
+human sacrifice.
+
+I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing's proposal, and yet something
+ought to be done. We must put up with what we have already, I suppose,
+and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol
+pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand
+rests,--no bad type of the great man's state of mind after the
+nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a
+penal statue. But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that
+Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues? I go
+back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment. I had even gone so far
+as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the
+Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it
+would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our
+graven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects
+enumerated in the divine ordinance. Perhaps a double-barrelled statute
+might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the
+monumental difficulty. Let a law be passed that all speeches delivered
+more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all
+eulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel of
+the Deaf and Dumb asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds
+of the Institution for the Blind. Let the penalty for infringement in
+the one case be to read the last President's Message, and in the other
+to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as
+to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual
+punishments.
+
+Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should
+pass so self-denying an ordinance. They might, perhaps, make all oratory
+but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates
+might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed
+by a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be
+by an appetite for slate pencils. _Vita brevis, lingua longa._ I protest
+that among lawgivers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the
+Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence. The ancient Greeks also
+(though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions,
+especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the
+advantage of communication with America. Now the Greeks had a Muse of
+Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how
+hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more
+excellent Muse of Leaving-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her out
+and kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a goddess to be
+worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!
+
+Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch's
+lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts
+and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in
+comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine
+lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are
+as dust in the balance to those of speech.
+
+We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.
+There are now two debating clubs, seminaries of multiloquence. A few of
+us old-fashioned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it
+"The Jolly Oysters." No member is allowed to open his mouth except at
+high-tide by the calendar. We have biennial festivals on the evening of
+election day, when the constituency avenges itself in some small measure
+on its Representative elect by sending a baker's dozen of orators to
+congratulate him.
+
+But I am falling into the very vice I condemn,--like Carlyle, who has
+talked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue. And yet
+something should be done about it. Even when we get one orator safely
+underground, there are ten to pronounce his eulogy, and twenty to do it
+over again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue. I go to
+listen: we all go: we are under a spell. 'T is true, I find a casual
+refuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he called
+Sleep the child of Silence. Speech begets her as often. But there is no
+sure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, let
+there be written on my head-stone, with impartial application to these
+Black Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to our
+equestrian statues,--
+
+  _Os sublime_ did it!
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Function Of The Poet And Other
+Essays, by James Russell Lowell
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays
+by James Russell Lowell
+
+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: The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays
+
+Author: James Russell Lowell
+
+Release Date: December 27, 2004 [EBook #14481]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FUNCTION OF THE POET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Thomas Amrhein and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+
+
+COLLECTED AND EDITED BY
+ALBERT MORDELL
+
+
+KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y.
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+
+1920 by Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+Reissued in 1967 by Kennikat Press
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The Centenary Celebration of James Russell Lowell last year showed that
+he has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet.
+Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work rather
+than in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of his
+life. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame of his youth did
+not continue to glow, but he resigned himself to his fate; nevertheless,
+it should be remembered that "The Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Biglow
+Papers," and "The Commemoration Ode" are enough to make the reputation
+of any poet.
+
+The present volume sustains Lowell's right to be considered one of the
+great American critics. The literary merit of some of the essays herein
+is in many respects nowise inferior to that in some of the volumes he
+collected himself. The articles are all exquisitely and carefully
+written, and the style of even the book reviews displays that quality
+found in his best writings which Ferris Greenslet has appropriately
+described as "savory." That such a quantity of good literature by so
+able a writer as Lowell should have been allowed to repose buried in the
+files of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact that
+Lowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute all
+the more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews on
+ephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in book
+form.
+
+The essays herein represent the matured author as they were written in
+the latter part of his life, between his thirty-sixth and fifty-seventh
+years. The only early essay is the one on Poe. It appeared in _Graham's
+Magazine_ for February, 1845, and was reprinted by Griswold in his
+edition of Poe. It has also been reprinted in later editions of Poe, but
+has never been included in any of Lowell's works. This was no doubt due
+to the slight break in the relations between Poe and Lowell, due to
+Poe's usual accusations of plagiarism. The essay still remains one of
+the best on Poe ever written.
+
+Though Lowell became in later life quite conservative and academic, it
+should not be thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberal
+ideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, and
+had good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first works
+of Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men,
+indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers will
+enjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, the
+raps at spiritualism here and there. Moreover, there is a passage in the
+first essay showing that Lowell, before Freud, understood the
+psychoanalytic theory of genius in its connection with childhood
+memories. The passage follows Lowell's narration of the story of little
+Montague.
+
+None of the essays in this volume has appeared in book form except a few
+fragments from some of the opening five essays which were reported from
+Lowell's lectures in the _Boston Advertiser_, in 1855, and were
+privately printed some years ago. Charles Eliot Norton performed a
+service to the world when he published in the _Century Magazine_ in 1893
+and 1894 some lectures from Lowell's manuscripts. These lectures are now
+collected and form the first five essays in this book. I have also
+retained Professor Norton's introductions and notes. Attention is called
+to his remark that "The Function of the Poet" is not unworthy to stand
+with Sidney's and Shelley's essays on poetry.
+
+The rest of the essays in this volume appeared in Lowell's lifetime in
+the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _North American Review_, and the _Nation_.
+They were all anonymous, but are assigned to Lowell by George Willis
+Cooke in his "Bibliography of James Russell Lowell." Lowell was editor
+of the _Atlantic_ from the time of its founding in 1857 to May, 1861. He
+was editor of the _North American Review_ from January, 1864, to the
+time he left for Europe in 1872. With one exception (that on "Poetry and
+Nationalism" which formed the greater part of a review of the poems of
+Howells's friend Piatt), all the articles from these two magazines,
+reprinted in this volume, appeared during Lowell's editorship. These
+articles include reviews of poems by his friends Longfellow and
+Whittier. And in his review of "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Lowell
+makes effective use of his scholarship to introduce a lengthy and
+interesting discourse on the dactylic hexameter.
+
+While we are on the subject of the New England poets a word about the
+present misunderstanding and tendency to underrate them may not be out
+of place. Because it is growing to be the consensus of opinion that the
+two greatest poets America has produced are Whitman and Poe, it does not
+follow that the New-Englanders must be relegated to the scrap-heap. Nor
+do I see any inconsistency in a man whose taste permits him to enjoy
+both the free verse and unpuritanic (if I may coin a word) poems of
+Masters and Sandburg, and also Whittier's "Snow-Bound" and Longfellow's
+"Courtship of Miles Standish." Though these poems are not profound,
+there is something of the universal in them. They have pleasant
+school-day memories for all of us and will no doubt have such for our
+children.
+
+Lowell's cosmopolitan tastes may be seen in his essays on men so
+different as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows that
+he even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray to
+Dickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree with
+him. As a young man he hated Swift, but he gives us a sane study of him.
+The review of Plutarch's "Essays" edited by Goodwin, with an
+introduction by Emerson, is also of interest.
+
+The last essay in the volume on "A Plea for Freedom from Speech and
+Figures of Speech-Makers" shows Lowell's satirical powers at their best.
+Ferris Greenslet tells us, in his book on Lowell, that the Philip Vandal
+whose eloquence Lowell ridicules is Wendell Phillips. The essay gives
+Lowell's humorous comments on various matters, especially on
+contemporary types of orators, reformers, and heroes. It represents
+Lowell as he is most known to us, the Lowell who is always ready with
+fun and who set the world agog with his "Biglow Papers."
+
+Lowell's work as a critic dates from the rare volume "Conversations on
+Some of the Old Poets," published in 1844 in his twenty-fifth year,
+includes his best-known volumes "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows,"
+and most fitly concludes with the "Latest Literary Essays," published in
+the year of his death in 1891. My sincere hope is that this book will
+not be found to be an unworthy successor to these volumes.
+
+Though some of Lowell's literary opinions are old-fashioned to us (one
+author even wrote an entire volume to demolish Lowell's reputation as a
+critic), there is much in his work that the world will not let die. He
+is highly regarded abroad, and he is one of the few men in our
+literature who produced creative criticism.
+
+Thanks and acknowledgments are due the _Century Magazine_ and the
+literary representatives of Lowell, for permission to reprint in this
+volume the first five essays, which are copyrighted and were published
+in the _Century Magazine_.
+
+ALBERT MORDELL
+
+_Philadelphia, January 13, 1920_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
+  _Century Magazine_, January, 1894
+
+HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
+  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
+  _Century Magazine_, November, 1893
+
+THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS (HOMER, DANTE,
+CERVANTES, GOETHE, SHAKESPEARE)
+  _Century Magazine_, December, 1893
+
+THE IMAGINATION
+  _Century Magazine_, March, 1894
+
+CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
+  _Century Magazine_, May, 1894
+    I. Life in Literature and Language
+    II. Style and Manner
+    III. Kalevala
+
+
+REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
+
+HENRY JAMES: JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES
+  _The Nation_, June 24, 1875
+
+LONGFELLOW: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1859
+
+TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
+  _North American Review_, January, 1864
+
+WHITTIER: IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
+  _North American Review_, January, 1864
+
+HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1860
+
+SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
+  _North American Review_, April, 1866
+
+POETRY AND NATIONALITY
+  _North American Review_, October, 1868
+
+W.D. HOWELLS: VENETIAN LIFE
+  _North American Review_, October, 1866
+
+EDGAR A. POE
+  _Graham's Magazine_, February, 1845;
+  R.W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)
+
+THACKERAY: ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
+  _North American Review_, April, 1864
+
+
+TWO GREAT AUTHORS
+
+SWIFT: FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT
+  _The Nation_, April 13 and 20, 1876
+
+PLUTARCH'S MORALS
+  _North American Review_, April, 1871
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1860
+
+
+
+
+ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
+
+
+This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before
+the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never
+printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions
+were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in
+composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print.
+How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the
+broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his
+essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and
+1867--essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew,
+though not treated at large.
+
+But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the
+enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths
+it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression
+of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline
+alike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand with
+Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm
+and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less
+than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture
+Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."
+
+_Charles Eliot Norton_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a
+great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in
+friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels
+out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the
+development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up
+out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest
+pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions
+that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what
+little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
+barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
+everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
+certain outward respects, but essentially the same.
+
+And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
+the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
+the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
+of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
+highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer
+and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the _epea
+pteroenta_, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored
+future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise
+and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by,
+as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is
+Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey,"
+"whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"--the gift of conferring
+good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as
+they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the
+desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust,
+because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the
+future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
+were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their
+ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries
+ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have
+poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up
+by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some
+provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for
+a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The
+historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as
+they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave
+them.
+
+The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have
+a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves
+continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older
+epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.
+Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances;
+for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the
+generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for
+a purposeless moment, and reenter the dark again after they have
+performed the nothing they came for.
+
+Gradually, however, the poet as the "seer" became secondary to the
+"maker." His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher. But
+always something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has now
+come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing
+is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep,
+too. If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral,
+that man is Shakespeare. But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which
+does not see through his tragic--yes, and his comic--masks awful eyes
+that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic
+meaning--a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all
+human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself
+unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness
+that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the
+errand that was laid upon him:
+
+  Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
+  And made myself a motley to the view,
+  Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
+  Made old offences of affections new;
+  Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
+  Askance and strangely;
+
+the application of which is made clear by the next sonnet, in which he
+distinctly alludes to his profession.
+
+There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets--that, however
+in little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes a
+great and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bear
+themselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language. There
+is not a mature play of Shakespeare's in which great ideas do not jut up
+in mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces of
+thought, and known afar to many kindreds of men.
+
+And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for any
+faculty of observation and description, that we value the poet. It is in
+proportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not a
+juggler with words. It is by means of this that for every generation of
+man he plays the part of "namer." Before him, as before Adam, the
+creation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then the
+world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever a
+great imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging the
+outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away
+in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth
+beneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggests
+the invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. His
+imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his
+characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also
+perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract
+thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.
+
+Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel
+something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of
+contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change,
+he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and
+conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with
+their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as
+utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which
+faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.
+History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the
+world for a village. This life could only become other than
+phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something
+that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power
+unseen--that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits
+stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy. In the "Odyssey"
+we find pure allegory.
+
+Now, under all these names--praiser, seer, soothsayer--we find the same
+idea lurking. The poet is he who can best see and best say what is
+ideal--what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he
+celebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as it
+appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still
+clings to him; he is the revealer of Deity. He may be unconscious of his
+mission; he may be false to it; but in proportion as he is a great poet,
+he rises to the level of it the more often. He does not always directly
+rebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel what
+delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil, it is with
+such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that
+the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great
+poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to
+a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever
+learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean
+and bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly
+on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that
+they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead
+of speaking the true universal language of imagination. He who
+translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
+is the reverse of a poet.
+
+The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same
+thing--imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him the
+power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks
+about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace,
+which whoso has on understands the language of all created things. And
+as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole
+of himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said a
+thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as
+there are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than an
+interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between
+man and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, the
+possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected
+treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under
+the dusty path of our daily life.
+
+And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,--a thing which
+enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,--but
+all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
+every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the
+dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping
+news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately
+ships,--"the city on the inconstant billows dancing,"--as there is
+between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybody
+remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to
+the chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful
+chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a
+fair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw
+himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and
+fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced
+together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the
+visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to
+him again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are
+typified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscences
+of the stately home of our childhood,--for we are all of us poets and
+geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of
+every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,--and we all remember
+the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there. But
+somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty
+taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end--till
+suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and
+of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to our
+true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature
+that the poet reintroduces us.
+
+But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power
+of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank
+materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show
+its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was
+sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or
+no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
+with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
+against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
+Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
+matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
+was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
+reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
+the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
+you so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bone
+broken."
+
+And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
+character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
+phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
+For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
+not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
+purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
+What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
+less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
+eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
+defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.
+
+No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
+beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
+the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
+and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
+practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
+that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
+this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
+after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with
+which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
+common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
+visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
+two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
+the same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do we
+depend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but upon
+observation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternal
+promontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lower
+system.
+
+But it seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late,
+that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and all that is
+left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
+railroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in Brother
+Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But because _he_
+is a materialist, shall there be no more poets? When we have said that
+we live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant more
+than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
+foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at any
+rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespeare
+was richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such a
+pair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his to
+report it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, who
+continues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less
+than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he
+lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not
+sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his
+little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more
+quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have
+drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of
+affairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground for
+the public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere
+piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such
+ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick
+and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink.
+It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespeare
+received everything that came along,--of what a _present_ man he
+was,--that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought into
+England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.
+
+It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for that very
+reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation
+contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. When the
+poet comes, he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the
+passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not
+to have lived in Homer's day, or Dante's, but to be alive now. To be
+alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live
+in the past, and men yet unborn that live in the future. We are like
+Hans in Luck, forever exchanging the burdensome good we have for
+something else, till at last we come home empty-handed.
+
+That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton
+whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even
+now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and
+thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus
+that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their
+triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy,
+looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to
+behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted
+and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when there
+was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.
+
+The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its
+costume. And that is what makes it prosaic--that we have not faith
+enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented
+to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is
+that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue
+of Sir Robert Peel,--a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding
+gracefully to the present,--in which the sculptor had done his best to
+travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when
+England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of
+this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord
+Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to
+the rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, "Thus sat
+Francis Bacon"--not "Cneius Pompeius"--"Viscount Verulam." Those men had
+faith even in their own shoe-strings.
+
+After all, how is our poor scapegoat of a nineteenth century to blame?
+Why, for not being the seventeenth, to be sure! It is always raining
+opportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago who
+were intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up. We are like
+beggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must be
+counterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece of
+familiar copper. And so, as we stand in our mendicancy by the wayside,
+Time tosses carefully the great golden to-day into our hats, and we turn
+it over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised at
+finding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes. Till Dante's time
+the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings
+into but Latin,--and indeed a dead tongue was the best for dead
+thoughts,--but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men
+bargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of the
+world around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang.
+
+In our day, it is said despairingly, the understanding reigns
+triumphant: it is the age of common sense. If this be so, the wisest way
+would be to accept it manfully. But, after all, what is the meaning of
+it? Looking at the matter superficially, one would say that a striking
+difference between our science and that of the world's gray fathers is
+that there is every day less and less of the element of wonder in it.
+What they saw written in light upon the great arch of heaven, and, by a
+magnificent reach of sympathy, of which we are incapable, associated
+with the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only a
+professor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn and
+unapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanized
+among the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in every
+calyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The stars
+can no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is a
+conjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sends
+thither its special reporter with his telescope. Over those arcana of
+life where once a mysterious presence brooded, we behold scientific
+explorers skipping like so many incarnate notes of interrogation. We pry
+into the counsels of the great powers of nature, we keep our ears at the
+keyhole, and know everything that is going to happen. There is no longer
+any sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, and
+life turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needs
+no more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" We
+have found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription upon
+it, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted.
+
+Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in our
+cradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples the
+day with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimation
+of demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material for
+thought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, as
+sapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathy
+with man or nature as a town history with its genealogies of Mr.
+Nobody's great-grandparents.
+
+We have utilized everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar
+system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a
+symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass
+through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a
+museum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum of
+supernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has been
+going on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern and
+historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of
+the death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic
+imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus.
+
+Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On those
+sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.
+It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see
+farther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom of
+a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all this
+is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced
+itself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are not
+arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set
+all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In my
+opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful
+than the discoveries themselves."
+
+But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if it
+would, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination. No two
+men have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, that
+something more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that a
+logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as
+every man's _own_ logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a
+structure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring
+together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one.
+When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if a
+leaf has fallen. I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in the
+pulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have not sometimes
+found the popular giant as provokingly insensible. The [sqrt of -x] is
+nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower
+which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day
+of childhood. Demonstration may lead to the very gate of heaven, but
+there she makes us a civil bow, and leaves us to make our way back again
+to Faith, who has the key. That science which is of the intellect alone
+steps with indifferent foot upon the dead body of Belief, if only she
+may reach higher or see farther.
+
+But we cannot get rid of our wonder--we who have brought down the wild
+lightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be our
+errand-boy and penny-postman. Wonder is crude imagination; and it is
+necessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exact
+knowledge is not enough. Do we get nearer the truth or farther from it
+that we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit? We
+go on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it? The evasive
+genius flits into something else, and defies us. The powers of the outer
+and inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connection
+man is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps
+it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was
+vainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it
+wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man of
+science remakes the old spirit. But we seem to have created too many
+wonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, when
+asked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them. But
+nature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best but
+scotch it, not kill it. In this day of newspapers and electric
+telegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole
+continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as
+Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!
+Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster on
+Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblin
+is laid at last!"--and while I mused the tables were turning, and the
+chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have a
+neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed
+out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son,
+and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with
+it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so
+brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp.
+
+It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
+sort or other. If they cannot get the best they will get some substitute
+for it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine's slur that it is wine
+of devils. The mind bound down too closely to what is practical either
+becomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wilderness
+of "isms." The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted some
+persons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and found
+refreshment in taking a scalp now and then. Nature insists above all
+things upon balance. She contrives to maintain a harmony between the
+material and spiritual, nor allows the cerebrum an expansion at the cost
+of the cerebellum. If the character, for example, run on one side into
+religious enthusiasm, it is not unlikely to develop on the other a
+counterpoise of worldly prudence. Thus the Shaker and the Moravian are
+noted for thrift, and mystics are not always the worst managers. Through
+all changes of condition and experience man continues to be a citizen of
+the world of idea as well as the world of fact, and the tax-gatherers of
+both are punctual.
+
+And these antitheses which we meet with in individual character we
+cannot help seeing on the larger stage of the world also, a moral
+accompanying a material development. History, the great satirist, brings
+together Alexander and the blower of peas to hint to us that the tube of
+the one and the sword of the other were equally transitory; but
+meanwhile Aristotle was conquering kingdoms out of the unknown, and
+establishing a dynasty of thought from whose hand the sceptre has not
+yet passed. So there are Charles V, and Luther; the expansion of trade
+resulting from the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, and the
+Elizabethan literature; the Puritans seeking spiritual El Dorados while
+so much valor and thought were spent in finding mineral ones. It seems
+to be the purpose of God that a certain amount of genius shall go to
+each generation, particular quantities being represented by individuals,
+and while no _one_ is complete in himself, all collectively make up a
+whole ideal figure of a man. Nature is not like certain varieties of the
+apple that cannot bear two years in succession. It is only that her
+expansions are uniform in all directions, that in every age she
+completes her circle, and like a tree adds a ring to her growth be it
+thinner or thicker.
+
+Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, the one trivial and
+ordinary, the other sacred and recluse; the one which he carries to the
+dinner-table and to his daily work, which grows old with his body and
+dies with it, the other that which is made up of the few inspiring
+moments of his higher aspiration and attainment, and in which his youth
+survives for him, his dreams, his unquenchable longings for something
+nobler than success. It is this life which the poets nourish for him,
+and sustain with their immortalizing nectar. Through them he feels once
+more the white innocence of his youth. His faith in something nobler
+than gold and iron and cotton comes back to him, not as an upbraiding
+ghost that wrings its pale hands and is gone, but beautiful and
+inspiring as a first love that recognizes nothing in him that is not
+high and noble. The poets are nature's perpetual pleaders, and protest
+with us against what is worldly. Out of their own undying youth they
+speak to ours. "Wretched is the man," says Goethe, "who has learned to
+despise the dreams of his youth!" It is from this misery that the
+imagination and the poets, who are its spokesmen, rescue us. The world
+goes to church, kneels to the eternal Purity, and then contrives to
+sneer at innocence and ignorance of evil by calling it green. Let every
+man thank God for what little there may be left in him of his vernal
+sweetness. Let him thank God if he have still the capacity for feeling
+an unmarketable enthusiasm, for that will make him worthy of the society
+of the noble dead, of the companionship of the poets. And let him love
+the poets for keeping youth young, woman womanly, and beauty beautiful.
+
+There is as much poetry as ever in the world if we only knew how to find
+it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more
+prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped
+of material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying
+mountain-farm of imagination, which did not appear in the schedule of
+his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though he
+never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great
+poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.
+
+There is no reason why our continent should not sing as well as the
+rest. We have had the practical forced upon us by our position. We have
+had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we are
+descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright
+wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the
+Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
+be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or
+they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are
+States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.
+
+But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poetical
+people. Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men in
+visible types. He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap of
+invisibility and the purse of Fortunatus. These were once stories for
+grown men, and not for the nursery as now. We are apt ignorantly to
+wonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction the
+absurdity of which any of our primary-school children could demonstrate.
+But we forget that the world's gray fathers were children themselves,
+and that in their little world, with its circle of the black unknown all
+about it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in the
+dark. Look at a child's toys, and we shall understand the matter well
+enough. Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still),
+at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which she
+has been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, and
+a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.
+
+But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet. In her
+railroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness. Fine-Ear herself
+could not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listen
+in Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans. And what need of
+Aladdin's lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill? The
+office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these
+miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there
+is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there
+is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed
+that fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the
+lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul
+of poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does not
+seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the
+"Merchant of Venice" in it. Themes of song are waiting everywhere for
+the right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one can
+pull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more trouble
+than in plucking a violet.
+
+John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford, many years ago,
+reckoned the number of whale-ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
+out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as
+a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that
+those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever must
+be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity,
+but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that a
+race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty
+Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces.
+Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every port
+of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies
+dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert
+only flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot
+Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space
+occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!
+They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible
+as the soul.
+
+Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not as the
+mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme il
+faut_ for a great nation, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy,
+for its power of making men better by arousing in them a perception of
+their own instincts for what is beautiful, and therefore sacred and
+religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not
+have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a
+people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our
+little mother-island sunk beneath the sea, or, worse, were she conquered
+by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakespeare would be an immortal England,
+and would conquer countries, when the bones of her last sailor had kept
+their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched
+thunders of her navy.
+
+Old Purchas in his "Pilgrims" tells of a sacred caste in India who, when
+they go out into the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the world
+out of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. And
+it is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks to
+pooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whatever
+of life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is in
+the visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find its
+activity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty,
+if it be bewildered or thwarted by an outward profession of faith
+covering up a practical unbelief in anything higher and holier than the
+world of sense, it will find vent in such wretched holes and corners as
+table-tippings and mediums who sell news from heaven at a quarter of a
+dollar the item. Imagination cannot be banished out of the world. She
+may be made a kitchen-drudge, a Cinderella, but there are powers that
+watch over her. When her two proud sisters, the intellect and
+understanding, think her crouching over her ashes, she startles and
+charms by her splendid apparition, and Prince Soul will put up with no
+other bride.
+
+The practical is a very good thing in its way--if it only be not another
+name for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root
+which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from
+Parthia--which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they
+were some great matter till he died.
+
+One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes him
+feel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankind
+were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism
+which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy old
+world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany,
+talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till
+bedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and
+beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. But
+divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and
+messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as
+having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of
+Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the
+sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit
+second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of
+Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity,
+"trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of
+sunsets.
+
+No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with every
+child. It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon. Every age
+says to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I am
+like"; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, has
+need of seers and will have them. Our time is not an unpoetical one. We
+are in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces of
+unsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though they
+may be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone. It is nothing against us
+that we are a commercial people. Athens was a trading community; Dante
+and Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was already
+commercial when she produced Shakespeare.
+
+This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
+the noble, and the true, will never cease out of the world till the God
+from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselves
+in an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as new
+duties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of the
+poet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soul
+endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while
+there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will
+still send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hang
+their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God with us is
+forever the mystical name of the hour that is passing. The lives of the
+great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt
+most deeply the meaning of the present.
+
+
+
+
+HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+In the winter of 1855, when Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a
+course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His
+subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive
+lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the
+imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first
+characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the
+advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads,"
+especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of
+real life--the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative
+of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8,
+Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On
+Poetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotistic
+imaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Function
+and Prospects of Poetry."
+
+These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period of
+delivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, but
+they came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues of
+familiar studies and long reflection. No such criticism, at once
+abundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished by
+breadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, had
+been heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiastic
+audiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as the
+ablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as the
+foremost of American men of letters.
+
+In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard
+University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in
+special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of
+the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed
+Minister of the United States to Spain.
+
+During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses of
+lectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they were
+given more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject of
+these courses was in general the "Study of Literature," treating in
+different years of different special topics, from the literature of
+Northern to that of Southern Europe, from the Kalevala and the
+Niebelungen Lied to the Provencal poets; from Wolfram von Eschenbach to
+Rousseau; from the cycle of romances of Charlemagne and his peers to
+Dante and Shakespeare. Some of these lectures, or parts of them, were
+afterward prepared for publication, with such changes as were required
+to give them proper literary form; and the readers of Lowell's prose
+works know what gifts of native power, what large and solid acquisitions
+of learning, what wide and delightful survey of the field of life and of
+letters, are to be found in his essays on Shakespeare, on Dante, on
+Dryden, and on many another poet or prose writer. The abundance of his
+resources as critic in the highest sense have never been surpassed, at
+least in English literature.
+
+But considerable portions of the earlier as well as of the later
+lectures remain unprinted, partly, no doubt, because his points of view
+changed with the growth of his learning, and the increasing depth as
+well as breadth of his vision. There is but little in manuscript which
+he would himself, I believe, have been inclined to print without
+substantial change. Yet these unprinted remains contain so much that
+seems to me to possess permanent value that, after some question and
+hesitation, I have come to the conclusion that selections from them
+should be published. The fragments must be read with the fact constantly
+held in mind that they do not always represent Lowell's mature opinions;
+that, in some instances, they give but the first form of thoughts
+developed in other connections in one or other of his later essays; that
+they have not received his last revision; that they have the form of
+discourse addressed to the ear, rather than that of literary work
+finished for the eye.
+
+If so read, I trust that the reader, while he may find little in them to
+increase Lowell's well-established reputation, may find much in them to
+confirm a high estimate of his position as one of the rare masters of
+English prose as well as one of the most capable of critics; much to
+interest him alike in their intrinsic character, and in their
+illustration of the life and thought of the writer; and much to make him
+feel a keen regret that they are the final contributions of their author
+to the treasures of English literature.
+
+_Charles Eliot Norton_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hippel, the German satirist, divides the life of man into five periods,
+according to the ruling desires which successively displace each other
+in the human soul. Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, the
+second for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourth
+for money, and the fifth for a "place" in the country. I think he has
+overlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point of
+time--the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master of
+a chamber to one's self.
+
+How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that
+independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!
+How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small
+chamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor pores
+over the "Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks," his longing heightened
+as the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney.
+There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties his
+pockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of the
+housemaid. There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment of
+Schwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel the
+cool shadow of the discoverer's laurel. There the antiquary begins his
+collections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistles
+of Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late the
+property of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate,
+who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to make
+his children the ornaments of society. There the potential Dibdin or
+Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf--more fair to him
+than the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe," and
+"Gulliver," perhaps "Gil Blas," Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and
+Rome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds," the "Parent's Assistant," and
+(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," with other narratives
+of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.
+With these are admitted also "Viri Romae," Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and
+even the Latin grammar, because they _count_, playing here upon these
+mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators,
+a role in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated
+volumes--the "books without which no gentleman's library can be
+complete."
+
+I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery
+of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was
+first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of
+that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my
+unmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adorn
+it. The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints
+which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather's study,
+but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story
+till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther. These
+were heads of ancient worthies[1]--Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca,
+and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortly
+banished again with a _quousque tandem!_ Besides those I have mentioned,
+there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the
+slave of tradition, I called Heraclitus--an error which my excellent
+schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by
+the judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded the
+birth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree of
+knowledge, whose advantages could Adam have enjoyed during early life,
+he had known better than to have yielded to the temptation of any other.
+
+[Footnote 1: Some readers may recall the reference to these "heads of
+ancient wise men" in "An Interview with Miles Standish."--C.E.N.]
+
+Well, over my chimney hung those two antithetical philosophers--the one
+showing his teeth in an eternal laugh, while the tears on the cheek of
+the other forever ran, and yet, like the leaves on Keats's Grecian urn,
+could never be shed. I used to wonder at them sometimes, believing, as I
+did firmly, that to weep and laugh had been respectively the sole
+business of their lives. I was puzzled to think which had the harder
+time of it, and whether it were more painful to be under contract for
+the delivery of so many tears _per diem_, or to compel that [Greek:
+anerithmon gelasma][1] I confess, I pitied them both; for if it be
+difficult to produce on demand what Laura Matilda would call the "tender
+dew of sympathy," he is also deserving of compassion who is expected to
+be funny whether he will or no. As I grew older, and learned to look on
+the two heads as types, they gave rise to many reflections, raising a
+question perhaps impossible to solve: whether the vices and follies of
+men were to be washed away, or exploded by a broadside of honest
+laughter. I believe it is Southwell who says that Mary Magdalene went to
+Heaven by water, and it is certain that the tears that people shed for
+themselves are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved
+by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers
+should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber
+enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while
+on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves
+of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits
+they can upon their fat.
+
+[Footnote 1: Countless--_i.e._, perpetual--smile.]
+
+On the other hand, man has a wholesome dread of laughter, as he is the
+only animal capable of that phenomenon--for the laugh of the hyena is
+pronounced by those who have heard it to be no joke, and to be classed
+with those [Greek: gelasmata agelasta] which are said to come from the
+other side of the mouth. Whether, as Shaftesbury will have it, ridicule
+be absolutely the test of truth or no, we may admit it to be relatively
+so, inasmuch as by the _reductio ad absurdum_ it often shows that
+abstract truth may become falsehood, if applied to the practical affairs
+of life, because its relation to other truths equally important, or to
+human nature, has been overlooked. For men approach truth from the
+circumference, and, acquiring a knowledge at most of one or two points
+of that circle of which God is the centre, are apt to assume that the
+fixed point from which it is described is that where they stand.
+Moreover, "Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat?"
+
+I side rather with your merry fellow than with Dr. Young when he says:
+
+  Laughter, though never censured yet as sin,
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Is half immoral, be it much indulged;
+  By venting spleen, or dissipating thought,
+  It shows a scorner, or it makes a fool;
+  And sins, as hurting others or ourselves.
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Yet would'st thou laugh (but at thine own expense),
+  This counsel strange should I presume to give--
+  "Retire, and read thy Bible, to be gay."
+
+With shame I confess it, Dr. Young's "Night Thoughts" have given me as
+many hearty laughs as any humorous book I ever read.
+
+Men of one idea,--that is, who have one idea at a time,--men who
+accomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, are
+inevitably destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be
+great and noble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversity
+of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a
+single idea, and that a small and rickety one--some seven months' child
+of thought--that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to
+the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no
+satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if
+Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For
+example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy
+to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two
+hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick
+Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great
+antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in
+Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person
+who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm,
+the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine
+to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm
+likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would
+have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the
+spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an
+epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"
+exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's
+axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable
+satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I
+have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks,
+Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never
+succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the
+collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus
+unconsciously by our passive enthusiast?
+
+I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see
+certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of
+the comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without
+laughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the _haruspex haruspicem_)
+and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secret
+I will keep yours." In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be
+implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body
+and soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm
+would lead us an endless dance.
+
+The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of one
+idea--for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two. He is the
+universal disenchanter. He makes himself quite as much the subject of
+ironical study as his neighbor. Is he inclined to fancy himself a great
+poet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sit
+down because a certain part of him was made of glass, and muses
+smilingly, "There are many forms of hypochondria." This duality in his
+mind which constitutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of his
+character. He is futile in action because in every path he is confronted
+by the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusion
+that nothing is very much worth the while. If he be independent of
+exertion, his life commonly runs to waste. If he turn author, it is
+commonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and "Don Quixote" was
+the fruit of a debtors' prison.
+
+It seems to be an instinct of human nature to analyze, to define, and to
+classify. We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away in
+the mind, and feel as if we knew them better when we have named them.
+And so to a certain extent we do. The mere naming of things by their
+appearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom;
+and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combines
+appearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the senses
+by impression, is poetry. A great part of criticism is scientific, but
+as the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possible
+in this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far as
+that, at some kind of classification that may help us toward that
+excellent property--compactness of mind.
+
+Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodness
+produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say that
+this was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is there
+in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne,
+Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic of
+all of them. Ben Jonson says that
+
+  When some one peculiar quality
+  Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
+  All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
+  In their constructions all to run one way,
+  This may be truly said to be a humor.
+
+But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,--of a good
+subject for the humorist,--such as Don Quixote, for example.
+
+Humor--taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous,
+and to give it expression--seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.
+Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused
+through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great
+comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their
+faces, or before they have spoken a word.
+
+The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the
+understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the
+English, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let us
+not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take
+the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.
+Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which
+arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the
+impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great
+humorist, defines it thus:
+
+    Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to
+    set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it
+    beside the great--that it may annihilate both, because in the
+    presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal,
+    only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality,
+    the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance
+    of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of
+    little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the
+    Scoffer.
+
+We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor,
+while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of
+lightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without our
+being able to put our finger on any passage, and say, "It is here." Wit
+must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wise
+deacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of human
+natur' in man," he might have added that there was a good deal more in
+some men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may be
+humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence
+of mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase,
+this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be
+instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and its
+impression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. As Galiani said of
+Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes
+every time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime
+oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art of
+saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where
+it is forbidden to say anything." Wit must also have the quality of
+unexpectedness. "Sometimes," says Barrow, "an affected simplicity,
+sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it rises
+only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty
+wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one
+knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are
+unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless
+rovings of fancy and windings of language."
+
+That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected
+likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at
+what is called a _conceit_, which has all the qualities of wit--except
+wit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long
+poem called "Albion's England," which had an immense contemporary
+popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of
+language. In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.
+Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,
+
+  Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
+  Soft were those lips that bled.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This, and one or two of the following illustrations, were
+used again by Mr. Lowell in his "Shakespeare Once More": _Works_
+(Riverside edition), III, 53.]
+
+This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good
+as a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a
+pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have
+been,--to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,--it
+should read:
+
+  Hard was the _hand_ that gave the blow,
+  Soft were those lips that bled,
+
+for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word "hard" as
+applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper
+logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which
+belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:
+
+  Her heart and morning broke together
+  In tears,
+
+which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might
+almost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionally
+violated in the word _broke_, and the sentence becomes absurd, though
+not funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of
+the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it,
+though here, again, there would be no true wit:
+
+  His heart and Biddle broke together
+  On 'change.
+
+Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of
+"Hudibras," certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose
+wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost
+rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a
+contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject. Butler says of loyalty
+that it is
+
+  True as the dial to the sun
+  Although it be not shined upon.
+
+Now what is the difference between this and the examples from Warner and
+Morris which I have just quoted? Simply that the comparison turning upon
+the word _true_, the mind is satisfied, because the analogy between the
+word as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave no
+gap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over. But it is precisely this
+jolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discompose
+our thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the object
+of a pun to give us. Wit of this kind treats logic with every possible
+outward demonstration of respect--"keeps the word of promise to the ear,
+and breaks it to the sense." Dean Swift's famous question to the man
+carrying the hare, "Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?" is
+perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an
+equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood
+abounds in examples of this sort of fun--only that his analogies are of
+a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old sailor he
+says,
+
+  His head was turned, and so he chewed
+  His pigtail till he died.
+
+This is inimitable, like all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is
+perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind
+is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical _non sequiturs_. And
+yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in
+the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of his
+ear-trumpet:
+
+  I don't pretend with horns of mine,
+  Like some in the advertising line,
+  To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales
+  That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale's.
+
+  There was Mrs. F. so very deaf
+  That she might have worn a percussion cap
+  And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
+  Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
+  She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.
+
+Again, his definition of deafness:
+
+  Deaf as the dog's ears in Enfield's "Speaker."
+
+So, in his description of the hardships of the wild beasts in the
+menagerie,
+
+  Who could not even prey
+  In their own way,
+
+and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning
+with the lion; but
+
+  Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
+  When Nero bolted him.
+
+In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit
+always suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostling
+together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.
+Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down in
+a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but
+once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn,
+they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. In
+the droll complaint of the lover,
+
+  Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
+  But why did you kick me down-stairs?
+
+the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the
+word "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking
+downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.
+Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole
+sentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment of
+Huon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that
+makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.
+
+Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as
+distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so
+full is it of quaint fancy:
+
+  Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
+  As but the offscouring of the British sand,
+  And so much earth as was contributed
+  By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
+  Or what by ocean's slow alluvium fell
+  Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
+  This indigestful vomit of the sea
+  Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
+
+  Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore
+  They, with mad labor, fished their land to shore,
+  And dived as desperately for each piece
+  Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese
+  Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
+  Less than what building swallows bear away,
+  Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll.
+  Transfusing into them their sordid soul.
+
+  How did they rivet with gigantic piles
+  Thorough the centre their new-catched miles,
+  And to the stake a struggling country bound,
+  Where barking waves still bait the forced ground!
+
+  Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid.
+  And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played,
+  As if on purpose it on land had come
+  To show them what's their _mare liberum_;
+  The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
+  And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest;
+  And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs tan
+  Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban,
+  And, as they over the new level ranged,
+  For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.
+  Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
+  Something like government among them brings;
+  And as among the blind the blinkard reigns
+  So rules among the drowned he that drains;
+  Who best could know to pump on earth a leak,
+  Him they their lord and Country's Father speak.
+  To make a bank was a great plot of state,
+  Invent a shovel and be a magistrate;
+  Hence some small dykegrave, unperceived, invades
+  The power, and grows, as 't were, a king of spades.
+
+I have cited this long passage not only because Marvell (both in his
+serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is
+as good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off
+into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that
+constitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny,
+hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an
+epigram of two lines:
+
+  Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
+  May man undam you and God damn you all.
+
+Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the
+most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
+With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus," and
+wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
+Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a
+place "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat," and this
+hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is
+certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the
+Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and
+disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But
+commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him
+rather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an example
+from the "Day of Judgment":
+
+  With a whirl of thought oppressed
+  I sank from reverie to rest,
+  A horrid vision seized my head,
+  I saw the graves give up their dead!
+  Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
+  And thunder roars, and lightning flies!
+  Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
+  The world stands trembling at his throne!
+  While each pale sinner hung his head,
+  Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said:
+  "Offending race of human kind;
+  By nature, reason, learning, blind,
+  You who through frailty stepped aside.
+  And you who never fell through pride,
+  You who in different sects were shammed,
+  And come to see each other damned
+  (So some folks told you--but they knew
+  No more of Jove's designs than you)--
+  The world's mad business now is o'er,
+  And I resent these pranks no more--
+  I to such blockheads set my wit!
+  I damn such fools! Go, go! you're bit!"
+
+The unexpectedness of the conclusion here, after the somewhat solemn
+preface, is entirely of the essence of wit. So, too, is the sudden flirt
+of the scorpion's tail to sting you. It is almost the opposite of humor
+in one respect--namely, that it would make us think the solemnest things
+in life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humor
+delights in exposing. This further difference is also true: that wit
+makes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none of
+its point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and droller
+the oftener we read it. If we cannot safely deny that Swift was a
+humorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gone
+through the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid. We should
+never forget that he died mad. Satirists of this kind, while they have
+this quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower,
+differ from their nobler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is always
+to the disadvantage of the higher. They purposely disenchant us--while
+the others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted at
+all.
+
+Ben Jonson, who had in respect of sturdy good sense very much the same
+sort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose "Discoveries," as he
+calls them, are well worth reading for the sound criticism they contain,
+says:
+
+    The parts of a comedy are the same with [those of] a tragedy, and
+    the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach: the
+    comics are called _didaskaloi_[1] of the Greeks, no less than the
+    tragics. Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy;
+    that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling.
+    For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in
+    comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's
+    nature without a disease. As a wry face moves laughter, or a
+    deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using
+    her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made
+    the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise
+    man. So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in
+    the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly
+    stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And
+    therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests
+    upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and
+    sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did
+    move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and
+    scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands
+    the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.
+
+[Footnote 1: Teachers.]
+
+He then goes on to say of Aristophanes that
+
+    he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous,
+    oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be
+    corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter
+    with that beast the multitude. They love nothing that is right and
+    proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them
+    the better it is.
+
+In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a
+little bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructed
+according to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault
+in comedy. I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniably
+true, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon the
+stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the
+writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than
+as movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the
+greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in
+limbo, qualifies him with the title of _satiro_.
+
+But if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?
+Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor? Yes; but, as it
+appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree,
+from any other ancient. I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies
+not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends,
+but for the fun of the thing. I am so poor a Grecian that I have no
+doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. But
+even through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out
+more or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was a
+master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands--puts forth
+buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it
+feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.
+Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps
+we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts
+as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent
+being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems
+too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the
+definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true
+flavor of Falstaff in him--"a million a minute and your expenses paid."
+As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file." Now
+they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come
+tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the
+circus, with a "Here we are!" I can think of nothing like it but
+Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the _go_
+out of words. They do not merely play with words; they romp with them,
+tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.
+
+I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in "The Clouds" or "The
+Birds," but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs," nor does
+the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of
+humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he
+has nothing like the scene in "The Frogs," where Bacchus is terrified
+with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries,
+and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor
+tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess,
+the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the
+ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been
+degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within
+the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those
+hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet
+saw in Tartary?
+
+Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on
+the same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, the
+greatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not,--and I am inclined
+to believe he did,--he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his
+esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human
+character--the imagination and understanding. There is a great deal more
+than this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book is
+often little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested. The
+plot is of the meagrest. A country gentleman of La Mancha, living very
+much by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances of
+chivalry, becomes at last the victim of a monomania on this one subject,
+and resolves to revive the order of chivalry in his own proper person.
+He persuades a somewhat prosaic neighbor of his to accompany him as
+squire. They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which
+they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting.
+Now if this were all of "Don Quixote," it would be simply broad farce,
+as it becomes in Butler's parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far
+as mere external characteristics are concerned. The latter knight and
+his squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficient
+reason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that they
+furnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom. They
+represent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing.
+
+I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfect
+character ever drawn. As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense,
+always a gentleman,--that is, as he is guilty of no crime that is
+technically held to operate in defeasance of his title to that name as a
+man of the world,--so is Don Quixote, in everything that does not
+concern his monomania, a perfect gentleman and a good Christian besides.
+He is not the merely technical gentleman of three descents--but the
+_true_ gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness,
+generosity, and fear of God can make. And with what consummate skill are
+the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just
+so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill
+event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from
+his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's
+treatment of him in the second part--which followed the other after an
+interval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they delude
+themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides
+shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castle
+are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.
+
+Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooner
+or later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal good
+by material means. Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is the
+type of the man with common sense. He always sees things in the daylight
+of reason. He is never taken in by his master's theory of
+enchanters,--although superstitious enough to believe such things
+possible,--but he _does_ believe, despite all reverses, in his promises
+of material prosperity and advancement. The island that has been
+promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before
+Macbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And,
+fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island
+of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate--because statesmanship
+depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on
+precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS
+
+(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)
+
+
+The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result
+in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of
+ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such
+men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light
+upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as
+the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an
+accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the
+scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth
+only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to
+know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were
+contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting
+with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from
+the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the
+New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise
+and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy
+and cumbrous--the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men;
+generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space,
+mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of
+something better than provincial scholarship.
+
+But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier
+moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can
+say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long
+steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the
+carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts.
+What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vast
+combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up
+to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with all
+large mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the first
+solid result of thought, however small--the nucleus of speculation. The
+true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and
+sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of
+science.
+
+It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it
+democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy
+of thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it has
+taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it
+has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of
+reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had few
+books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it
+over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.
+Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and
+precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would
+hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of
+Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books;
+for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift.
+When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three
+hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently
+survived until our day.
+
+In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we
+admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those
+better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon
+that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is
+deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is
+forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual
+progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his
+dethroned gods.
+
+There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very
+few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I
+should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so
+universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally
+true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European
+branch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and there
+needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than
+this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the "Iliad" and the
+"Odyssey." The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work
+of one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so
+nobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I should
+place the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, in which the history of the
+spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of
+outline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same
+universal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural man
+set before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squire
+Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature--the
+imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. This
+is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly
+independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural
+history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the
+projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable
+result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only
+ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally
+represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral
+significance there may be in certain episodes of the "Odyssey," the man
+of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the
+understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive.
+There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is
+nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry,
+than that passage in the eleventh book of the "Odyssey," where the shade
+of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest
+shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades
+of Hades. Dante's poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man
+from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral
+conversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the great
+camp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so
+representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all
+men. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction
+between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the
+transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect;
+and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual
+culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness,
+and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, but
+human, and record certain phases of man's nature, certain stages of his
+moral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It will
+remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it
+remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and
+harmonious development.
+
+I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a
+different category. Though they mark the very highest level of human
+genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the
+individual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life
+as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain
+definite conditions. We all of us _may_ be in the position of Macbeth or
+Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds
+potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of
+our common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books I
+have mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us grow
+up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time,
+sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape
+our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with
+Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and
+with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the
+intellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do not
+mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them,
+in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and
+perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts
+for their permanence, and insures their immortality.
+
+
+
+
+THE IMAGINATION[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: A small portion of this lecture appeared at the time of its
+delivery, in January, 1855, in a report printed in the _Boston Daily
+Advertiser_.]
+
+Imagination is the wings of the mind; the understanding, its feet. With
+these it may climb high, but can never soar into that ampler ether and
+diviner air whence the eye dominates so uncontrolled a prospect on every
+hand. Through imagination alone is something like a creative power
+possible to man. It is the same in Aeschylus as in Shakespeare, though
+the form of its manifestation varies in some outward respects from age
+to age. Being the faculty of vision, it is the essential part of
+expression also, which is the office of all art.
+
+But in comparing ancient with modern imaginative literature, certain
+changes especially strike us, and chief among them a stronger infusion
+of sentiment and what we call the picturesque. I shall endeavor to
+illustrate this by a few examples. But first let us discuss imagination
+itself, and give some instances of its working.
+
+"Art," says Lord Verulam, "is man added to Nature" (_homo additus
+naturae_); and we may modernize his statement, and adapt it to the
+demands of aesthetics, if we define art to be Nature infused with and
+shaped by the imaginative faculty of man; thus, as Bacon says elsewhere,
+"conforming the shows of things to the desires of the mind." Art always
+platonizes: it results from a certain finer instinct for form, order,
+proportion, a certain keener sense of the rhythm there is in the eternal
+flow of the world about us, and its products take shape around some idea
+preexistent in the mind, are quickened into life by it, and strive
+always (cramped and hampered as they are by the limitations and
+conditions of human nature, of individual temperament, and outward
+circumstances) toward ideal perfection--toward what Michelangelo called
+
+  Ideal form, the universal mould.
+
+Shakespeare, whose careless generalizations have often the exactness of
+scientific definitions, tells us that
+
+  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
+  Are of imagination all compact;
+
+that
+
+              as imagination bodies forth
+  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
+  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
+  A local habitation and a name.
+
+And a little before he had told us that
+
+  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
+  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
+  More than cool reason ever comprehends.
+
+Plato had said before him (in his "Ion") that the poet is possessed by a
+spirit not his own, and that he cannot poetize while he has a particle
+of understanding left. Again he says that the bacchantes, possessed by
+the god, drink milk and honey from the rivers, and cannot believe, _till
+they recover their senses_, that they have been drinking mere water.
+Empedocles said that "the mind could only conceive of fire by being
+fire."
+
+All these definitions imply in the imaginative faculty the capabilities
+of ecstasy and possession, that is, of projecting itself into the very
+consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by
+the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the
+tone, the color, and the temperature thereof. Shakespeare is the highest
+example of this--for example, the parting of Romeo and Juliet. There the
+poet is so possessed by the situation, has so mingled his own
+consciousness with that of the lovers, that all nature is infected too,
+and is full of partings:
+
+  Look, love, what envious streaks
+  Do lace the _severing_ clouds in yonder east.
+
+In Shelley's "Cenci," on the other hand, we have an instance of the
+poet's imagination giving away its own consciousness to the object
+contemplated, in this case an inanimate one.
+
+  Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
+  Crosses a deep ravine; 't is rough and narrow,
+  And winds with short turns down the precipice;
+  And in its depth there is a mighty rock
+  Which has, from unimaginable years,
+  Sustained itself with terror and with toil
+  Over a gulf, and with the agony
+  With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
+  Even as a wretched soul hour after hour
+  Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
+  And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
+  In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag,
+  Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
+  The melancholy mountain yawns.
+
+The hint of this Shelley took from a passage in the second act of
+Calderon's "Purgatorio de San Patricio."
+
+  No ves ese penasco que parece
+  Que se esta sustentando con trabajo,
+  Y con el ansia misma que padece
+  Ha tantos siglos que se viene abajo?
+
+which, retaining the measure of the original, may be thus paraphrased:
+
+  Do you not see that rock there which appeareth
+  To hold itself up with a throe appalling,
+  And, through the very pang of what it feareth,
+  So many ages hath been falling, falling?
+
+You will observe that in the last instance quoted the poet substitutes
+his own _impression_ of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his
+own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all
+sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose
+excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the
+main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its
+excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and
+healthy expression. Thus Shakespeare in his ninety-seventh sonnet:
+
+  How like a winter hath my absence been
+  From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
+  What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
+  What old December's bareness everywhere!
+  And yet this time remov'd was summer's time.
+
+It is only when it becomes a habit, instead of a mood of the mind, that
+it is a token of disease. Then it is properly dyspepsia,
+liver-complaint--what you will, but certainly not imagination as the
+handmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: one
+as the _plastic_ or _shaping_ faculty, which gives form and proportion,
+and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unity
+foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as
+the _realizing_ energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts,
+not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and
+coherence.
+
+We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, in
+the one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intense
+sympathy--a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as a
+Cordelia, a Caliban as a Prospero. There is a passage in Chaucer's
+"House of Fame" which very prettily illustrates this latter function:
+
+  Whan any speche yeomen ys
+  Up to the paleys, anon ryght
+  Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
+  Which that the worde in erthe spak,
+  Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
+  And so were hys lykenesse,
+  And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
+  That it the same body be,
+  Man or woman, he or she.
+
+We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind
+of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive,
+sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of
+body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "the
+dull substance of his flesh were thought." It is not in mere intensity
+of phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, or
+the situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witness
+of itself in expression. I know nothing more profoundly imaginative
+therefore in its bald simplicity than a line in Webster's "Duchess of
+Malfy." Ferdinand has procured the murder of his sister the duchess.
+When her dead body is shown to him he stammers out:
+
+  Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.
+
+The difference between subjective and objective in poetry would seem to
+be that the aim of the former is to express a mood of the mind, often
+something in itself accidental and transitory, while that of the latter
+is to convey the impression made upon the mind by something outside of
+it, but taken up into the mind and idealized (that is, stripped of all
+unessential particulars) by it. The one would fain set forth your view
+of the thing (modified, perhaps, by your breakfast), the other would set
+forth the very thing itself in its most concise individuality.
+Subjective poetry may be profound and imaginative if it deal with the
+primary emotions of our nature, with the soul's inquiries into its own
+being and doing, as was true of Wordsworth; but in the very proportion
+that it is profound, its range is limited. Great poetry should have
+breadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere on
+the open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on their
+occasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploring
+expeditions among the crypts of metaphysics.
+
+But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengage
+what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse
+the vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things are
+gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. It
+is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that
+can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to
+itself. That the power of abstraction has something to do with the
+imagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is a
+dramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep.
+His acquaintances walk and talk before him on the stage of dream
+precisely as in life. When he wakes, his genius has flown away with his
+sleep. It was indeed nothing more than that his mind was not distracted
+by the multiplicity of details which the senses force upon it by day. He
+thinks of Smith, and it is no longer a mere name on a doorplate or in a
+directory; but Smith himself is there, with those marvellous
+commonplaces of his which, could you only hit them off when you were
+awake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too,
+that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforced
+his remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the corner
+of the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a week
+of newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination
+_bodies forth_? It is indeed the _verbum caro factum_--the word made
+flesh and blood.
+
+I said that the imagination always idealizes, that in its highest
+exercise, for example, as in the representation of character, it goes
+behind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types of
+human nature, as in Don Quixote and Hamlet, Antigone and Cordelia,
+Alcestis and Amelia. By this I mean that those features are most
+constantly insisted upon, not in which they differ from other men but
+from other kinds of men. For example, Don Quixote is never set before us
+as a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when you
+analyze it, of a very noble kind--nothing less, indeed, than devotion to
+an unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginative
+men for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats and
+disillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice at
+intervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one of
+Beethoven's symphonies, a kind of clue to guide us through those
+intricacies of harmony. So in Lear, one of Shakespeare's profoundest
+psychological studies, the weakness of the man is emphasized, as it
+were, and forced upon our attention by his outbreaks of impotent
+violence; so in Macbeth, that imaginative bias which lays him open to
+the temptation of the weird sisters is suggested from time to time
+through the whole tragedy, and at last unmans him, and brings about his
+catastrophe in his combat with Macduff. This is what I call ideal and
+imaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries of
+character, not by arbitrary lines drawn at this angle or that, according
+to the whim of the tracer, but by those mountain-ranges of human nature
+which divide man from man and temperament from temperament. And as the
+imagination of the reader must reinforce that of the poet, reducing the
+generic again to the specific, and defining it into sharper
+individuality by a comparison with the experiences of actual life, so,
+on the other hand, the popular imagination is always poetic, investing
+each new figure that comes before it with all the qualities that belong
+to the genus; Thus Hamlet, in some one or other of his characteristics
+has been the familiar of us all, and so from an ideal and remote figure
+is reduced to the standard of real and contemporary existence; while
+Bismarck, who, if we knew him, would probably turn out to be a
+comparatively simple character, is invested with all the qualities which
+have ever been attributed to the typical statesman, and is clearly as
+imaginative a personage as the Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's "Don
+Carlos." We are ready to accept any _coup de theatre_ of him. Now, this
+prepossession is precisely that for which the imagination of the poet
+makes us ready by working on our own.
+
+But there are also lower levels on which this idealization plays its
+tricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may be
+called the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to
+delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from the
+associations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroic
+stature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar face
+in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the
+countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful
+reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most
+penetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ of
+expression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor were
+wrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at any
+rate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual and
+trivial. Their stage showed nothing that could be met in the streets. We
+barbarians, on the other hand, take delight precisely in that. We admire
+the novels of Trollope and the groups of Rogers because, as we say, they
+are so _real_, while it is only because they are so matter-of-fact, so
+exactly on the level with our own trivial and prosaic apprehensions.
+When Dante lingers to hear the dispute between Sinon and Master Adam,
+Virgil, type of the higher reason and the ideal poet, rebukes him, and
+even angrily.
+
+  E fa ragion ch'io ti sia sempre allato
+  Si piu avvien che fortuna t' accoglia
+  Ove sien genti in simigliante piato;
+  Che voler cio udire e bassa voglia.
+
+  Remember, _I_ am always at thy side,
+  If ever fortune bring thee once again
+  Where there are people in dispute like this,
+  For wishing to hear that is vulgar wish.
+
+Verse is another of these expedients for producing that frame of mind,
+that prepossession, on the part of hearer or reader which is essential
+to the purpose of the poet, who has lost much of his advantage by the
+invention of printing, which obliges him to appeal to the eye rather
+than the ear. The rhythm is no arbitrary and artificial contrivance. It
+was suggested by an instinct natural to man. It is taught him by the
+beating of his heart, by his breathing, hastened or retarded by the
+emotion of the moment. Nay, it may be detected by what seems the most
+monotonous of motions, the flow of water, in which, if you listen
+intently, you will discover a beat as regular as that of the metronome.
+With the natural presumption of all self-taught men, I thought I had
+made a discovery in this secret confided to me by Beaver Brook, till
+Professor Peirce told me it was always allowed for in the building of
+dams. Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not only
+metre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outward
+nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray
+out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to
+spray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands
+an embodied ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of proportion, number,
+and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen the
+blue river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been ravished by the
+visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and
+downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
+how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
+flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
+vault below? At least there can be no doubt that metre, by its
+systematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes the
+senses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself in
+sympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predisposition
+to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose
+of the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right
+way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own
+sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The right
+reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary
+condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mind
+both in poet and hearer. The imagination must be sensitized ere it will
+take the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced and
+fixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun. Then
+that becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of the
+brain. Your own passion must penetrate and mingle with that of the
+artist that you may interpret him aright. You must, I say, be
+prepossessed, for it is the mind which shapes and colors the reports of
+the senses. Suppose you were expecting the bell to toll for the burial
+of some beloved person and the church-clock should begin to strike. The
+first lingering blow of the hammer would beat upon your very heart, and
+thence the shock would run to all the senses at once; but after a few
+strokes you would be undeceived, and the sound would become commonplace
+again. On the other hand, suppose that at a certain hour you knew that a
+criminal was to be executed; then the ordinary striking of the clock
+would have the sullen clang of a funeral bell. So in Shakespeare's
+instance of the lover, does he not suddenly find himself sensible of a
+beauty in the world about him before undreamed of, because his passion
+has somehow got into whatever he sees and hears? Will not the rustle of
+silk across a counter stop his pulse because it brings back to his sense
+the odorous whisper of Parthenissa's robe? Is not the beat of the
+horse's hoofs as rapid to Angelica pursued as the throbs of her own
+heart huddling upon one another in terror, while it is slow to Sister
+Anne, as the pulse that pauses between hope and fear, as she listens on
+the tower for rescue, and would have the rider "spur, though mounted on
+the wind"?
+
+Dr. Johnson tells us that that only is good poetry which may be
+translated into sensible prose. I greatly doubt whether any very
+profound emotion can be so rendered. Man is a metrical animal, and it is
+not in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joy
+over the new centre of hope and terror that is sucking life from her
+breast. Translate passion into sensible prose and it becomes absurd,
+because subdued to workaday associations, to that level of common sense
+and convention where to betray intense feeling is ridiculous and
+unmannerly. Shall I ask Shakespeare to translate me his love "still
+climbing trees in the Hesperides"? Shall I ask Marlowe how Helen could
+"make him immortal with a kiss," or how, in the name of all the Monsieur
+Jourdains, at once her face could "launch a thousand ships and burn the
+topless towers of Ilion"? Could Aeschylus, if put upon the stand, defend
+his making Prometheus cry out,
+
+  O divine ether and swift-winged winds,
+  Ye springs of rivers, and of ocean waves
+  The innumerable smile, all mother Earth,
+  And Helios' all-beholding round, I call:
+  Behold what I, a god, from gods endure!
+
+Or could Lear justify his
+
+  I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
+  I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you children!
+
+No; precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain
+any more than we can describe a perfume. There is a little quatrain of
+Gongora's quoted by Calderon in his "Alcalde of Zalamea" which has an
+inexplicable charm for me:
+
+  Las flores del romero,
+    Nina Isabel,
+  Hoy son flores azules,
+    Y manana seran miel.
+
+If I translate it, 't is nonsense, yet I understand it perfectly, and it
+will, I dare say, outlive much wiser things in my memory. It is the very
+function of poetry to free us from that witch's circle of common sense
+which holds us fast in its narrow enchantment. In this disenthralment,
+language and verse have their share, and we may say that language also
+is capable of a certain idealization. Here is a passage from the XXXth
+song of Drayton's "Poly-Olbion":
+
+  Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every Hill
+  Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring valleys fill;
+  Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
+  From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
+  From whose stone-trophied head, it on to Wendrosse went,
+  Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent,
+  That Broadwater therewith within her banks astound,
+  In sailing to the sea, told it in Egremound.
+
+This gave a hint to Wordsworth, who, in one of his "Poems on the Naming
+of Places," thus prolongs the echo of it:
+
+  Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
+  That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
+  The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
+  Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again;
+  The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
+  Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
+  And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
+  A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
+  And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
+  Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
+  Carried the Lady's voice,--old Skiddaw blew
+  His speaking-trumpet;--back out of the clouds
+  Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
+  And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.
+
+Now, this passage of Wordsworth I should call the
+idealization of that of Drayton, who becomes poetical
+only in the "stone-trophied head of Dunbalrase";
+and yet the thought of both poets is the same.
+
+Even what is essentially vulgar may be idealized by seizing and dwelling
+on the generic characteristics. In "Antony and Cleopatra" Shakespeare
+makes Lepidus tipsy, and nothing can be droller than the drunken gravity
+with which he persists in proving himself capable of bearing his part in
+the conversation. We seem to feel the whirl in his head when we find his
+mind revolving round a certain fixed point to which he clings as to a
+post. Antony is telling stories of Egypt to Octavius, and Lepidus, drawn
+into an eddy of the talk, interrupts him:
+
+  _Lepidus_: You gave strange serpents there.
+
+  _Antony_ [_trying to shake him off_]: Ay, Lepidus.
+
+  _Lepidus_: Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud
+  by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.
+
+  _Antony_ [_thinking to get rid of him_]: They are so.
+
+Presently Lepidus has revolved again, and continues, as if he had been
+contradicted:
+
+  Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies' pyramises
+  are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard
+  that.
+
+And then, after another pause, still intent on proving himself sober, he
+asks, coming round to the crocodile again:
+
+  What manner o' thing is your crocodile?
+
+Antony answers gravely:
+
+  It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath
+  breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own
+  organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements
+  once out of it, it transmigrates.
+
+  _Lepidus_: What color is it of?
+
+  _Antony_: Of its own color, too.
+
+  _Lepidus_ [_meditatively_]: 'T is a strange serpent.
+
+The ideal in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades
+embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the
+dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic
+sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though
+these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this
+that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was
+supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and
+something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg
+encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas
+the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the
+mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this
+was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and
+personification with that typical expression which is the true function
+of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.
+
+        Revenge impatient rose;
+  He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
+        And, with a withering look,
+      The war-denouncing trumpet took,
+      And blew a blast so loud and dread,
+    Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of woe!
+        And ever and anon he beat
+        The doubling drum with furious heat.
+
+"Words, words, Horatio!" Now let us hear Chaucer with his single
+stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the
+murderous tread behind us:
+
+  The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.
+
+Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it--Collins's noise
+or Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you will
+perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness
+which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention.
+Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as
+the two points most apt to impress the imagination.
+
+The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on the
+other hand, adorns, illustrates, and commonly amplifies. The one is
+suggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander," I
+read--
+
+  Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,
+  And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
+  How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine,
+  For her love's sake, that with immortal wine
+  Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease
+  Than there was water in the Sestian seas.
+
+In the epithet "star," Hero's thought implies the beauty and brightness
+of her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune's
+skies" we have not only the simple fact that the waters are the
+atmosphere of the sea-god's realm, but are reminded of that reflected
+heaven which Hero must have so often watched as it deepened below her
+tower in the smooth Hellespont. I call this as high an example of fancy
+as could well be found; it is picture and sentiment combined--the very
+essence of the picturesque.
+
+But when Keats calls Mercury "the star of Lethe," the word "star" makes
+us see him as the poor ghosts do who are awaiting his convoy, while the
+word "Lethe" intensifies our sympathy by making us feel his coming as
+they do who are longing to drink of forgetfulness. And this again reacts
+upon the word "star," which, as it before expressed only the shining of
+the god, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitual
+association of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothing
+can be more fanciful than this bit of Henry More the Platonist:
+
+                        What doth move
+  The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?
+  The thrush or lark that, mounting high above,
+  Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn
+  Heavily hanging in the dewy morn?
+
+But compare this with Keats again:
+
+  The voice I hear this passing night was heard
+  In ancient days by emperor and clown;
+  Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
+  Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home,
+  She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
+
+The imagination has touched that word "alien," and we see the field
+through Ruth's eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, not
+merely through those of the poet.
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
+
+I. LIFE IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
+
+
+It is the office and function of the imagination to renew life in lights
+and sounds and emotions that are outworn and familiar. It calls the soul
+back once more under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest bush
+burn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible presence of God. And it
+works the same miracle for language. The word it has touched retains the
+warmth of life forever. We talk about the age of superstition and fable
+as if they were passed away, as if no ghost could walk in the pure white
+light of science, yet the microscope that can distinguish between the
+disks that float in the blood of man and ox is helpless, a mere dead
+eyeball, before this mystery of Being, this wonder of Life, the sympathy
+which puts us in relation with all nature, before that mighty
+circulation of Deity in which stars and systems are but as the
+blood-disks in our own veins. And so long as wonder lasts, so long will
+imagination find thread for her loom, and sit like the Lady of Shalott
+weaving that magical web in which "the shows of things are accommodated
+to the desires of the mind."
+
+It is precisely before this phenomenon of life in literature and
+language that criticism is forced to stop short. That it is there we
+know, but what it is we cannot precisely tell. It flits before us like
+the bird in the old story. When we think to grasp it, we already hear it
+singing just beyond us. It is the imagination which enables the poet to
+give away his own consciousness in dramatic poetry to his characters, in
+narrative to his language, so that they react upon us with the same
+original force as if they had life in themselves.
+
+
+II. STYLE AND MANNER
+
+
+Where Milton's style is fine it is _very_ fine, but it is always liable
+to the danger of degenerating into mannerism. Nay, where the imagination
+is absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theological
+discussions in "Paradise Lost," it becomes mannerism of the most
+wearisome kind. Accordingly, he is easily parodied and easily imitated.
+Philips, in his "Splendid Shilling," has caught the trick exactly:
+
+  Not blacker tube nor of a shorter size
+  Smokes Cambrobriton (versed in pedigree,
+  Sprung from Cadwallader and Arthur, kings
+  Full famous in romantic tale) when he,
+  O'er many a craggy hill and barren cliff,
+  Upon a cargo of famed Cestrian cheese
+  High overshadowing rides, with a design
+  To vend his wares or at the Arvonian mart.
+  Or Maridunum, or the ancient town
+  Yclept Brechinia, or where Vaga's stream
+  Encircles Ariconium, fruitful soil.
+
+Philips has caught, I say, Milton's trick; his real secret he could
+never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable. But all
+authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies
+less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become
+mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily
+imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his
+time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence
+has in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined by
+him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is
+circumlocution in the crow of a cock. Cowper was only saved by mixing
+equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind of
+cross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we should
+not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that
+no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the
+majesty and compass of the organ. He was as much composer as poet.
+
+How is it with Shakespeare? did he have no style? I think I find the
+proof that he had it, and that of the very highest and subtlest kind, in
+the fact that I can nowhere put my finger on it, and say it is here or
+there.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: In his essay, "Shakespeare Once More" (_Works_, in, pp.
+36-42), published in 1868, Mr. Lowell has treated of Shakespeare's style
+in a passage of extraordinary felicity and depth of critical judgment.]
+
+I do not mean that things in themselves artificial may not be highly
+agreeable. We learn by degrees to take a pleasure in the mannerism of
+Gibbon and Johnson. It is something like reading Latin as a living
+language. But in both these cases the man is only present by his
+thought. It is the force of that, and only that, which distinguishes
+them from their imitators, who easily possess themselves of everything
+else. But with Burke, who has true style, we have a very different
+experience. If we _go_ along with Johnson or Gibbon, we are _carried_
+along by Burke. Take the finest specimen of him, for example, "The
+Letter to a Noble Lord." The sentences throb with the very pulse of the
+writer. As he kindles, the phrase glows and dilates, and we feel
+ourselves sharing in that warmth and expansion. At last we no longer
+read, we seem to hear him, so livingly is the whole man in what he
+writes; and when the spell is over, we can scarce believe that those
+dull types could have held such ravishing discourse. And yet we are told
+that when Burke spoke in Parliament he always emptied the house.
+
+I know very well what the charm of mere words is. I know very well that
+our nerves of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the violin is
+said to do, to certain modulations, so that we receive them with a
+readier sympathy at every repetition. This is a part of the sweet charm
+of the classics. We are pleased with things in Horace which we should
+not find especially enlivening in Mr. Tupper. Cowper, in one of his
+letters, after turning a clever sentence, says, "There! if that had been
+written in Latin seventeen centuries ago by Mr. Flaccus, you would have
+thought it rather neat." How fully any particular rhythm gets possession
+of us we can convince ourselves by our dissatisfaction with any
+emendation made by a contemporary poet in his verses. Posterity may
+think he has improved them, but we are jarred by any change in the old
+tune. Even without any habitual association, we cannot help recognizing
+a certain power over our fancy in mere words. In verse almost every ear
+is caught with the sweetness of alliteration. I remember a line in
+Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" which owes much of its fascination to
+three _m's_, where he speaks of the Hebrid Isles
+
+  Far placed amid the melancholy main.
+
+I remember a passage in Prichard's "Races of Man" which had for me all
+the moving quality of a poem. It was something about the Arctic regions,
+and I could never read it without the same thrill. Dr. Prichard was
+certainly far from being an inspired or inspiring author, yet there was
+something in those words, or in their collocation, that affected me as
+only genius can. It was probably some dimly felt association, something
+like that strange power there is in certain odors, which, in themselves
+the most evanescent and impalpable of all impressions on the senses,
+have yet a wondrous magic in recalling, and making present to us, some
+forgotten experience.
+
+Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems are
+full of those little pitfalls for the fancy. Whatever you have read,
+whether in the classics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stir
+you with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable. Gray
+makes use of the same artifice, and with the same success.
+
+There is a charm in the arrangement of words also, and that not only in
+verse, but in prose. The finest prose is subject to the laws of metrical
+proportion. For example, in the song of Deborah and Barak: "Awake,
+awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, utter a song! Arise, Barak, and lead thy
+captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam!" Or again, "At her feet he
+bowed; he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he
+bowed, there he fell down dead."
+
+Setting aside, then, all charm of association, all the influence to
+which we are unconsciously subjected by melody, by harmony, or even by
+the mere sound of words, we may say that style is distinguished from
+manner by the author's power of projecting his own emotion into what he
+writes. The stylist is occupied with the impression which certain things
+have made upon him; the mannerist is wholly concerned with the
+impression he shall make on others.
+
+
+III. KALEVALA
+
+
+But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which
+imagination may display itself--as an active power or as a passive
+quality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receives
+from nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latter
+reproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration by
+conventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by the
+conscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself with
+expression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we call
+art, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in a
+vivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet was
+conscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have not
+communicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have come
+down to us to which every generation adds some new significance out of
+its own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for the
+understanding, and, passing into the common currency of speech, become
+the property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, which
+is the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is the
+property of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always here
+a certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrases
+and images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditions
+remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy
+combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and
+natural relation with the world about him, however little or however
+much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious
+and incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomes
+with the advance of every generation in literary culture and social
+refinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never produced
+among cultivated people. Like the mayflower, they love the woods, and
+will not be naturalized in the garden. Now, the advantage of that
+primitive kind of poetry of which I was just speaking is that it finds
+its imaginative components ready made to its hand. But an illustration
+is worth more than any amount of discourse. Let me read you a few
+passages from a poem which grew up under the true conditions of natural
+and primitive literature--remoteness, primitiveness of manners, and
+dependence on native traditions. I mean the epic of Finland--Kalevala.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This translation is Mr. Lowell's, and, so far as I know,
+has not been printed.--C.E. NORTON.]
+
+  I am driven by my longing,
+  Of my thought I hear the summons
+  That to singing I betake me,
+  That I give myself to speaking,
+  That our race's lay I utter,
+  Song for ages handed downward.
+  Words upon my lips are melting,
+  And the eager tones escaping
+  Will my very tongue outhasten,
+  Will my teeth, despite me, open.
+
+  Golden friend, beloved brother,
+  Dear one that grew up beside me,
+  Join thee with me now in singing,
+  Join thee with me now in speaking,
+  Since we here have come together,
+  Journeying by divers pathways;
+  Seldom do we come together,
+  One comes seldom to the other,
+  In the barren fields far-lying,
+  On the hard breast of the Northland.
+
+  Hand in hand together clasping,
+  Finger fast with finger clasping,
+  Gladly we our song will utter,
+  Of our lays will give the choicest--
+  So that friends may understand it.
+  And the kindly ones may hear it.
+  In their youth which now is waxing,
+  Climbing upward into manhood:
+  These our words of old tradition,
+  These our lays that we have borrowed
+  From the belt of Wainamoinen,
+  From the forge of Ilmarinen,
+  From the sword of Kaukomeli,
+  From the bow of Jonkahainen,
+  From the borders of the ice-fields,
+  From the plains of Kalevala.
+
+  These my father sang before me,
+  As the axe's helve he fashioned;
+  These were taught me by my mother,
+  As she sat and twirled her spindle,
+  While I on the floor was lying,
+  At her feet, a child was rolling;
+  Never songs of Sampo failed her.
+  Magic songs of Lonhi never;
+  Sampo in her song grew aged,
+  Lonhi with her magic vanished,
+  In her singing died Wipunen,
+  As I played, died Lunminkainen.
+  Other words there are a many,
+  Magic words that I have taught me,
+  Which I picked up from the pathway,
+  Which I gathered from the forest,
+  Which I snapped from wayside bushes,
+  Which I gleaned from slender grass-blades,
+  Which I found upon the foot-bridge.
+  When I wandered as a herd-boy.
+  As a child into the pastures,
+  To the meadows rich in honey,
+  To the sun-begoldened hilltops,
+  Following the black Maurikki
+  By the side of brindled Kimmo.
+
+  Lays the winter gave me also,
+  Song was given me by the rain-storm,
+  Other lays the wind-gusts blew me,
+  And the waves of ocean brought them;
+  Words I borrowed of the song-birds,
+  And wise sayings from the tree-tops.
+
+  Then into a skein I wound them,
+  Bound them fast into a bundle,
+  Laid upon my ledge the burthen,
+  Bore them with me to my dwelling,
+  On the garret beams I stored them,
+  In the great chest bound with copper.
+
+  Long time in the cold they lay there,
+  Under lock and key a long time;
+  From the cold shall I forth bring them?
+  Bring my lays from out the frost there
+  'Neath this roof so wide-renowned?
+  Here my song-chest shall I open,
+  Chest with runic lays o'errunning?
+  Shall I here untie my bundle,
+  And begin my skein unwinding?
+       *       *       *       *       *
+  Now my lips at last must close them
+  And my tongue at last be fettered;
+  I must leave my lay unfinished,
+  And must cease from cheerful singing;
+  Even the horses must repose them
+  When all day they have been running;
+  Even the iron's self grows weary
+  Mowing down the summer grasses;
+  Even the water sinks to quiet
+  From its rushing in the river;
+  Even the fire seeks rest in ashes
+  That all night hath roared and crackled;
+  Wherefore should not music also,
+  Song itself, at last grow weary
+  After the long eve's contentment
+  And the fading of the twilight?
+  I have also heard say often,
+  Heard it many times repeated,
+  That the cataract swift-rushing
+  Not in one gush spends its waters,
+  And in like sort cunning singers
+  Do not spend their utmost secret,
+  Yea, to end betimes is better
+  Than to break the thread abruptly.
+
+  Ending, then, as I began them,
+  Closing thus and thus completing,
+  I fold up my pack of ballads,
+  Roll them closely in a bundle,
+  Lay them safely in the storeroom,
+  In the strong bone-castle's chamber,
+  That they never thence be stolen,
+  Never in all time be lost thence,
+  Though the castle's wall be broken,
+  Though the bones be rent asunder,
+  Though the teeth may be pried open,
+  And the tongue be set in motion.
+
+  How, then, were it sang I always
+  Till my songs grew poor and poorer,
+  Till the dells alone would hear me,
+  Only the deaf fir-trees listen?
+  Not in life is she, my mother,
+  She no longer is aboveground;
+  She, the golden, cannot hear me,
+  'T is the fir-trees now that hear me,
+  'T is the pine-tops understand me,
+  And the birch-crowns full of goodness,
+  And the ash-trees now that love me!
+  Small and weak my mother left me,
+  Like a lark upon the cliff-top,
+  Like a young thrush 'mid the flintstones
+  In the guardianship of strangers,
+  In the keeping of the stepdame.
+  She would drive the little orphan.
+  Drive the child with none to love him,
+  To the cold side of the chimney,
+  To the north side of the cottage.
+  Where the wind that felt no pity,
+  Bit the boy with none to shield him.
+  Larklike, then, I forth betook me,
+  Like a little bird to wander.
+  Silent, o'er the country straying
+  Yon and hither, full of sadness.
+  With the winds I made acquaintance
+  Felt the will of every tempest.
+  Learned of bitter frost to shiver,
+  Learned too well to weep of winter.
+
+  Yet there be full many people
+  Who with evil voice assail me,
+  And with tongue of poison sting me,
+  Saying that my lips are skilless,
+  That the ways of song I know not,
+  Nor the ballad's pleasant turnings.
+  Ah, you should not, kindly people,
+  Therein seek a cause to blame me,
+  That, a child, I sang too often,
+  That, unfledged, I twittered only.
+  I have never had a teacher,
+  Never heard the speech of great men,
+  Never learned a word unhomely,
+  Nor fine phrases of the stranger.
+  Others to the school were going,
+  I alone at home must keep me,
+  Could not leave my mother's elbow,
+  In the wide world had her only;
+  In the house had I my schooling,
+  From the rafters of the chamber.
+  From the spindle of my mother,
+  From the axehelve of my father,
+  In the early days of childhood;
+  But for this it does not matter,
+  I have shown the way to singers,
+  Shown the way, and blazed the tree-bark,
+  Snapped the twigs, and marked the footpath;
+  Here shall be the way in future,
+  Here the track at last be opened
+  For the singers better-gifted,
+  For the songs more rich than mine are,
+  Of the youth that now are waxing,
+  In the good time that is coming!
+
+Like Virgil's husbandman, our minstrel did not know how well off he was
+to have been without schooling. This, I think, every one feels at once
+to be poetry that sings itself. It makes its own tune, and the heart
+beats in time to its measure. By and by poets will begin to say, like
+Goethe, "I sing as the bird sings"; but this poet sings in that fashion
+without thinking of it or knowing it. And it is the very music of his
+race and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos.
+Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners to
+the old national lays grow fewer every day. Before long the Fins will be
+writing songs in the manner of Heine, and dramas in imitation of
+"Faust." Doubtless the material of original poetry lies in all of us,
+but in proportion as the mind is conventionalized by literature, it is
+apt to look about it for models, instead of looking inward for that
+native force which makes models, but does not follow them. This rose of
+originality which we long for, this bloom of imagination whose perfume
+enchants us--we can seldom find it when it is near us, when it is part
+of our daily lives.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
+
+
+
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales_. By Henry James, Jr.
+Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co.
+_Transatlantic Sketches_. By the same author.]
+
+Whoever takes an interest, whether of mere curiosity or of critical
+foreboding, in the product and tendency of our younger literature, must
+have had his attention awakened and detained by the writings of Mr.
+James. Whatever else they may be, they are not common, and have that air
+of good breeding which is the token of whatever is properly called
+literature. They are not the overflow of a shallow talent for
+improvisation too full of self to be contained, but show everywhere the
+marks of intelligent purpose and of the graceful ease that comes only of
+conscientious training. Undoubtedly there was a large capital of native
+endowment to start from--a mind of singular subtlety and refinement; a
+faculty of rapid observation, yet patient of rectifying afterthought;
+senses daintily alive to every aesthetic suggestion; and a frank
+enthusiasm, kept within due bounds by the double-consciousness of humor.
+But it is plain that Mr. James is fortunate enough to possess, or to be
+possessed by, that finer sixth sense which we call the artistic, and
+which controls, corrects, and discontents. His felicities, therefore,
+are not due to a lucky turn of the dice, but to forethought and
+afterthought. Accordingly, he is capable of progress, and gives renewed
+evidence of it from time to time, while too many of our authors show
+premature marks of arrested development. They strike a happy vein of
+starting, perhaps, and keep on grubbing at it, with the rude helps of
+primitive mining, seemingly unaware that it is daily growing more and
+more slender. Even should it wholly vanish, they persist in the vain
+hope of recovering it further on, as if in literature two successes of
+precisely the same kind were possible Nay, most of them have hit upon no
+vein at all, but picked up a nugget rather, and persevere in raking the
+surface of things, if haply they may chance upon another. The moral of
+one of Hawthorne's stories is that there is no element of treasure-trove
+in success, but that true luck lies in the deep and assiduous
+cultivation of our own plot of ground, be it larger or smaller. For
+indeed the only estate of man that savors of the realty is in his mind.
+Mr. James seems to have arrived early at an understanding of this, and
+to have profited by the best modern appliances of self-culture. In
+conception and expression is he essentially an artist and not an
+irresponsible _trouvere_. If he allow himself an occasional
+carelessness, it is not from incaution, but because he knows perfectly
+well what he is about. He is quite at home in the usages of the best
+literary society. In his writing there is none of that hit-or-miss
+playing at snapdragon with language, of that clownish bearing-on in what
+should be the light strokes, as if mere emphasis were meaning, and
+naturally none of the slovenliness that offends a trained judgment in
+the work of so many of our writers later, unmistakably clever as they
+are. In short, he has _tone_, the last result and surest evidence of an
+intellect reclaimed from the rudeness of nature, for it means
+self-restraint. The story of Handel's composing always in full dress
+conveys at least the useful lesson of a gentlemanlike deference for the
+art a man professes and for the public whose attention he claims. Mr.
+James, as we see in his sketches of travel, is not averse to the
+lounging ease of a shooting-jacket, but he respects the usages of
+convention, and at the canonical hours is sure to be found in the
+required toilet. He does not expect the company to pardon his own
+indolence as one of the necessary appendages of originality. Always
+considerate himself, his readers soon find reason to treat him with
+consideration. For they soon come to see that literature may be light
+and at the same time thoughtful; that lightness, indeed, results much
+more surely from serious study than from the neglect of it.
+
+We have said that Mr. James was emphatically a man of culture, and we
+are old-fashioned enough to look upon him with the more interest as a
+specimen of exclusively _modern_ culture. Of any classical training we
+have failed to detect the traces in him. His allusions, his citations,
+are in the strictest sense contemporary, and indicate, if we may trust
+our divination, a preference for French models, Balzac, De Musset,
+Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Merimee, Sainte-Beuve, especially the three
+latter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, their
+clever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by direct
+bluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is an
+admirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable by
+example. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to be
+called our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the French
+small-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows the
+graceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a man
+distinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of letting
+us feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusively
+aware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of his
+character by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be made
+always in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes and
+prejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proof
+of indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any fault
+with Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, it
+would be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like
+_bouder, se reconnait, banal_, and the like), where our English, without
+being driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite as
+good and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow as
+near surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who so
+generally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us a
+disagreeable alien like _abandon_ (used as a noun), as if it could show
+an honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster.
+Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance that
+escapes our obtuser sense, a sweetness, it may be, of early association,
+for he tells us somewhere that in his boyhood he was put to school in
+Geneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into the
+rusticism that "remembers of" a thing.
+
+But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligent
+study of French models, it is plain that a much larger share of Mr.
+James's education has been acquired by travel and through the eyes of a
+thoughtful observer of men and things. He has seen more cities and
+manners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and if
+with less gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of his
+artistic apprehensiveness and scope that is of far greater value to him.
+We do not mean to imply that Mr. James lacks what is called knowledge of
+the world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in
+him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination
+ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity.
+He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in
+a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening
+the ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line he
+has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character
+and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of
+society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and
+art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr.
+James does not see things with his eyes alone. His vision is always
+modified by his imaginative temperament. He is the last man we should
+consult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow of
+sensitive impression, and are positively better than the actual
+pilgrimage. We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, but
+hardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. _Et ego in
+Arcadia_, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not the
+name we found in our guide-book. It is always _Dichtung und Wahrheit_
+(Goethe knew very well what he was about when he gave precedence to the
+giddier sister)--it is always fact seen through imagination and
+transfigured by it. A single example will best show what we mean. "It is
+partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened
+that the aqueducts are so impressive. _They seem the very source of the
+solitude in which they stand_; they look like architectural spectres,
+and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede
+along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out
+of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's
+pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance
+crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice,"
+or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it
+stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose.
+But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased. Mr. James tempts us
+into many byways of serious and fruitful thought. Especially valuable
+and helpful have we found his _obiter dicta_ on the arts of painting,
+sculpture, and architecture; for example, when he says of the Tuscan
+palaces that "in their large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty of
+effect, [they] reproduce more than other modern styles the simple
+nobleness of Greek architecture." And we would note also what he says of
+the Albani Antinoues. It must be a nimble wit that can keep pace with Mr.
+James's logic in his aesthetic criticism. It is apt to spring airily
+over the middle term to the conclusion, leaving something in the
+likeness of a ditch across the path of our slower intelligences, which
+look about them and think twice before taking the leap. Courage! there
+are always fresh woods and pastures new on the other side. A curious
+reflection has more than once flashed upon our minds as we lingered with
+Mr. James over his complex and refined sensations: we mean the very
+striking contrast between the ancient and modern traveller. The former
+saw with his bodily eyes, and reported accordingly, catering for the
+curiosity of homely wits as to the outsides and appearances of things.
+Even Montaigne, habitually introspective as he was, sticks to the old
+method in his travels. The modern traveller, on the other hand,
+superseded by the guide-book, travels in himself, and records for us the
+scenery of his own mind as it is affected by change of sky and the
+various weather of temperament.
+
+Mr. James, in his sketches, frankly acknowledges his preference of the
+Old World. Life--which here seems all drab to him, without due lights
+and shades of social contrast, without that indefinable suggestion of
+immemorial antiquity which has so large a share in picturesque
+impression--is there a dome of many-colored glass irradiating both
+senses and imagination. We shall not blame him too gravely for this, as
+if an American had not as good a right as any ancient of them all to
+say, _Ubi libertas, ibi patria_. It is no real paradox to affirm that a
+man's love of his country may often be gauged by his disgust at it. But
+we think it might fairly be argued against him that the very absence of
+that distracting complexity of associations might help to produce that
+solitude which is the main feeder of imagination. Certainly, Hawthorne,
+with whom no modern European can be matched for the subtlety and power
+of this marvellous quality, is a strong case on the American side of the
+question.
+
+Mr. James's tales, if without any obvious moral, are sure to have a
+clearly defined artistic purpose. They are careful studies of character
+thrown into dramatic action, and the undercurrent of motive is, as it
+should be, not in the circumstances but in the characters themselves. It
+is by delicate touches and hints that his effects are produced. The
+reader is called upon to do his share, and will find his reward in it,
+for Mr. James, as we cannot too often insist, is first and always an
+artist. Nowhere does he show his fine instinct more to the purpose than
+in leaving the tragic element of tales (dealing as they do with
+contemporary life, and that mainly in the drawing-room) to take care of
+itself, and in confining the outward expression of passion within the
+limits of a decorous amenity. Those who must have their intellectual
+gullets tingled with the fiery draught of coarse sensation must go
+elsewhere for their dram; but whoever is capable of the aroma of the
+more delicate vintages will find it here. In the volume before us
+"Madame de Mauves" will illustrate what we mean. There is no space for
+detailed analysis, even if that were ever adequate to give the true
+impression of stories so carefully worked out and depending so much for
+their effect on a gradual cumulation of particulars each in itself
+unemphatic. We have said that Mr. James shows promise as well as
+accomplishment, gaining always in mastery of his material. It is but a
+natural inference from this that his "Roderick Hudson" is the fullest
+and most finished proof of his power as a story-teller. Indeed, we may
+say frankly that it pleases us the more because the characters are drawn
+with a bolder hand and in more determined outline, for if Mr. James need
+any friendly caution, it is against over-delicacy of handling.
+
+
+
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
+
+
+The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon English
+soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was
+first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre
+remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel
+Harvey,--a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,--whose chief claim to
+remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was
+the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure
+Letters" (1592) he says, "If I never deserve anye better remembraunce,
+let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English Hexameter,
+whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and excellent Sir
+Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and elsewhere."
+This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an afterthought
+with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him and Spenser in
+1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a collaborator with
+Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of Surrey is said to have
+been the first who wrote thus in English. The most successful person,
+however, was William Webb, who translated two of Virgil's Eclogues with
+a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in his "Schoolmaster" (1570),
+had already suggested the adoption of the ancient hexameter by English
+poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham in his "Art of Poesie")
+thought the number of monosyllabic words in English an insuperable
+objection to verses in which there was a large proportion of dactyls,
+and recommended, therefore, that a trial should be made with iambics.
+Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have tried his hand at the new
+kind of verse. He says:
+
+    I like your late Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I
+    also enure my penne sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or
+    chiefest hardnesse, whych seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime
+    gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that
+    it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, as in
+    _Carpenter_; the middle sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when
+    it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that
+    draweth one legge after hir and _Heaven_, being used shorte as one
+    sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a _Diastole_, is
+    like a lame dogge that holdes up one legge. But it is to be wonne
+    with Custome, and rough words must be subdued with Vse. For why a
+    God's name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of our
+    owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the Sounde, reserving the
+    Quantitie to the Verse?
+
+The amiable Edmonde seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this
+sentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue
+English to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for
+example, make the vowel in "debt" long, in the teeth of use and wont.
+
+We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the ear
+of Master Gabriel Harvey,--an ear that must have been long by position,
+in virtue of its place on his head.
+
+  Not the like _Discourser_, for Tongue and head to be found out;
+  Not the like _resolute Man_, for great and serious affayres;
+  Not the like _Lynx_, to spie out secretes and priuities of States;
+  _Eyed_ like to _Argus_, _Earde_ like to _Midas_, _Nosd_ like to _Naso_,
+  Winged like to _Mercury_, fittst of a Thousand for to be employed.
+
+And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the
+"Aeneid."
+
+  Laocoon storming from Princelie Castel is hastning,
+  And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine
+  Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie?
+  Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,
+  Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlisses
+  So soone forgotten? My life for an haulfpennie (Trojans), etc.
+
+Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:--
+
+  Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,
+  And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed.
+
+Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff, "that
+drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill,
+like the waye betwixt Stamford and Beechfeeld, and goes like a horse
+plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to the
+saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It will be noticed that his
+prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England at
+that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so far
+useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's "Defence of Ryme" (1603),
+one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also, in his
+"Satires," condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for their
+grave beauty and strength.
+
+The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich
+Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to
+the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His
+"Odyssey" (1783), his "Iliad" (1791), and his "Luise" (1795), were
+confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann and
+Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modern
+hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other classic metres
+into England, and we should be grateful to him, at least, for having
+given the model for Canning's "Knife-grinder." The exotic, however,
+again refused to take root, and for many years after we have no example
+of English hexameters. It was universally conceded that the temper of
+our language was unfriendly to them.
+
+It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only
+tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of the
+Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but "Evangeline"
+(1847), though encumbered with too many descriptive irrelevancies, was
+so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made converts by
+thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than this, it made
+Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary English poets.
+Clough's "Bothie"--poem whose singular merit has hitherto failed of the
+wide appreciation it deserves--followed not long after; and Kingsley's
+"Andromeda" is yet damp from the press.
+
+While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by "Evangeline" is a
+striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have
+never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a
+dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform
+for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow
+into prose,--as in the verse
+
+  Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,
+
+and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his style
+in other metres, as where he says
+
+  Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_,
+
+using a word as essentially unpoetic as "surtout or pea-jacket." We
+think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms
+the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented
+sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of
+phrase.
+
+But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as
+frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles
+Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the
+narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with a
+firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness, and
+simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest
+artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the
+picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is with
+a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and characters
+of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of Priscilla
+spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We feel charmed
+to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the little old
+familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are astonished,
+like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius could be
+contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot associate
+sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins may be
+consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot
+Desmoulins--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.
+
+Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary
+popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait
+for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any
+general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to
+receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in
+itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and
+always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly
+popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the
+great poets--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and
+naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which
+brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed
+expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that is
+a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one who
+is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr.
+Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics
+are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done,
+because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault is
+a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his readers,
+which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be drawn from
+any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two stanzas could
+be cut off from "The Two Angels," a poem which, without them, is as
+perfect as anything in the language.
+
+Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain jewels
+in Maga's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should, perhaps,
+have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of our most
+precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some very
+unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it seemed to
+us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original poet. The
+writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more complex or
+more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite with the
+few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and not
+personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the development
+of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the gratitude and
+love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace
+and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr.
+Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets,
+deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic
+narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In
+our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red
+pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to
+overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if,
+since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative
+than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Apart from its intrinsic
+beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful
+consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict
+of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no
+fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that
+which charms now and charms always,--true power and originality, without
+grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic type
+of strength.
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
+
+
+It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular of
+American, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of his
+nature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of his
+images, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justify
+the public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation will
+settle into fame. That he has not _this_ of Tennyson, nor _that_ of
+Browning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other things
+that are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in his
+verse that make day for a moment in this dim cavern of consciousness
+where we grope; but there is an equable sunshine that touches the
+landscape of life with a new charm, and lures us out into healthier air.
+If he fall short of the highest reaches of imagination, he is none the
+less a master within his own sphere--all the more so, indeed, that he is
+conscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving to
+be other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as in
+these latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poets
+like that of Irving among our prose-writers. Make whatever deductions
+and qualifications, and they still keep their place in the hearts and
+minds of men. In point of time he is our Chaucer--the first who imported
+a finer foreign culture into our poetry.
+
+His present volume shows a greater ripeness than any of its
+predecessors. We find a mellowness of early autumn in it. There is the
+old sweetness native to the man, with greater variety of character and
+experience. The personages are all drawn from the life, and sketched
+with the light firmness of a practised art. They have no more
+individuality than is necessary to the purpose of the poem, which
+consists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellers
+gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its
+sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a
+natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of
+his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the
+same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities
+of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes,
+and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease of
+style which is, of all things, the hardest to attain. The verse flows
+clear and sweet as honey, and with a faint fragrance that tells, but not
+too plainly, of flowers that grew in many fields. We are made to feel
+that, however tedious the processes of culture may be, the ripe result
+in facile power and scope of fancy is purely delightful. We confess that
+we are so heartily weary of those cataclysms of passion and sentiment
+with which literature has been convulsed of late,--as if the main object
+were, not to move the reader, but to shake the house about his
+ears,--that the homelike quiet and beauty of such poems as these is like
+an escape from noise to nature.
+
+As regards the structure of the work looked at as a whole, it strikes us
+as a decided fault, that the Saga of King Olaf is so disproportionately
+long, especially as many of the pieces which compose it are by no means
+so well done as the more strictly original ones. We have no quarrel with
+the foreign nature of the subject as such,--for any good matter is
+American enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking
+that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for
+freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself
+felt. Put into English, the Saga seems _too_ Norse; and there is often a
+hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for
+literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but
+hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the
+ethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent"
+is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," which
+he learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland,
+where he played as a boy. We are willing, however, to pardon the parts
+which we find somewhat ineffectual, in favor of the "Nun of Nidaros,"
+which concludes, and in its gracious piety more than redeems, them all.
+
+
+
+
+WHITTIER
+
+IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
+
+
+It is a curious illustration of the attraction of opposites, that, among
+our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in
+the Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a
+drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to
+the tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of
+our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burns
+all the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is not
+as a singular antithesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity of
+his is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as illustrating
+how deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon the
+commonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sect
+they chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of the
+Puritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englander
+is too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens to
+reverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of a
+sincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poetic
+sentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitiful
+snobbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of the
+Puritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest men
+brought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of the
+democracy which was to develop itself from their institutions. They
+brought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly nature
+of the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate and
+disperse itself. The same conditions have produced the same results also
+at the South, and nothing but slavery blocks the way to a perfect
+sympathy between the two sections.
+
+Mr. Whittier is essentially a lyric poet, and the fervor of his
+temperament gives his pieces of that kind a remarkable force and
+effectiveness. Twenty years ago many of his poems were in the nature of
+_conciones ad populum_, vigorous stump-speeches in verse, appealing as
+much to the blood as the brain, and none the less convincing for that.
+By regular gradations ever since his tone has been softening and his
+range widening. As a poet he stands somewhere between Burns and Cowper,
+akin to the former in patriotic glow, and to the latter in intensity of
+religious anxiety verging sometimes on morbidness. His humanity, if it
+lack the humorous breadth of the one, has all the tenderness of the
+other. In love of outward nature he yields to neither. His delight in it
+is not a new sentiment or a literary tradition, but the genuine passion
+of a man born and bred in the country, who has not merely a visiting
+acquaintance with the landscape, but stands on terms of lifelong
+friendship with hill, stream, rock, and tree. In his descriptions he
+often catches the _expression_ of rural scenery, a very different thing
+from the mere _looks_, with the trained eye of familiar intimacy. A
+somewhat shy and hermitical being we take him to be, and more a student
+of his own heart than of men. His characters, where he introduces such,
+are commonly abstractions, with little of the flesh and blood of real
+life in them, and this from want of experience rather than of sympathy;
+for many of his poems show him capable of friendship almost womanly in
+its purity and warmth. One quality which we especially value in him is
+the intense home-feeling which, without any conscious aim at being
+American, gives his poetry a flavor of the soil surprisingly refreshing.
+Without being narrowly provincial, he is the most indigenous of our
+poets. In these times, especially, his uncalculating love of country has
+a profound pathos in it. He does not flare the flag in our faces, but
+one feels the heart of a lover throbbing in his anxious verse.
+
+Mr. Whittier, if the most fervid of our poets, is sometimes hurried away
+by this very quality, in itself an excellence, into being the most
+careless. He draws off his verse while the fermentation is yet going on,
+and before it has had time to compose itself and clarify into the ripe
+wine of expression. His rhymes are often faulty beyond the most
+provincial license even of Burns himself. Vigor without elegance will
+never achieve permanent success in poetry. We think, also, that he has
+too often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path to
+which his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, into
+metaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real life
+of his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a _smudge_, and gives
+evidence of itself in smoke instead of flame. Where he follows his truer
+instincts, he is often admirable in the highest sense, and never without
+the interest of natural thought and feeling naturally expressed.
+
+
+
+
+HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
+
+
+The natural product of a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man
+and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard
+Barton. _His_ verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the
+sect; for from title-page to colophon there was no sin either in the way
+of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse,
+that brewed a cup, neither cheering unduly nor inebriating, out of the
+emptyings of Wordsworth's teapot. How that little busy B. improved each
+shining hour, how neatly he laid his wax, it gives us a cold shiver to
+think of--_ancora ci raccappriccia!_ Against a copy of verses signed
+"B.B.," as we remember them in the hardy Annuals that went to seed so
+many years ago, we should warn our incautious offspring as an
+experienced duck might her brood against a charge of B.B. shot. It
+behooves men to be careful; for one may chance to suffer lifelong from
+these intrusions of cold lead in early life, as duellists sometimes
+carry about all their days a bullet from which no surgery can relieve
+them. Memory avenges our abuses of her, and, as an awful example, we
+mention the fact that we have never been able to forget certain stanzas
+of another B.B., who, under the title of "Boston Bard," whilom obtained
+from newspaper columns that concession which gods and men would
+unanimously have denied him.
+
+George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on
+established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him
+crazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else it
+might be, was surely not of that kind "that never was on land or sea."
+There has been much that was poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in
+the men themselves. Poetry demands a richer and more various culture,
+and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias
+Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth is
+something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of
+the same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as
+they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate
+for the waste of human life as the Journal of an average Quaker.
+Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing
+springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness.
+
+Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, who
+can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she
+made a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choice
+between Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on the
+whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. He
+sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery. He has not forgiven the
+Puritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admires
+them for all that, calls on his countrymen as
+
+  Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
+  Answering Charles's royal mandate with a stern "Thus saith the Lord,"
+
+and at heart, we suspect, has more sympathy with Miles Standish than
+with Mary Dyer. Indeed,
+
+  Sons of men who sat in meeting with their broadbrims o'er their brow,
+  Answering Charles's royal mandate with a _thee_ instead of _thou_,
+
+would hardly do. Whatever Mr. Whittier may lack, he has the prime merit
+that he smacks of the soil. It is a New England heart he buttons his
+straight-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain now
+and then. Even the native idiom crops out here and there in his verses.
+He makes _abroad_ rhyme with _God_, _law_ with _war_, _us_ with _curse_,
+_scorner_ with _honor_, _been_ with _men_, _beard_ with _shared_. For
+the last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest
+we can make no terms whatever,--they must march out with no honors of
+war. The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give
+a flavor of _essence-pennyr'y'l_ to the very Beatitudes. It differs from
+Lowland Scotch as a _patois_ from a dialect.
+
+But criticism is not a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has other
+and better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in the
+heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soil
+might have made him a Burns or a Beranger for us. New England is dry and
+hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the
+magnolia grows after a fashion. It is all very nice to say to our poets,
+"You have sky and wood and waterfall and men and women--in short, the
+entire outfit of Shakespeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere"; and
+when the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir of
+approval. But it is all _bosh_, nevertheless. Nature is _not_ the same
+here, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled his
+being with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped in
+history, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere of
+thought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition. Nature without an
+ideal background is nothing. We may claim whatever merits we like (and
+our orators are not too bashful), we may be as free and enlightened as
+we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We may
+be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to
+the political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has little
+of that marvellous bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finer
+issues than a gregarious activity in hoarding. The Puritans left us a
+fine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but they
+disinherited us of the past. Not a single stage-property of poetry did
+they bring with them but the good old Devil, with his graminivorous
+attributes, and even he could not stand the climate. Neither horn nor
+hoof nor tail of him has been seen for a century. He is as dead as the
+goat-footed Pan, whom he succeeded, and we tenderly regret him.
+
+Mr. Whittier himself complains somewhere of
+
+  The rigor of our frozen sky,
+
+and he seems to have been thinking of our clear, thin, intellectual
+atmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artists
+complain that it rounds no edges. We have sometimes thought that his
+verses suffered from a New England taint in a too great tendency to
+metaphysics and morals, which may be the bases on which poetry rests,
+but should not be carried too high above-ground. Without this, however,
+he would not have been the typical New England poet that he is. In the
+present volume there is little of it. It is more purely objective than
+any of its forerunners, and is full of the most charming rural pictures
+and glimpses, in which every sight and sound, every flower, bird, and
+tree, is neighborly and homely. He makes us see
+
+        the old swallow-haunted barns,
+  Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
+  Through which the moted sunlight streams.
+  And winds blow freshly in to shake
+  The red plumes of the roosted cocks
+  And the loose hay-mow's scented locks,--
+
+                the cattle-yard
+  With the white horns tossing above the wall,
+
+the spring-blossoms that drooped over the river,
+
+  Lighting up the swarming shad,--
+
+and
+
+        the bulged nets sweeping shoreward
+  With their silver-sided haul.
+
+Every picture is full of color, and shows that true eye for Nature which
+sees only what it ought, and that artistic memory which brings home
+compositions and not catalogues. There is hardly a hill, rock, stream,
+or sea-fronting headland in the neighborhood of his home that he has not
+fondly remembered. Sometimes, we think, there is too much description,
+the besetting sin of modern verse, which has substituted what should be
+called wordy-painting for the old art of painting in a single word. The
+essential character of Mr. Whittier's poetry is lyrical, and the rush of
+the lyric, like that of a brook, allows few pictures. Now and then there
+may be an eddy where the feeling lingers and reflects a bit of scenery,
+but for the most part it can only catch gleams of color that mingle with
+the prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it. This volume
+contains some of the best of Mr. Whittier's productions in this kind.
+"Skipper Ireson's Ride" we hold to be by long odds the best of modern
+ballads. There are others nearly as good in their way, and all, with a
+single exception, embodying native legends. In "Telling the Bees," Mr.
+Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of exquisite
+grace and feeling. "The Garrison of Cape Ann" would have been a fine
+poem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at the
+end of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point of a sword. It is
+pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton
+Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad
+English and worse Latin. With all his faults, that conceited old pedant
+contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on
+this side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the trouble
+to give us a tolerably correct edition of it. Absurdity is common
+enough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightful
+gift.
+
+This last volume has given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier's
+powers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his
+earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third
+stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said
+Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer
+and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The
+half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and,
+we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia." The
+years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richer
+quality in these verses where the ferment is over and the _rile_ has
+quietly settled. We have had no more purely American poet than Mr.
+Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous
+expression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been
+so true to the present.
+
+
+
+
+SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
+
+
+At the close of his poem Mr. Whittier utters a hope that it may recall
+some pleasant country memories to the overworked slaves of our great
+cities, and that he may deserve those thanks which are all the more
+grateful that they are rather divined by the receiver than directly
+expressed by the giver. The reviewer cannot aspire to all the merit of
+this confidential privacy and pleasing shyness of gratitude, but he may
+fairly lay claim to a part of it, inasmuch as, though obliged to speak
+his thanks publicly, he need not do it to the author's face. We are
+again indebted to Mr. Whittier, as we have been so often before, for a
+very real and a very refined pleasure. The little volume before us has
+all his most characteristic merits. It is true to Nature and in local
+coloring, pure in sentiment, quietly deep in feeling, and full of those
+simple touches which show the poetic eye and the trained hand. Here is a
+New England interior glorified with something of that inward light which
+is apt to be rather warmer in the poet than the Quaker, but which,
+blending the qualities of both in Mr. Whittier, produces that kind of
+spiritual picturesqueness which gives so peculiar a charm to his verse.
+There is in this poem a warmth of affectionate memory and religious
+faith as touching as it is uncommon, and which would be altogether
+delightful if it did not remind us that the poet was growing old. Not
+that there is any other mark of senescence than the ripened sweetness of
+a life both publicly and privately well spent. There is fire enough, but
+it glows more equably and shines on sweeter scenes than in the poet's
+earlier verse. It is as if a brand from the camp-fire had kindled these
+logs on the old homestead's hearth, whose flickering benediction touches
+tremulously those dear heads of long ago that are now transfigured with
+a holier light. The father, the mother, the uncle, the schoolmaster, the
+uncanny guest, are all painted in warm and natural colors, with perfect
+truth of detail and yet with all the tenderness of memory. Of the family
+group the poet is the last on earth, and there is something deeply
+touching in the pathetic sincerity of the affection which has outlived
+them all, looking back to before the parting, and forward to the assured
+reunion.
+
+But aside from its poetic and personal interest, and the pleasure it
+must give to every one who loves pictures from the life, "Snow-Bound"
+has something of historical interest. It describes scenes and manners
+which the rapid changes of our national habits will soon have made as
+remote from us as if they were foreign or ancient. Already, alas! even
+in farmhouses, backlog and forestick are obsolescent words, and
+close-mouthed stoves chill the spirit while they bake the flesh with
+their grim and undemonstrative hospitality. Already are the railroads
+displacing the companionable cheer of crackling walnut with the dogged
+self-complacency and sullen virtue of anthracite. Even where wood
+survives, he is too often shut in the dreary madhouse cell of an
+airtight, round which one can no more fancy a social mug of flip
+circling than round a coffin. Let us be thankful that we can sit in Mr.
+Whittier's chimney-corner and believe that the blaze he has kindled for
+us shall still warm and cheer, when a wood fire is as faint a tradition
+in New as in Old England.
+
+We have before had occasion to protest against Mr. Whittier's
+carelessness in accents and rhymes, as in pronouncing "ly'ceum," and
+joining in unhallowed matrimony such sounds as _awn_ and _orn_, _ents_
+and _ence_. We would not have the Muse emulate the unidiomatic
+preciseness of a normal school-mistress, but we cannot help thinking
+that, if Mr. Whittier writes thus on principle, as we begin to suspect,
+he errs in forgetting that thought so refined as his can be fitly
+matched only with an equal refinement of expression, and loses something
+of its charm when cheated of it. We hope he will, at least, never mount
+Pega'sus, or water him in Heli'con, and that he will leave Mu'seum to
+the more vulgar sphere and obtuser sensibilities of Barnum. Where Nature
+has sent genius, she has a right to expect that it shall be treated with
+a certain elegance of hospitality.
+
+
+
+
+POETRY AND NATIONALITY[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: This essay, to which I have given the above title, forms
+the greater part of a review of poems by John James Piatt. The brief,
+concluding portion of the review is of little value and is omitted here.
+Piatt died several years ago. He was a great friend of William Dean
+Howells, and once published a volume of poems in collaboration with him.
+A.M.]
+
+One of the dreams of our earlier horoscope-mongers was, that a poet
+should come out of the West, fashioned on a scale somewhat proportioned
+to our geographical pretensions. Our rivers, forests, mountains,
+cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in him their antitype
+and voice. Shaggy he was to be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties,
+unhampered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse, half-alligator
+breed. By him at last the epos of the New World was to be fitly sung,
+the great tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for all time. It
+was a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judicious
+prophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its
+terms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dare
+affirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he was
+impossible? And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless.
+
+Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturally
+levy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images and
+illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhere
+outside of the life that lay immediately about him. Life in its large
+sense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, is
+the only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always close
+at hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the
+difference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota is
+almost inappreciable. Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always to
+underlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it. The Iliad
+and the Odyssey paint manners that are only here and there incidentally
+true to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either never
+existed or had long since passed away. Had Dante's scope been narrowed
+to contemporary Italy, the "Divina Commedia" would have been a
+picture-book merely. But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspired
+him was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theories
+as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shakespeare shows us less of
+the England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time.
+The struggle of Goethe's whole life was to emancipate himself from
+Germany, and fill his lungs for once with a more universal air.
+
+Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in these rare fruits, some
+gift of the sun peculiar to the region that ripened them. If we are ever
+to have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality will be of
+this subtile essence, something that shall make him unspeakably nearer
+to us, while it does not provincialize him for the rest of mankind. The
+popular recipe for compounding him would give us, perhaps, the most
+sublimely furnished bore in human annals. The novel aspects of life
+under our novel conditions may give some freshness of color to our
+literature; but democracy itself, which many seem to regard as the
+necessary Lucina of some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract an
+influence to serve for any such purpose. If any American author may be
+looked on as in some sort the result of our social and political ideal,
+it is Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the traditional, in the
+irresponsible freedom of his speculation, and his faith in the absolute
+value of his own individuality, is certainly, to some extent, typical;
+but if ever author was inspired by the past, it is he, and he is as far
+as possible from the shaggy hero of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, who
+have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may
+safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our
+representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the
+credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hope
+for better things.
+
+[Footnote 1: This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is
+mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. The
+Howells essay appeared two years before the above. A.M.]
+
+The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; and
+if a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and the
+gift of the right word,--for it is these, and not sublime spaces, that
+make a poet,--he will be original rather in spite of democracy than in
+consequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite as much to the
+accumulations of the Old World as to the promises of the New. But for a
+long while yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not, perhaps, for
+the birth of such a man, but for his development and culture. At
+present, with the largest reading population in the world, perhaps no
+country ever offered less encouragement to the higher forms of art or
+the more thorough achievements of scholarship. Even were it not so, it
+would be idle to expect us to produce any literature so peculiarly our
+own as was the natural growth of ages less communicative, less open to
+every breath of foreign influence. Literature tends more and more to
+become a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality. Any
+more Cids, or Songs of Roland, or Nibelungens, or Kalewalas are out of
+the question,--nay, anything at all like them; for the necessary
+insulation of race, of country, of religion, is impossible, even were it
+desirable. Journalism, translation, criticism, and facility of
+intercourse tend continually more and more to make the thought and turn
+of expression in cultivated men identical all over the world. Whether we
+like it or not, the costume of mind and body is gradually becoming of
+one cut.
+
+
+
+
+W.D. HOWELLS
+
+VENETIAN LIFE
+
+
+Those of our readers who watch with any interest the favorable omens of
+our literature from time to time, must have had their eyes drawn to
+short poems, remarkable for subtilty of sentiment and delicacy of
+expression, and bearing the hitherto unfamiliar name of Mr. Howells.
+Such verses are not common anywhere; as the work of a young man they are
+very uncommon. Youthful poets commonly begin by trying on various
+manners before they settle upon any single one that is prominently their
+own. But what especially interested us in Mr. Howells was, that his
+writings were from the very first not merely tentative and preliminary,
+but had somewhat of the conscious security of matured _style_. This is
+something which most poets arrive at through much tribulation. It is
+something which has nothing to do with the measure of their intellectual
+powers or of their moral insight, but is the one quality which
+essentially distinguishes the artist from the mere man of genius. Among
+the English poets of the last generation, Keats is the only one who
+early showed unmistakable signs of it, and developed it more and more
+fully until his untimely death. Wordsworth, though in most respects a
+far profounder man, attained it only now and then, indeed only once
+perfectly,--in his "Laodamia." Now, though it be undoubtedly true from
+one point of view that what a man has to say is of more importance than
+how he says it, and that modern criticism especially is more apt to be
+guided by its moral and even political sympathies than by aesthetic
+principles, it remains as true as ever that only those things have been
+said finally which have been said perfectly, and that this finished
+utterance is peculiarly the office of poetry, or of what, for want of
+some word as comprehensive as the German _Dichtung_, we are forced to
+call imaginative literature. Indeed, it may be said that, in whatever
+kind of writing, it is style alone that is able to hold the attention of
+the world long. Let a man be never so rich in thought, if he is clumsy
+in the expression of it, his sinking, like that of an old Spanish
+treasureship, will be hastened by the very weight of his bullion, and
+perhaps, after the lapse of a century, some lucky diver fishes up his
+ingots and makes a fortune out of him.
+
+That Mr. Howells gave unequivocal indications of possessing this fine
+quality interested us in his modest preludings. Marked, as they no doubt
+were, by some uncertainty of aim and indefiniteness of thought, that
+"stinting," as Chaucer calls it, of the nightingale "ere he beginneth
+sing," there was nothing in them of the presumption and extravagance
+which young authors are so apt to mistake for originality and vigor.
+Sentiment predominated over reflection, as was fitting in youth; but
+there was a refinement, an instinctive reserve of phrase, and a felicity
+of epithet, only too rare in modern, and especially in American writing.
+He was evidently a man more eager to make something good than to make a
+sensation,--one of those authors more rare than ever in our day of
+hand-to-mouth cleverness, who has a conscious ideal of excellence, and,
+as we hope, the patience that will at length reach it. We made occasion
+to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase
+our interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the
+rough-and-ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with
+no advantage of college-training, who, passing from the compositor's
+desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of
+the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated. A
+singular fruit, we thought, of our shaggy democracy,--as interesting a
+phenomenon in that regard as it has been our fortune to encounter. Where
+is the rudeness of a new community, the pushing vulgarity of an
+imperfect civilization, the licentious contempt of forms that marks our
+unchartered freedom, and all the other terrible things which have so
+long been the bugaboos of European refinement? Here was a natural
+product, as perfectly natural as the deliberate attempt of "Walt
+Whitman" to answer the demand of native and foreign misconception was
+perfectly artificial. Our institutions do not, then, irretrievably doom
+us to coarseness and to impatience of that restraining precedent which
+alone makes true culture possible and true art attainable. Unless we are
+mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells
+which is a better argument for the American social and political system
+than any empirical theories that can be constructed against it.
+
+We know of no single word which will so fitly characterize Mr. Howells's
+new volume about Venice as "delightful." The artist has studied his
+subject for four years, and at last presents us with a series of
+pictures having all the charm of tone and the minute fidelity to nature
+which were the praise of the Dutch school of painters, but with a higher
+sentiment, a more refined humor, and an airy elegance that recalls the
+better moods of Watteau. We do not remember any Italian studies so
+faithful or the result of such continuous opportunity, unless it be the
+"Roba di Roma" of Mr. Story, and what may be found scattered in the
+works of Henri Beyle. But Mr. Story's volumes recorded only the chance
+observations of a quick and familiar eye in the intervals of a
+profession to which one must be busily devoted who would rise to the
+acknowledged eminence occupied by their author; and Beyle's mind, though
+singularly acute and penetrating, had too much of the hardness of a man
+of the world and of Parisian cynicism to be altogether agreeable. Mr.
+Howells, during four years of that consular leisure which only Venice
+could make tolerable, devoted himself to the minute study of the superb
+prison to which he was doomed, and his book is his "Prigioni." Venice
+has been the university in which he has fairly earned the degree of
+Master. There is, perhaps, no European city, not even Bruges, not even
+Rome herself, which, not yet in ruins, is so wholly of the past, at once
+alive and turned to marble, like the Prince of the Black Islands in the
+story. And what gives it a peculiar fascination is that its antiquity,
+though venerable, is yet modern, and, so to speak, continuous; while
+that of Rome belongs half to a former world and half to this, and is
+broken irretrievably in two. The glory of Venice, too, was the
+achievement of her own genius, not an inheritance; and, great no longer,
+she is more truly than any other city the monument of her own greatness.
+She is something wholly apart, and the silence of her watery streets
+accords perfectly with the spiritual mood which makes us feel as if we
+were passing through a city of dream. Fancy now an imaginative young man
+from Ohio, where the log-hut was but yesterday turned to almost less
+enduring brick and mortar, set down suddenly in the midst of all this
+almost immemorial permanence of grandeur. We cannot think of any one on
+whom the impression would be so strangely deep, or whose eyes would be
+so quickened by the constantly recurring shock of unfamiliar objects.
+Most men are poor observers, because they are cheated into a delusion of
+intimacy with the things so long and so immediately about them; but
+surely we may hope for something like seeing from fresh eyes, and those
+too a poet's, when they open suddenly on a marvel so utterly alien to
+their daily vision and so perdurably novel as Venice. Nor does Mr.
+Howells disappoint our expectation. We have here something like a
+full-length portrait of the Lady of the Lagoons.
+
+We have been struck in this volume, as elsewhere in writings of the same
+author, with the charm of _tone_ that pervades it. It is so constant as
+to bear witness, not only to a real gift, but to the thoughtful
+cultivation of it. Here and there Mr. Howells yields to the temptation
+of _execution_, to which persons specially felicitous in language are
+liable, and pushes his experiments of expression to the verge of being
+unidiomatic, in his desire to squeeze the last drop of significance from
+words; but this is seldom, and generally we receive that unconscious
+pleasure in reading him which comes of naturalness, the last and highest
+triumph of good writing. Mr. Howells, of all men, does not need to be
+told that, as wine of the highest flavor and most delicate _bouquet_ is
+made from juice pressed out by the unaided weight of the grapes, so in
+expression we are in danger of getting something like acridness if we
+crush in with the first sprightly runnings the skins and kernels of
+words in our vain hope to win more than we ought of their color and
+meaning. But, as we have said, this is rather a temptation to which he
+now and then shows himself liable, than a fault for which he can often
+be blamed. If a mind open to all poetic impressions, a sensibility too
+sincere ever to fall into maudlin sentimentality, a style flexible and
+sweet without weakness, and a humor which, like the bed of a stream, is
+the support of deep feeling, and shows waveringly through it in spots of
+full sunshine,--if such qualities can make a truly delightful book, then
+Mr. Howells has made one in the volume before us. And we give him
+warning that much will be expected of one who at his years has already
+shown himself capable of so much.
+
+
+
+
+EDGAR A. POE[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: The following notice of Mr. Poe's life and works was
+written at his own request, and accompanied a portrait of him published
+in _Graham's Magazine_ for February, 1845. It is here [in R.W.
+Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)] given with a few alterations
+and omissions.]
+
+The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or,
+if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into
+many systems, each revolving round its several sun, and often presenting
+to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capital
+city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from which
+life and vigor radiate to the extremities, but resembles more an
+isolated umbilicus, stuck down as near as may be to the centre of the
+land, and seeming rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to
+serve any present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its
+literature almost more distinct than those of the different dialects of
+Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one of her own, of
+which some articulate rumor barely has reached us dwellers by the
+Atlantic.
+
+Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism of
+contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give praise where
+it is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often seduces
+the iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she writes what
+seems rather like an epitaph than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as
+an alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into any man's hat. The
+critic's ink may suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls
+or of sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we
+might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding-place
+of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we usually find
+mixed with it.
+
+Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life of
+imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and
+peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of a
+romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by
+Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed the
+warranty of a large estate to the young poet. Having received a
+classical education in England, he returned home and entered the
+University of Virginia, where, after an extravagant course, followed by
+reformation at the last extremity, he was graduated with the highest
+honors of his class. Then came a boyish attempt to join the fortunes of
+the insurgent Greeks, which ended at St. Petersburg, where he got into
+difficulties through want of a passport, from which he was rescued by
+the American consul, and sent home.[1] He now entered the military
+academy at West Point from which he obtained a dismissal on hearing of
+the birth of a son to his adopted father, by a second marriage, an event
+which cut off his expectations as an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, in
+whose will his name was not mentioned, soon after relieved him of all
+doubt in this regard, and he committed himself at once to authorship for
+a support. Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) a
+small volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, and
+excited high expectations of its author's future distinction in the
+minds of many competent judges.
+
+[Footnote 1: There is little evidence for this story, which some
+biographers have dismissed as a myth created by Poe himself. See
+Woodberry's _Poe_, v. i, p. 337.]
+
+That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet's earliest lispings
+there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare's first poems, though
+brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness, give but a very faint
+promise of the directness, condensation, and overflowing moral of his
+maturer works. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare is hardly a case in point,
+his "Venus and Adonis" having been published, we believe, in his
+twenty-sixth year. Milton's Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye for
+nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint
+of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all
+the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and
+eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow
+namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius
+which he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lost
+more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator
+of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is
+called) the interest of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke
+White's promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey
+but surely with no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a
+traditional piety, which, to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less
+objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment
+of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning
+pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional
+simple, lucky beauty. Burns, having fortunately been rescued by his
+humble station from the contaminating society of the "best models" wrote
+well and naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough to
+have had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from
+which, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from
+the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever
+of that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest,
+most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's
+"Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid
+and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is
+but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early
+poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient
+investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer
+of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
+who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and
+more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest
+specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that
+ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions
+of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope
+of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a
+wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for
+rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional
+combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate
+physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only
+remarkable when it displays an effort of _reason_, and the rudest verses
+in which we can trace some conception of the ends of poetry, are worth
+all the miracles of smooth juvenile versification. A schoolboy, one
+would say, might acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by an
+association with the motion of the play-ground tilt.
+
+Mr. Poe's early productions show that he could see through the verse to
+the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the life
+and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of the
+other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever
+read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of
+purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre.
+Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express
+by the contradictory phrase of _innate experience_. We copy one of the
+shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a
+little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and symmetry of the
+outline are such as few poets ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosia
+about it.
+
+  TO HELEN
+
+  Helen, thy beauty is to me
+    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
+  That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
+    The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
+    To his own native shore.
+
+  On desperate seas long wont to roam,
+    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
+  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
+    To the glory that was Greece
+    And the grandeur that was Rome.
+
+  Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
+    How statue-like I see thee stand!
+  The agate lamp within thy hand,
+    Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
+    Are Holy Land!
+
+It is the _tendency_ of the young poet that impresses us. Here is no
+"withering scorn," no heart "blighted" ere it has safely got into its
+teens, none of the drawing-room sans-culottism which Byron had brought
+into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the Greek
+Helicon in it. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It is not of
+that kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of the
+fingers. It is of that finer sort which the inner ear alone can
+estimate. It seems simple, like a Greek column, because of its
+perfection. In a poem named "Ligeia," under which title he intended to
+personify the music of nature, our boy-poet gives us the following
+exquisite picture:
+
+  Ligeia! Ligeia!
+    My beautiful one,
+  Whose harshest idea
+    Will to melody run,
+  _Say, is it thy will_,
+    _On the breezes to toss_,
+  _Or, capriciously still_,
+    _Like the lone albatross_,
+  _Incumbent on night_,
+    _As she on the air_,
+  _To keep watch with delight_
+    _On the harmony there_?
+
+John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too long
+capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similar
+passages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.
+
+Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to call
+_genius_. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there
+is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power. Let
+talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such magnetism.
+Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting. Talent
+sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of
+clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so
+that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton, and if
+Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses
+shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may
+make friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the
+divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to
+what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has
+not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are
+allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away
+by their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely
+prisoned in the pommel of its sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of
+the spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive the
+ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man of
+mere talent ever flung his inkstand at the devil.
+
+When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he has
+produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it at all
+is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence for the
+trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and the greenest
+laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses and Aristotles of our
+newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order to
+render a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness of
+attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is,
+according to these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of
+the country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable
+residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude
+be, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of their
+idiosyncrasy.
+
+Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous
+yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first
+of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge
+of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to
+conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a
+correct outline, while the second groups, fills up, and colors. Both of
+these Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his prose
+works, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the first in his
+later ones. In judging of the merit of an author, and assigning him his
+niche among our household gods, we have a right to regard him from our
+own point of view, and to measure him by our own standard. But, in
+estimating the amount of power displayed in his works, we must be
+governed by his own design, and, placing them by the side of his own
+ideal, find how much is wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions
+of the objects of art. He esteems that object to be the creation of
+Beauty, and perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that we
+disagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we shall
+take his own standard as our guide. The temple of the god of song is
+equally accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it for
+all who bring offerings, or seek an oracle.
+
+In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that
+dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable
+into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a
+very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a
+power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of
+mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a
+button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the
+predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded,
+analysis. It is this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at once
+reaches forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bring
+about certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate parts
+tend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to
+his own mind. To him _x_ is a known quantity all along. In any picture
+that he paints, he understands the chemical properties of all his
+colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the
+shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a
+geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with
+_Mysticism_. The Mystic dwells _in_ the mystery, is enveloped with it;
+it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and
+the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other
+hand, is a spectator _ab extra_. He analyzes, he dissects, he watches
+
+  ----with an eye serene,
+  The very pulse of the machine,
+
+for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and piston-rods,
+all working to produce a certain end.
+
+This analyzing tendency of his mind balances the poetical, and, by
+giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful
+reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great
+power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to
+trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of
+horror, also, he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by a
+dusky hint some terrible _doubt_ which is the secret of all horror. He
+leaves to imagination the task of finishing the picture, a task to which
+only she is competent.
+
+  For much imaginary work was there;
+  Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
+  That for Achilles' image stood his spear
+  Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind
+  Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind.
+
+Beside the merit of conception, Mr. Poe's writings have also that of
+form. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly classical. It
+would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied
+powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales,
+"The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque
+and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one
+could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre
+beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been
+enough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master of a classic
+style. In this tale occurs, perhaps, the most beautiful of his poems.
+
+The great masters of imagination have seldom resorted to the vague and
+the unreal as sources of effect. They have not used dread and horror
+alone, but only in combination with other qualities, as means of
+subjugating the fancies of their readers. The loftiest muse has ever a
+household and fireside charm about her. Mr. Poe's secret lies mainly in
+the skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mystery
+and terror. In this his success is so great and striking as to deserve
+the name of art, not artifice. We cannot call his materials the noblest
+or purest, but we must concede to him the highest merit of construction.
+
+As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient. Unerring in his
+analysis of dictions, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in the
+faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art. His criticisms are,
+however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic.
+They have the exactness, and at the same time, the coldness of
+mathematical demonstrations. Yet they stand in strikingly refreshing
+contrast with the vague generalisms and sharp personalities of the day.
+If deficient in warmth, they are also without the heat of partizanship.
+They are especially valuable as illustrating the great truth, too
+generally overlooked, that analytic power is a subordinate quality of
+the critic.
+
+On the whole, it may be considered certain that Mr. Poe has attained an
+individual eminence in our literature, which he will keep. He has given
+proof of power and originality. He has done that which could only be
+done once with success or safety, and the imitation or repetition of
+which would produce weariness.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
+
+
+The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death of
+Thackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still our
+social and literary capital. Not even the loss of Irving called forth so
+universal and strong an expression of sorrow. And yet it had been the
+fashion to call Thackeray a cynic. We must take leave to doubt whether
+Diogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been so
+tenderly regretted. We think there was something more in all this than
+mere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius. There was
+a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,--a
+true man.
+
+Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist,
+and could not have been one if he would. Your true cynic is a sceptic
+also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish
+suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself,
+but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest quality
+always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees,
+and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is
+and man as he might be, between the real snob and the ideal image of his
+Creator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm;
+the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from
+the harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to
+say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and
+teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of
+all manner of _shams_, an equally intense love for every kind of
+manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye
+for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever
+it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to
+betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have
+been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison
+between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid
+light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that
+flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that
+_ingenium perfervidum_ of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-Mall
+Jeremiah after all.
+
+It is curious to see how often Nature, original and profuse as she is,
+repeats herself; how often, instead of sending one complete mind like
+Shakespeare, she sends two who are the complements of each
+other,--Fielding and Richardson, Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and George
+Sand, and now again Thackeray and Dickens. We are not fond of
+comparative criticism, we mean of that kind which brings forward the
+merit of one man as if it depreciated the different merit of another,
+nor of supercilious criticism, which measures every talent by some ideal
+standard of possible excellence, and, if it fall short, can find nothing
+to admire. A thing is either good in itself or good for nothing. Yet
+there is such a thing as a contrast of differences between two eminent
+intellects by which we may perhaps arrive at a clearer perception of
+what is characteristic in each. It is almost impossible, indeed, to
+avoid some sort of parallel _a la_ Plutarch between Thackeray and
+Dickens. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they may
+be equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a few
+striking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints
+character, and Dickens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages are
+all men, those of Dickens personified oddities. The one is an artist,
+the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.
+Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the
+illustrations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as
+we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for Dickens
+invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is
+perfect, that of Dickens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast
+less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.
+Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from the
+reporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of the
+greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more
+types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is
+marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is
+very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had
+pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are
+masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon
+by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never
+act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.
+
+Thackeray's style is beyond praise,--so easy, so limpid, showing
+everywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture,
+it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was natural
+to him,--his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond," for example)
+being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respects
+the most finished example we have of what is called a man of the world.
+In the pardonable eulogies which were uttered in the fresh grief at his
+loss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked above
+Fielding,--a position which no one would have been so eager in
+disclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on their
+pedestals. Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written in
+English since Shakespeare. Of a broader and deeper nature, of a larger
+brain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter is
+Society. The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common was
+Richard Steele, as these "Roundabout Papers" show plainly enough. He
+admired Fielding, but he loved Steele.
+
+
+
+
+TWO GREAT AUTHORS
+
+
+
+
+SWIFT[1]
+
+I
+
+
+[Footnote 1: [A review of _The Life of Jonathan Swift_, by John Forster.]]
+
+The cathedral of St. Patrick's, dreary enough in itself seems to grow
+damper and chillier as one's footsteps disturb the silence between the
+grave of its famous Dean and that of Stella, in death as in life near
+yet divided from him, as if to make their memories more inseparable and
+prolong the insoluble problem of their relation to each other. Nor was
+there wanting, when we made our pilgrimage thither, a touch of grim
+humor in the thought that our tipsy guide (Clerk of the Works he had
+dubbed himself for the nonce), as he monotonously recited his
+contradictory anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane," varied by times with
+an irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinary
+biographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled our
+cicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse into
+rhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind of
+conjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servant
+Patrick, but in that sad presence his grotesqueness was as shocking as
+the clown in one of Shakespeare's tragedies to Chateaubriand. A shilling
+sent him back to the neighboring pot-house whence a half-dozen ragged
+volunteers had summoned him, and we were left to our musings. One
+dominating thought shouldered aside all others--namely, how strange a
+stroke of irony it was, how more subtle even than any of the master's
+own, that our most poignant association with the least sentimental of
+men should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to that
+of Abelard and Heloise should invest the memory of him who had done more
+than all others together to strip life and human nature of their last
+instinctive decency of illusion. His life, or such accounts as we had of
+it, had been full of antitheses as startling as if some malign enchanter
+had embodied one of Macaulay's characters as a conundrum to bewilder the
+historian himself. A generous miser; a sceptical believer; a devout
+scoffer; a tender-hearted misanthrope; a churchman faithful to his order
+yet loathing to wear its uniform; an Irishman hating the Irish, as Heine
+did the Jews,[1] because he was one of them, yet defending them with the
+scornful fierceness of one who hated their oppressors more; a man honest
+and of statesmanlike mind, who lent himself to the basest services of
+party politics for purely selfish ends; a poet whose predominant faculty
+was that of disidealizing; a master of vernacular style, in whose works
+an Irish editor finds hundreds of faults of English to correct;
+strangest of all, a middle-aged clergyman of brutal coarseness, who
+could inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with a
+fruitless passion that broke her heart, the other with a love that
+survived hope and faith to suck away the very sources of that life
+whereof it was the only pride and consolation. No wonder that a new life
+of so problematic a personage as this should be awaited with eagerness,
+the more that it was to be illustrated with much hitherto unpublished
+material and was to be written by the practised hand of Mr. Forster.
+Inconsistency of conduct, of professed opinion, whether of things or
+men, we can understand; but an inconsistent character is something
+without example, and which nature abhors as she does false logic.
+Opportunity may develop, hindrance may dwarf, the prevailing set of
+temptation may give a bent to character, but the germ planted at birth
+can never be wholly disnatured by circumstance any more than soil or
+exposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it is
+cumulative, whether for good or ill; the general tenor of the life is a
+logical sequence from it, and a man can always explain himself to
+himself, if not to others, as a coherent whole, because he always knows,
+or thinks he knows, the value of _x_ in the personal equation. Were it
+otherwise, that sense of conscious identity which alone makes life a
+serious thing and immortality a rational hope, would be impossible. It
+is with the means of finding out this unknown quantity--in other words,
+of penetrating to the man's motives or his understanding of them--that
+the biographer undertakes to supply us, and unless he succeed in this,
+his rummaging of old papers but raises a new cloud of dust to darken our
+insight.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lowell was mistaken. Heine never lost his love for the
+Jews. He regretted his apostasy and always regarded himself as a Jew,
+and not a Christian. His own genius was Hebraic, and not, as Matthew
+Arnold thought, Hellenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowell
+had great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitchell once told
+me that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even wished that he
+had a Hebraic nose. Several documents attest to Lowell's ideas on the
+subject. He even claimed that his middle name "Russell" showed that he
+had Jewish blood. A.M.]
+
+If Mr. Forster's mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality of
+genius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for his
+task. The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which is
+beset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer. A finer sense might recoil
+before investigations whose importance is not at first so clear as their
+promise of unsavoriness. So far as Mr. Forster has gone, we think he has
+succeeded in the highest duty of a biographer: that of making his
+subject interesting and humanly sympathetic to the reader--a feat surely
+of some difficulty with a professed cynic like Swift. He lets him in the
+main tell his own story--a method not always trustworthy, to be sure,
+but safer in the case of one who, whatever else he may have been, was
+almost brutally sincere when he could be so with safety or advantage.
+Still, it should always be borne in mind that he _could_ lie with an air
+of honest candor fit to deceive the very elect. The author of the
+"Battle of the Books" (written in 1697) tells us in the preface to the
+Third Part of Temple's "Miscellanea" (1701) that he "cannot well inform
+the reader upon what occasion" the essay upon Ancient and Modern
+Learning "was writ, having been at that time in another kingdom"; and
+the professed confidant of a ministry, whom the Stuart Papers have
+proved to have been in correspondence with the Pretender, puts on an air
+of innocence (in his "Enquiry into the Behavior of the Queen's last
+Ministry") and undertakes to convince us that nothing could be more
+absurd than to accuse them of Jacobitism. It may be, as Orrery asserted,
+that Swift was "employed, not trusted," but this is hardly to be
+reconciled with Lewis's warning him on the Queen's death to burn his
+papers, or his own jest to Harley about the one being beheaded and the
+other hanged. The fact is that, while in certain contingencies Swift was
+as unscrupulous a liar as Voltaire, he was naturally open and truthful,
+and showed himself to be so whenever his passions or his interest would
+let him. That Mr. Forster should make a hero of the man whose life he
+has undertaken to write is both natural and proper; for without sympathy
+there can be no right understanding, and a hearty admiration is alone
+capable of that generosity in the interpretation of conduct to which all
+men have a right, and which he needs most who most widely transcends the
+ordinary standards or most resolutely breaks with traditionary rules.
+That so virile a character as Swift should have been attractive to women
+is not wonderful, but we think Mr. Forster has gone far towards proving
+that he was capable of winning the deep and lasting affection of men
+also. Perhaps it may not always be safe to trust implicitly the fine
+phrases of his correspondents; for there can be no doubt that Swift
+inspired fear as well as love. Revengefulness is the great and hateful
+blot on his character; his brooding temper turned slights into injuries,
+gave substance to mere suspicion, and once in the morbid mood he was
+utterly reckless of the means of vengeance. His most playful scratch had
+poison in it. His eye was equally terrible for the weak point of friend
+and foe. But giving this all the value it may deserve, the weight of the
+evidence is in favor of his amiability. The testimony of a man so
+sweet-natured and fair-minded as Dr. Delany ought to be conclusive, and
+we do not wonder that Mr. Forster should lay great stress upon it. The
+depreciatory conclusions of Dr. Johnson are doubtless entitled to
+consideration; but his evidence is all from hearsay, and there were
+properties in Swift that aroused in him so hearty a moral repulsion as
+to disenable him for an unprejudiced opinion. Admirable as the
+rough-and-ready conclusions of his robust understanding often are, he
+was better fitted to reckon the quantity of a man's mind than the
+quality of it--the real test of its value; and there is something almost
+comically pathetic in the good faith with which he applies his
+beer-measure to juices that could fairly plead their privilege to be
+gauged by the wine standard. Mr. Forster's partiality qualifies him for
+a fairer judgment of Swift than any which Johnson was capable of
+forming, or, indeed, would have given himself the trouble to form.
+
+But this partiality in a biographer, though to be allowed and even
+commended as a quickener of insight, should not be strong enough to warp
+his mind from its judicial level. While we think that Mr. Forster is
+mainly right in his estimate of Swift's character, and altogether so in
+insisting on trying him by documentary rather than hearsay evidence, it
+is equally true that he is sometimes betrayed into overestimates, and
+into positive statement, where favorable inference would have been
+wiser. Now and then his exaggeration is merely amusing, as where he
+tells us that Swift, "as early as in his first two years after quitting
+Dublin, was _accomplished in French_," the only authority for such a
+statement being a letter of recommendation from Temple saying that he
+"had _some French_." Such compulsory testimonials are not on their _voir
+dire_ any more than epitaphs. So, in speaking of Betty Jones, with whom
+in 1689 Swift had a flirtation that alarmed his mother, Mr. Forster
+assumes that she "was an educated girl" on the sole ground, so far as
+appears, of "her mother and Swift's being cousins." Swift, to be sure,
+thirty years later, on receiving some letters from his old sweetheart,
+"suspects them to be counterfeit" because "she spells like a
+kitchen-maid," and this, perhaps, may be Mr. Forster's authority. But,
+as the letters _were_ genuine, the inference should have been the other
+way. The "letters to Eliza," by the way, which Swift in 1699 directs
+Winder, his successor at Kilroot, to burn, were doubtless those
+addressed to Betty Jones. Mr. Forster does not notice this; but that
+Swift should have preserved them, or copies of them, is of some
+consequence, as tending to show that they were mere exercises in
+composition, thus confirming what he says in the remarkable letter to
+Kendall, written in 1692, when he was already off with the old love and
+on with a new.
+
+These instances of the temptation which most easily besets Mr. Forster
+are trifles, but the same leaning betrays him sometimes into graver
+mistakes of overestimate. He calls Swift the best letter-writer in the
+language, though Gray, Walpole, Cowper, and Lamb be in some essential
+qualities his superiors. He praises his political writing so
+extravagantly that we should think he had not read the "Examiner," were
+it not for the thoroughness of his work in other respects. All that
+Swift wrote in this kind was partisan, excellently fitted to its
+immediate purpose, as we might expect from his imperturbable good sense,
+but by its very nature ephemeral. There is none of that reach of
+historical imagination, none of that grasp of the clue of fatal
+continuity and progression, none of that eye for country which divines
+the future highways of events, that makes the occasional pamphlets of
+Burke, with all their sobs of passionate sentiment, permanent
+acquisitions of political thinking. Mr. Forster finds in Swift's
+"Examiners" all the characteristic qualities of his mind and style,
+though we believe that a dispassionate reader would rather conclude that
+the author, as we have little doubt was the fact, was trying all along
+to conceal his personality under a disguise of decorous commonplace. In
+the same uncritical way Mr. Forster tells us that "the ancients could
+show no such humor and satire as the 'Tale of a Tub' and the 'Battle of
+the Books.'" In spite of this, we shall continue to think Aristophanes
+and even Lucian clever writers, considering the rudeness of the times in
+which they lived. The "Tale of a Tub" has several passages of
+rough-and-tumble satire as good as any of their kind, and some hints of
+deeper suggestion, but the fable is clumsy and the execution unequal and
+disjointed. In conception the "Battle" is cleverer, and it contains
+perhaps the most perfect apologue in the language, but the best strokes
+of satire in it are personal (that of Dryden's helmet, for instance),
+and we enjoy them with an uneasy feeling that we are accessaries in
+something like foul play. Indeed, it may be said of Swift's humor
+generally that it leaves us uncomfortable, and that it too often
+impregnates the memory with a savor of mortal corruption proof against
+all disinfectants. Pure humor cannot flow from so turbid a source as
+_soeva indignatio_, and if man be so filthy and disgusting a creature as
+Swift represents him to be, if he be truly "by nature, reason, learning,
+blind," satire is thrown away upon him for reform and cruel as
+castigation.
+
+Mr. Forster not only rejects the story of Stella's marriage with Swift
+as lacking substantial evidence, but thinks that the limits of their
+intercourse were early fixed and never overpassed. According to him,
+their relation was to be, from the first, one "of affection, not
+desire." We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only woman
+Swift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, that
+he probably did marry her,[1] but only when all hope of the old
+open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault,
+if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa,
+and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no
+explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief
+folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened
+his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with
+remorseful self-contempt. Nothing could be more galling to a proud man
+than the feeling that he had been betrayed by his vanity. It is commonly
+assumed that pride is incompatible with its weaker congener. But pride,
+after all, is nothing more than a stiffened and congealed vanity, and
+melts back to its original ductility when exposed to the milder
+temperature of female partiality. Swift could not deny himself the
+flattery of Vanessa's passion, and not to forbid was to encourage. He
+could not bring himself to administer in time the only effectual remedy,
+by telling her that he was pledged to another woman. When at last he did
+tell her it was too late; and he learned, like so many before and since,
+that the most dangerous of all fires to play with is that of love. This
+was the extent of his crime, and it would have been none if there had
+been no such previous impediment. This alone gives any meaning to what
+he says when Vanessa declared her love:
+
+  Cadenus felt within him rise
+  _Shame_, disappointment, _guilt_, surprise.
+
+[Footnote 1: Most of the authorities conclude that Swift never married
+Stella. A.M.]
+
+Shame there might have been, but surely no guilt on any theory except
+that of an implicit engagement with Stella. That there was something of
+the kind, more or less definite, and that it was of some ten years'
+standing when the affair with Vanessa came to a crisis, we have no
+doubt. When Tisdall offered her marriage in 1704, and Swift wrote to him
+"that if my fortunes and humor served me to think of that state, I
+should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice," she
+accepted the implied terms and rejected her suitor, though otherwise not
+unacceptable to her. She would wait. It is true that Swift had not
+absolutely committed himself, but she had committed him by dismissing
+Tisdall. Without assuming some such tacit understanding, his letters to
+her are unintelligible. He repeatedly alludes to his absence from her as
+only tolerable because it was for her sake no less than his own, and the
+details of his petty economies would be merely vulgar except to her for
+whom their motive gave them a sweetness of humorous pathos. The evidence
+of the marriage seems to be as conclusive as that of a secret can well
+be. Dr. Delany, who ought to have been able to judge of its probability,
+and who had no conceivable motive of misstatement, was assured of it by
+one whose authority was Stella herself. Mr. Monck-Berkeley had it from
+the widow of Bishop Berkeley, and she from her husband, who had it from
+Dr. Ashe, by whom they were married. These are at least unimpeachable
+witnesses. The date of the marriage is more doubtful, but Sheridan is
+probably not far wrong when he puts it in 1716. It was simply a
+reparation, and no union was implied in it. Delany intimates that
+Vanessa, like the young Chevalier, vulgarized her romance in drink. More
+than this, however, was needful to palliate even in Swift the brutal
+allusion to her importunacy in "Gulliver," unless, as is but too
+possible, the passage in question be an outbreak of ferocious spleen
+against her victorious rival. Its coarseness need not make this seem
+impossible, for that was by no means a queasy age, and Swift continued
+on intimate terms with Lady Betty Germaine after the publication of the
+nasty verses on her father. The communication of the secret to Bishop
+Berkeley (who was one of Vanessa's executors) may have been the
+condition of the suppressing Swift's correspondence with her, and would
+have exasperated him to ferocity.
+
+
+II
+
+
+We cannot properly understand Swift's cynicism and bring it into any
+relation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiability
+without taking his whole life into account. Few give themselves the
+trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough
+to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature
+was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it
+effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet.
+With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole
+which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of
+momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the Cowleian
+Pindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint of
+Parisian rather than Theban origin. If the master was but a fresh
+example of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of the
+flying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not even
+the secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earth
+while with perfect good faith he went through all the motions of
+soaring? Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment,
+though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and
+the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent. He who
+could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if
+he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the
+simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a
+trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything
+something else than it was, he would see things as they were--or as, in
+his sullen disgust, they seemed to be--and call them all by their right
+names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a
+Hottentot--nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble
+compromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and not
+ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious
+exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical
+fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with the
+brutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed
+and aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with
+himself. He despised mankind because he found something despicable in
+Jonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion to
+their likeness with himself. He had more or less consciously sacrificed
+self-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man's
+accidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, as
+no other "man of his level" in Ireland was, to being happy with the
+woman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and the
+independence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude after
+all. "Money," he was fond of saying, "is freedom," but he never learned
+that self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect. With a
+hearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yet
+bring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier of
+three royal strumpets. How should he be happy who had defined happiness
+to be "the perpetual possession of being well deceived," and who could
+never be deceived himself? It may well be doubted whether what he
+himself calls "that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of
+things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries
+that in the inside they are good for nothing," be of so penetrative an
+insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather
+that to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had the
+microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the
+loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that
+tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with
+all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his
+shallow friend Gay that life was a jest. To his nobler temper it was
+always profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, we
+suspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears. The lesson is
+worth remembering that _his_ apples of Sodom, like those of lesser men,
+were plucked from boughs of his own grafting.
+
+But there are palliations for him, even if the world were not too ready
+to forgive a man everything if he will only be a genius. Sir Robert
+Walpole used to say "that it was fortunate so few men could be prime
+ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking
+wickedness of mankind." Swift, from his peculiar relation to two
+successive ministries, was in a position to know all that they knew, and
+perhaps, as a recognized place-broker, even more than they knew, of the
+selfish servility of men. He had seen the men who figure so imposingly
+in the stage-processions of history too nearly. He knew the real Jacks
+and Toms as they were over a pot of ale after the scenic illusion was
+done with. He saw the destinies of a kingdom controlled by men far less
+able than himself; the highest of arts, that of politics, degraded to a
+trade in places, and the noblest opportunity, that of office, abused for
+purposes of private gain. His disenchantment began early, probably in
+his intimacy with Sir William Temple, in whom (though he says that all
+that was good and great died with him) he must have seen the weak side
+of solemn priggery and the pretension that made a mystery of statecraft.
+In his twenty-second year he writes:
+
+  Off fly the vizards and discover all:
+    How plain I see through the deceit!
+    How shallow and how gross the cheat!
+       *       *       *       *       *
+    On what poor engines move
+  The thoughts of monarchs and designs of states!
+  What petty motives rule their fates!
+
+      I to such blockheads set my wit!
+      I damn such fools! go, go, you're bit!
+
+Mr. Forster's own style (simpler now than when he was under the
+immediate influence of Dickens, if more slipshod than when repressed by
+Landor) is not in essentials better or worse than usual. It is not
+always clear nor always idiomatic. On page 120 he tells us that "Scott
+did not care to enquire if it was likely that stories of the kind
+referred to should have contributed to form a character, or if it were
+not likelier still that they had grown and settled round a character
+already famous as well as formed." Not to speak of the confusion of
+moods and tenses, the phrase "to form a character" has been so long
+appropriated to another meaning than that which it has here, that the
+sense of the passage vacillates unpleasantly. He tells us that Swift was
+"under engagement to Will Frankland to christen _the baby his wife is
+near bringing to bed_." Parthenogenesis is a simple matter to this. And
+why _Will_ Frankland, _Joe_ Beaumont, and the like? We cannot claim so
+much intimacy with them as Swift, and the eighteenth century might be
+allowed to stand a little on its dignity. If Mr. Forster had been
+quoting the journal to Stella, there would be nothing to say except that
+Swift took liberties with his friends in writing to her which he would
+not have ventured on before strangers. In the same odd jargon, which the
+English journals are fond of calling American, Mr. Forster says that
+"Tom [Leigh] was not _popular_ with Swift." Mr. Forster is not only no
+model for contemporary English, but (what is more serious) sometimes
+mistakes the meaning of words in Swift's day, as when he explains that
+"strongly engaged" meant "interceded with or pressed." It meant much
+more than that, as could easily be shown from the writings of Swift
+himself.
+
+All the earlier biographers of Swift Mr. Forster brushes contemptuously
+aside, though we do not find much that is important in his own biography
+which industry may not hit upon somewhere or other in the confused
+narrative of Sheridan, for whom and for his sources of information he
+shows a somewhat unjust contempt. He goes so far as sometimes to
+discredit anecdotes so thoroughly characteristic of Swift that he cannot
+resist copying them himself. He labors at needless length the question
+of Swift's standing in college, and seems to prove that it was not
+contemptible, though there can be no doubt that the contrary opinion was
+founded on Swift's own assertion, often repeated. We say he seems to
+prove it, for we are by no means satisfied which of the two Swifts on
+the college list, of which a facsimile is given, is the future Dean. Mr.
+Forster assumes that the names are ranked in the order of seniority, but
+they are more likely to have been arranged alphabetically, in which case
+Jonathan would have preceded Thomas, and at best there is little to
+choose between three _mediocriters_ and one _male_, one _bene_, and one
+_negligenter_. The document, whatever we may think of its importance,
+has been brought to light by Mr. Forster. Of his other materials
+hitherto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving that
+Swift's Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707. This
+shows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whig
+to Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his former
+associates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency if
+not of desertion to the enemy. Whatever the motives of his change, it
+would have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty,
+and in spite of Mr. Forster's assertion that Addison continued to love
+and trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was any
+cordiality in their intercourse after 1710. No one familiar with Swift's
+manner of thinking will deem his political course of much import in
+judging of his moral character. At the bottom of his heart he had an
+impartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aims
+of both were more or less consciously selfish. Even if sincere, the
+matters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment as
+that which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput. With him the
+question was simply one between men who galled his pride and men who
+flattered it. Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceable
+inferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footing
+of friendship. To him they were all, more or less indifferently, rounds
+in the ladder by which he hoped to climb. He always claimed to have been
+a consistent Old Whig--that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchman
+who accepted the Revolution of 1688. This, to be sure, was not quite
+true, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on a
+Cavalier grandfather, and whose first known verses were addressed to the
+non-juring primate Sancroft after his deprivation, to become first a
+Tory and then a conniver at the restoration of the Stuarts as the best
+device for preventing a foreign succession and an endless chance of
+civil war. A man of Swift's way of thinking would hardly have balked at
+the scruple of creed, for he would not have deemed it possible that the
+Pretender should have valued a kingdom at any lower rate than his
+great-grandfather had done before him.
+
+The more important part of Mr. Forster's fresh material is to come in
+future volumes, if now, alas! we are ever to have them. For some of what
+he gives us in this we can hardly thank him. One of the manuscripts he
+has unearthed is the original version of "Baucis and Philemon" as it was
+before it had passed under the criticism of Addison. He seems to think
+it in some respects better than the revised copy though in our judgment
+it entirely justifies the wisdom of the critic who counselled its
+curtailment and correction. The piece as we have hitherto had it comes
+as near poetry as anything Swift ever wrote except "Cadenus and
+Vanessa," though neither of them aspires above the region of cleverness
+and fancy. Indeed, it is misleading to talk of the poetry of one whose
+fatal gift was an eye that disidealized. But we are not concerned here
+with the discussion of Swift's claim to the title of poet. What we are
+concerned about is to protest in the interests of good literature
+against the practice, now too common, of hunting out and printing what
+the author would doubtless have burned. It is unfair to the dead writer
+and the living reader by disturbing that unitary impression which every
+good piece of work aims at making, and is sure to make, only in
+proportion to the author's self-denial and his skill in
+
+  The last and greatest art, the art to blot.
+
+We do not wish, nor have we any right to know, those passages through
+which the castigating pen has been drawn.
+
+Mr. Forster may almost claim to have rediscovered Swift's journals to
+Esther Johnson, to such good purpose has he used them in giving life and
+light to his narrative. He is certainly wrong, however, in saying to the
+disparagement of former editors that the name Stella was not invented
+"till long after all the letters were written." This statement,
+improbable in itself as respects a man who forthwith refined Betty,
+Waring, and Vanhomrigh into Eliza, Varina, and Vanessa, is refuted by a
+passage in the journal of 14th October, 1710, printed by Mr. Forster
+himself. At least, we know not what "Stellakins" means unless it be
+"little Stella." The value of these journals for their elucidation of
+Swift's character cannot be overestimated, and Mr. Forster is quite
+right in insisting upon the importance of the "little language," though
+we are by no means sure that he is always so in his interpretation of
+the cipher. It is quite impossible, for instance, that ME can stand for
+Madam Elderly, and so for Dingley. It is certainly addressed, like the
+other endearing epithets, to Esther Johnson, and may mean My Esther or
+even Marry Esther, for anything we know to the contrary.
+
+Mr. Forster brings down his biography no farther than the early part of
+1710, so that we have no means of judging what his opinion would be of
+the conduct of Swift during the three years that preceded the death of
+Queen Anne. But he has told us what he thinks of his relations with
+Esther Johnson; and it is in them, as it seems to us, that we are to
+seek the key to the greater part of what looks most enigmatical in his
+conduct. At first sight, it seems altogether unworthy of a man of
+Swift's genius to waste so much of it and so many of the best years of
+his life in a sordid struggle after preferment in the church--a career
+in which such selfish ambitions look most out of place. How much better
+to have stayed quietly at Laracor and written immortal works! Very good:
+only that was not Swift's way of looking at the matter, who had little
+appetite for literary fame, and all of whose immortal progeny were
+begotten of the moment's overmastering impulse, were thrown nameless
+upon the world by their father, and survived only in virtue of the vigor
+they had drawn from his stalwart loins. But how if Swift's worldly
+aspirations, and the intrigues they involved him in, were not altogether
+selfish? How if he was seeking advancement, in part at least, for
+another, and that other a woman who had sacrificed for him not only her
+chances of domestic happiness, but her good name? to whom he was bound
+by gratitude? and the hope of repairing whose good fame by making her
+his own was so passionate in that intense nature as to justify any and
+every expedient, and make the patronage of those whom he felt to be his
+inferiors endurable by the proudest of men? We believe that this was the
+truth, and that the woman was Stella. No doubt there were other motives.
+Coming to manhood with a haughtiness of temper that was almost savage,
+he had forced himself to endure the hourly humiliation of what could not
+have been, however Mr. Forster may argue to the contrary, much above
+domestic servitude. This experience deepened in him the prevailing
+passions of his life, first for independence and next for consideration,
+the only ones which could, and in the end perhaps did, obscure the
+memory and hope of Stella. That he should have longed for London with a
+persistency that submitted to many a rebuff and overlived continual
+disappointment will seem childish only to those who do not consider that
+it was a longing for life. It was there only that his mind could be
+quickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dying
+daily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, if
+there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without
+impair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age.
+
+This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the world
+is just opening. In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, "I
+desire that you and all my friends will take a special care that my
+disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I have
+credible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from the
+twenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age." His contempt for
+mankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfuges
+by which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify and
+conceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of its
+cleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than being
+prime minister. How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody when
+his old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophic
+relief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty!
+
+Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose also
+with the "Tale of a Tub." Its levity, if it was not something worse,
+twice balked him of the mitre when it seemed just within his reach.
+Justly or not, he had the reputation of scepticism. Mr. Forster would
+have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to
+prove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimate
+friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him
+sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman.
+Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession
+which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect
+independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes.
+He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while he
+was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among
+savages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood
+in his way. A man's little faults are more often the cause of his
+greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever
+respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly
+had the advantage of him in that _savoir vivre_ which makes so large an
+element of worldly success. In judging him, however, we must take into
+account that his first literary hit was made when he was already
+thirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of others
+and distrust of himself.
+
+The reaction in Swift's temper and ambition told with the happiest
+effect on his prose. For its own purposes, as good working English, his
+style (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had no
+style at all), has never been matched. It has been more praised than
+studied, or its manifest shortcomings, its occasional clumsiness, its
+want of harmony and of feeling for the finer genialities of language,
+would be more often present in the consciousness of those who discourse
+about it from a superficial acquaintance. With him language was a means
+and not an end. If he was plain and even coarse, it was from choice
+rather than because he lacked delicacy of perception; for in badinage,
+the most ticklish use to which words can be put, he was a master.
+
+
+
+
+PLUTARCH'S MORALS[1]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: A review of the English translation edited by William W.
+Goodwin with an Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson.]
+
+Plutarch is perhaps the most eminent example of how strong a hold simple
+good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man
+of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make
+him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is
+more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be
+more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days
+in the rose's neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his
+temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he
+always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as
+shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born
+middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner
+and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the
+problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic
+interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his
+worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish
+to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better
+Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas
+Browne, love to lose himself in an _O, altitudo!_ yet the sky-piercing
+peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the
+horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually
+gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom
+invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook
+like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled
+amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming
+intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled
+predilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet like
+flowers." But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him
+and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother
+of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is
+most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that
+passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the
+volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the
+_atrium_ (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the
+great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and
+who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become
+human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his
+lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible
+virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion,
+patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which
+associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is
+theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson
+disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian
+unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended
+him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints
+which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch
+in the essay on "Physiognomy." After speaking of some "escripts encores
+plus reverez," he asks, in his idiomatic way, "a, quoy faire nous allons
+nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however,
+Montaigne liked him because he was _good talk_, as it is called, a
+better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are
+noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation
+between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style
+is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in
+Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived
+perhaps from authors much more ancient." But if they are borrowed, they
+have none of the discordant effect of the _purpureus pannus_, for the
+warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them
+his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly
+original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this
+selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural
+elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or
+sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We
+are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are
+trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and
+there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has
+flowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into the
+ports of every nation," says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction
+to Goodwin's Plutarch's "Morals." No doubt we are becalmed pretty often,
+and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation,
+so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and
+quotation.
+
+It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser,
+in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose
+mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative
+(if we take the "Lives" and the "Morals" together) in the thought and
+action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And on
+the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether
+good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them
+over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was his
+own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their
+purpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among men
+and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. His
+influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any
+other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the
+Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a
+remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years,
+living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had
+peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of
+his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect
+that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of
+us. Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past was
+inhabited by creatures like ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
+AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+
+
+
+
+A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH
+AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
+
+
+I must beg allowance to use the first person singular. I cannot, like
+old Weller, spell myself with a We. Ours is, I believe, the only
+language that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (to
+himself) as to erect the first personal pronoun into a kind of votive
+column to the dignity of human nature. Other tongues have, or pretend, a
+greater modesty.
+
+                     I
+
+What a noble letter it is! In it every reader sees himself as in a
+glass. As for me, without my I's, I should be as poorly off as the great
+mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of
+reason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess I
+always liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek drama
+which were well sprinkled with _ai ai_, they were so grandly simple. The
+force of great men is generally to be found in their intense
+individuality,--in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this
+essay will be similar.
+
+What I was going to say is this.
+
+My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics,
+which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun
+to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence and
+Statuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for human
+habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on very
+well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the
+fish which we cured, _more medicorum_, by laying them out. But this
+summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association.
+Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town
+wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain number
+of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their
+own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call
+their lectures "The Universal Brotherhood Course,"--for no other reason,
+that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.
+They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip
+Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, from
+what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the
+introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything like
+universal brotherhood. He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster,
+without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into the
+world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular.
+Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of
+vaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right of
+Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public
+Vituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand the
+nature of philanthropy.
+
+Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example. He loves his kind so much that
+he has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother's son of
+them. He goes about to save them by proving that not one of them is
+worth damning. And he does it all from the point of view of an early (a
+_knurly_) Christian. Let me illustrate. I was sauntering along Broadway
+once, and was attracted by a bird-fancier's shop. I like dealers in
+out-of-the-way things,--traders in bigotry and virtue are too
+common,--and so I went in. The gem of the collection was a terrier,--a
+perfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as a
+Cockney would say, than the 'ole British hairystocracy. "A'n't he a
+stunner?" said my disrespectable friend, the master of the shop. "Ah,
+you should see him worry a rat! He does it like a puffic Christian!"
+Since then, the world has been divided for me into Christians and
+_perfect_ Christians; and I find so many of the latter species in
+proportion to the former, that I begin to pity the rats. They (the rats)
+have at least one virtue,--they are not eloquent.
+
+It is, I think, a universally recognized truth of natural history, that
+a young lady is sure to fall in love with a young man for whom she feels
+at first an unconquerable aversion; and it must be on the same principle
+that the first symptoms of love for our neighbor almost always manifest
+themselves in a violent disgust at the world in general, on the part of
+the apostles of that gospel. They give every token of hating their
+neighbors consumedly; _argal_, they are going to be madly enamored of
+them. Or, perhaps, this is the manner in which Universal Brotherhood
+shows itself in people who wilfully subject themselves to infection as a
+prophylactic. In the natural way we might find the disease inconvenient
+and even expensive; but thus vaccinated with virus from the udders
+(whatever they may be) that yield the (butter-)milk of human kindness,
+the inconvenience is slight, and we are able still to go about our
+ordinary business of detesting our brethren as usual. It only shows that
+the milder type of the disease has penetrated the system, which will
+thus be enabled to out-Jenneral its more dangerous congener. Before long
+we shall have physicians of our ailing social system writing to the
+"Weekly Brandreth's Pill" somewhat on this wise:--"I have a very marked
+and hopeful case in Pequawgus Four Corners. Miss Hepzibah Tarbell,
+daughter of that archenemy of his kind, Deacon Joash T., attended only
+one of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most
+encouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family,--accusing
+her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno
+C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the
+magnetic needle. If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of Primitive
+Christian were well-founded, I think we may entertain them now."
+
+What I chiefly object to in the general-denunciation sort of reformers
+is that they make no allowance for character and temperament. They wish
+to repeal universal laws, and to patch our natural skins for us, as if
+they always wanted mending. That while they talk so much of the godlike
+nature of man, they should so forget the human natures of men! The
+Flathead Indian squeezes the child's skull between two boards till it
+shapes itself into a kind of gambrel roof against the rain,--the
+readiest way, perhaps, of uniforming a tribe that wear no clothes. But
+does he alter the inside of the head? Not a hair's-breadth. You remember
+the striking old gnomic poem that tells how Aaron, in a moment of
+fanatical zeal against that member by which mankind are so readily led
+into mischief, proposes a rhinotomic sacrifice to Moses? What is the
+answer of the experienced law-giver?
+
+  Says Moses to Aaron,
+  "'T is the fashion to wear 'em!'"
+
+Shall we advise the Tadpole to get his tail cut off, as a badge of the
+reptile nature in him, and to achieve the higher sphere of the Croakers
+at a single hop? Why, it is all he steers by; without it, he would be as
+helpless as a compass under the flare of Northern Lights; and he no
+doubt regards it as a mark of blood, the proof of his kinship with the
+preadamite family of the Saurians. Shall we send missionaries to the
+Bear to warn him against raw chestnuts, because they are sometimes so
+discomforting to our human intestines, which are so like his own? One
+sermon from the colic were worth the whole American Board.
+
+Moreover, as an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Street
+against a unanimity in goodness. Not to mention that a Quaker world, all
+faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,--what should
+we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, no
+literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a
+sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be
+thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as
+indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me
+monthly,--what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband
+forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The
+pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the
+very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and
+him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the
+curse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; she
+is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been
+feeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us.
+Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in Nathaniel
+Greene, and makes a general of him, to confute five generations of
+Broadbrims. The Puritans were good in their way, and we enjoy them
+highly as a preterite phenomenon; but they were _not_ good at cakes and
+ale, and that is one reason why they are a preterite phenomenon.
+
+I suppose we are all willing to let a public censor like P.V. run amuck
+whenever he likes,--so it be not down our street. I confess to a good
+deal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in No. 21, have
+plenty of stoicism to spare for the griefs of the dwellers in No. 23.
+Indeed, I agreed with our young Cato heartily in what he said about
+Statues. We must have an Act for the Suppression, either of Great Men,
+or else of Sculptors. I have not quite made up my mind which are the
+greater nuisances; but I am sure of this, that there are too many of
+both. They used to be _rare_ (to use a Yankeeism omitted by Bartlett),
+but nowadays they are overdone. I am half inclined to think that the
+sculptors club together to write folks up during their lives in the
+newspapers, quieting their consciences with the hope of some day making
+them look so mean in bronze or marble as to make all square again. Or do
+we really have so many? Can't they help growing twelve feet high in this
+new soil, any more than our maize? I suspect that Posterity will not
+thank us for the hereditary disease of Carrara we are entailing on him,
+and will try some heroic remedy, perhaps lithotripsy.
+
+Nor was I troubled by what Mr. Vandal said about the late Benjamin
+Webster. I am not a Boston man, and have, therefore, the privilege of
+thinking for myself. Nor do I object to his claiming for women the right
+to make books and pictures and (shall I say it?) statues,--only this
+last becomes a grave matter, if we are to have statues of all the great
+women, too! To be sure, there will not be the trousers-difficulty,--at
+least, not at present; what we may come to is none of my affair. I even
+go beyond him in my opinions on what is called the Woman Question. In
+the gift of speech, they have always had the advantage of us; and though
+the jealousy of the other sex have deprived us of the orations of
+Xantippe, yet even Demosthenes does not seem to have produced greater
+effects, if we may take the word of Socrates for it,--as I, for one,
+very gladly do.
+
+No,--what I complain of is not the lecturer's opinions, but the
+eloquence with which he expressed them. He does not like statues better
+than I do; but is it possible that he fails to see that the one nuisance
+leads directly to the other, and that we set up three images of Talkers
+for one to any kind of man who was useful in his generation? Let him
+beware, or he will himself be petrified after death. Boston seems to be
+specially unfortunate. She has more statues and more speakers than any
+other city on this continent. I have with my own eyes seen a book called
+"The Hundred Boston Orators." This would seem to give her a fairer title
+to be called the _tire_ than the _hub_ of creation. What with the
+speeches of her great men while they are alive, and those of her
+surviving great men about those aforesaid after they are dead, and those
+we look forward to from her _ditto ditto_ yet to be upon her _ditto
+ditto_ now in being, and those of her paulopost _ditto ditto_ upon her
+_ditto ditto_ yet to be, and those--But I am getting into the house that
+Jack built.
+
+And yet I remember once visiting the Massachusetts State House and being
+struck with the Pythagorean fish hung on high in the Representatives'
+Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to be
+observed except on Sundays. Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal to you as a
+man and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there are
+plenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-water
+that threatens the land. Let us adopt as our creed these two
+propositions:--
+
+I. _Tongues were given us to be held._
+
+II. _Dumbness sets the brute below the man: Silence elevates the man
+above the brute._
+
+Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than
+that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account
+how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be
+commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception
+is positively stunning.
+
+Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late
+Town Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA
+NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general.
+_He_, at least, never betrayed his clients. As it is, there is no end to
+it. We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal
+Schoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the same
+ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man
+had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.
+We are the victims of a droll antithesis. Daniel would not give in to
+Nebuchadnezzar's taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down
+and worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have
+gone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor. I do not
+think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one is
+so apt to encounter;--I met one once at an evening party. But I would be
+thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that
+statue. Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the
+monumental line! Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of
+convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late
+visit, got off without a single speech. The cheerful hospitalities of
+Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but
+nothing more melancholy. In his case I doubt the expediency of the
+omission. Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it
+would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers
+of the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together.
+
+In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts our
+friends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) are
+put to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay for
+it. The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the Stark
+Mills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for making
+a very dead bronze horse stand on his hind legs. For twenty-five cents I
+have seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful,--make a very
+living bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occurs
+to me that _hind legs_ is indelicate) posterior extremities to the
+wayward music of an out-of-town (_Scotice_, out-o'-toon) band. Now, I
+will make a handsome offer to the public. I propose for twenty-five
+thousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of a
+distinguished general officer as he _would have_ appeared at the Battle
+of Buena Vista. This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown the
+new dome of the Capitol at Washington. By this happy contrivance, the
+horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth
+at all,--thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for
+originality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the
+horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which
+way the wind blows by going along with it. The inferior animal I have
+resolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection. In
+this way I shall combine two striking advantages. The advocates of the
+Ideal in Art cannot fail to be pleased with a charger which embodies, as
+it were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attention
+of the spectator will not be distracted from the principal figure. The
+material to be pure brass. I have also in progress an allegorical group
+commemorative of Governor Wise. This, like-Wise, represents only a
+potentiality. I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment when
+and the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury at
+Washington. His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of his
+speeches. Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling on
+his own steel pen; a broken telegraph wire hints at the weight of the
+thoughts to which it has found itself inadequate; while the Army and
+Navy of the United States are conjointly typified in a horse-marine who
+flies headlong with his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. I
+think I shall be able to have this ready for exhibition by the time Mr.
+Wise is nominated for the Presidency,--certainly before he is elected.
+The material to be plaster, made of the shells of those oysters with
+which Virginia shall have paid her public debt. It may be objected, that
+plaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itself
+could hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor's speeches. But
+it must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype,
+have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of the
+spectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some reasonable hope
+of silence. This design, also, is intended only _in terrorem_, and will
+be suppressed for an adequate consideration.
+
+I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The
+fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may
+deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves
+into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a
+wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other
+way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of
+the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with
+the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in
+the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new
+victims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the wooden
+horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr.
+Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever
+material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short
+of a general.
+
+Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures. He counsels us to sell our real
+estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's reputation with
+posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor. To
+a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose military
+reputation insures his cutting and running (I mean, of course, in marble
+and bronze), the question becomes an interesting one,--To whom, in case
+of a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have the land all
+to themselves,--until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancient
+heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness will
+revive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican Art. For my own
+part, I never look at one of them now without thinking of at least one
+human sacrifice.
+
+I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing's proposal, and yet something
+ought to be done. We must put up with what we have already, I suppose,
+and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol
+pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand
+rests,--no bad type of the great man's state of mind after the
+nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a
+penal statue. But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that
+Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues? I go
+back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment. I had even gone so far
+as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the
+Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it
+would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our
+graven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects
+enumerated in the divine ordinance. Perhaps a double-barrelled statute
+might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the
+monumental difficulty. Let a law be passed that all speeches delivered
+more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all
+eulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel of
+the Deaf and Dumb asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds
+of the Institution for the Blind. Let the penalty for infringement in
+the one case be to read the last President's Message, and in the other
+to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as
+to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual
+punishments.
+
+Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should
+pass so self-denying an ordinance. They might, perhaps, make all oratory
+but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates
+might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed
+by a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be
+by an appetite for slate pencils. _Vita brevis, lingua longa._ I protest
+that among lawgivers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the
+Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence. The ancient Greeks also
+(though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions,
+especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the
+advantage of communication with America. Now the Greeks had a Muse of
+Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how
+hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more
+excellent Muse of Leaving-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her out
+and kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a goddess to be
+worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!
+
+Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch's
+lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts
+and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in
+comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine
+lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are
+as dust in the balance to those of speech.
+
+We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.
+There are now two debating clubs, seminaries of multiloquence. A few of
+us old-fashioned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it
+"The Jolly Oysters." No member is allowed to open his mouth except at
+high-tide by the calendar. We have biennial festivals on the evening of
+election day, when the constituency avenges itself in some small measure
+on its Representative elect by sending a baker's dozen of orators to
+congratulate him.
+
+But I am falling into the very vice I condemn,--like Carlyle, who has
+talked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue. And yet
+something should be done about it. Even when we get one orator safely
+underground, there are ten to pronounce his eulogy, and twenty to do it
+over again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue. I go to
+listen: we all go: we are under a spell. 'T is true, I find a casual
+refuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he called
+Sleep the child of Silence. Speech begets her as often. But there is no
+sure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, let
+there be written on my head-stone, with impartial application to these
+Black Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to our
+equestrian statues,--
+
+  _Os sublime_ did it!
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Function Of The Poet And Other
+Essays, by James Russell Lowell
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+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FUNCTION OF THE POET ***
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