THE FUNCTION OF THE POETAND OTHER ESSAYS

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

COLLECTED AND EDITED BYALBERT 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 thathe has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet. Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work ratherthan in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of hislife. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame of his youth didnot continue to glow, but he resigned himself to his fate; nevertheless, it should be remembered that "The Vision of Sir Launfal, " "The BiglowPapers, " and "The Commemoration Ode" are enough to make the reputationof any poet. 

The present volume sustains Lowell's right to be considered one of thegreat American critics. The literary merit of some of the essays hereinis in many respects nowise inferior to that in some of the volumes hecollected himself. The articles are all exquisitely and carefullywritten, and the style of even the book reviews displays that qualityfound in his best writings which Ferris Greenslet has appropriatelydescribed as "savory. " That such a quantity of good literature by soable a writer as Lowell should have been allowed to repose buried in thefiles of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact thatLowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute allthe more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews onephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in bookform. 

The essays herein represent the matured author as they were written inthe latter part of his life, between his thirty-sixth and fifty-seventhyears. The only early essay is the one on Poe. It appeared in _Graham'sMagazine_ for February, 1845, and was reprinted by Griswold in hisedition of Poe. It has also been reprinted in later editions of Poe, buthas never been included in any of Lowell's works. This was no doubt dueto the slight break in the relations between Poe and Lowell, due toPoe's usual accusations of plagiarism. The essay still remains one ofthe best on Poe ever written. 

Though Lowell became in later life quite conservative and academic, itshould not be thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberalideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, andhad good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first worksof Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men, indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers willenjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, theraps at spiritualism here and there. Moreover, there is a passage in thefirst essay showing that Lowell, before Freud, understood thepsychoanalytic theory of genius in its connection with childhoodmemories. The passage follows Lowell's narration of the story of littleMontague. 

None of the essays in this volume has appeared in book form except a fewfragments from some of the opening five essays which were reported fromLowell's lectures in the _Boston Advertiser_, in 1855, and wereprivately printed some years ago. Charles Eliot Norton performed aservice to the world when he published in the _Century Magazine_ in 1893and 1894 some lectures from Lowell's manuscripts. These lectures are nowcollected and form the first five essays in this book. I have alsoretained Professor Norton's introductions and notes. Attention is calledto his remark that "The Function of the Poet" is not unworthy to standwith Sidney's and Shelley's essays on poetry. 

The rest of the essays in this volume appeared in Lowell's lifetime inthe _Atlantic Monthly_, the _North American Review_, and the _Nation_. They were all anonymous, but are assigned to Lowell by George WillisCooke in his "Bibliography of James Russell Lowell. " Lowell was editorof the _Atlantic_ from the time of its founding in 1857 to May, 1861. Hewas editor of the _North American Review_ from January, 1864, to thetime he left for Europe in 1872. With one exception (that on "Poetry andNationalism" which formed the greater part of a review of the poems ofHowells's friend Piatt), all the articles from these two magazines, reprinted in this volume, appeared during Lowell's editorship. Thesearticles include reviews of poems by his friends Longfellow andWhittier. And in his review of "The Courtship of Miles Standish, " Lowellmakes effective use of his scholarship to introduce a lengthy andinteresting discourse on the dactylic hexameter. 

While we are on the subject of the New England poets a word about thepresent misunderstanding and tendency to underrate them may not be outof place. Because it is growing to be the consensus of opinion that thetwo greatest poets America has produced are Whitman and Poe, it does notfollow that the New-Englanders must be relegated to the scrap-heap. Nordo I see any inconsistency in a man whose taste permits him to enjoyboth the free verse and unpuritanic (if I may coin a word) poems ofMasters 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 pleasantschool-day memories for all of us and will no doubt have such for ourchildren. 

Lowell's cosmopolitan tastes may be seen in his essays on men sodifferent as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows thathe even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray toDickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree withhim. 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 anintroduction by Emerson, is also of interest. 

The last essay in the volume on "A Plea for Freedom from Speech andFigures of Speech-Makers" shows Lowell's satirical powers at their best. Ferris Greenslet tells us, in his book on Lowell, that the Philip Vandalwhose eloquence Lowell ridicules is Wendell Phillips. The essay givesLowell's humorous comments on various matters, especially oncontemporary types of orators, reformers, and heroes. It representsLowell as he is most known to us, the Lowell who is always ready withfun and who set the world agog with his "Biglow Papers. "

Lowell's work as a critic dates from the rare volume "Conversations onSome 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 inthe year of his death in 1891. My sincere hope is that this book willnot be found to be an unworthy successor to these volumes. 

Though some of Lowell's literary opinions are old-fashioned to us (oneauthor even wrote an entire volume to demolish Lowell's reputation as acritic), there is much in his work that the world will not let die. Heis highly regarded abroad, and he is one of the few men in ourliterature who produced creative criticism. 

Thanks and acknowledgments are due the _Century Magazine_ and theliterary representatives of Lowell, for permission to reprint in thisvolume the first five essays, which are copyrighted and were publishedin 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 beforethe Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell neverprinted it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertionswere too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste incomposition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print. How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and thebroadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with hisessays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and1867--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 theenthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truthsit contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expressionof a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquilinealike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand withSidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy, " and it is fitted to warmand inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no lessthan of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lectureLowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse. "

_Charles Eliot Norton_

 * * * * *

Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of agreat cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man infriendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovelsout of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to thedevelopment theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come upout of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudestpedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questionsthat will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to whatlittle we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out ofbarbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, andeverywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing incertain outward respects, but essentially the same. 

And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet andthe priest were united originally in the same person; which means thatthe poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as thatof sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was hishighest function, and hence his name of "seer. " He was the discovererand declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the _epeapteroenta_, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexploredfuture and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wiseand 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 isHomer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey, ""whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"--the gift of conferringgood or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung asthey were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men thedesire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust, because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to thefuture. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when theywere recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for theirancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuriesago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high. " Nor havepoets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts upby the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of someprovincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it fora moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. Thehistorians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth asthey can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gavethem. 

The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to havea double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselvescontinually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the olderepics 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, thegenerations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark fora purposeless moment, and reënter the dark again after they haveperformed 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. Butalways something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has nowcome to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeingis 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, whichdoes not see through his tragic--yes, and his comic--masks awful eyesthat flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenicmeaning--a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond allhuman and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himselfunconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witnessthat sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes theerrand 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 hedistinctly alludes to his profession. 

There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets--that, howeverin little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes agreat and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bearthemselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language. Thereis not a mature play of Shakespeare's in which great ideas do not jut upin mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces ofthought, and known afar to many kindreds of men. 

And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for anyfaculty of observation and description, that we value the poet. It is inproportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not ajuggler with words. It is by means of this that for every generation ofman he plays the part of "namer. " Before him, as before Adam, thecreation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then theworld of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever agreat imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging theoutward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly awayin music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depthbeneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggeststhe invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. Hisimagination went down to the very bases of things, and while hischaracters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are alsoperfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstractthoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever. 

Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad, " we feelsomething of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower ofcontemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change, he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains andconquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again withtheir trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were asutterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and whichfaded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre. History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with theworld for a village. This life could only become other thanphantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to somethingthat was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher powerunseen--that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flitsstealthily 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 sameidea lurking. The poet is he who can best see and best say what isideal--what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether hecelebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as itappears in man or nature, something of a religious character stillclings to him; he is the revealer of Deity. He may be unconscious of hismission; 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 directlyrebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel whatdelight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil, it is withsuch beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) thatthe besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the greatpoets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him toa higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoeverlearns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and meanand bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expresslyon the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, thatthey have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types insteadof speaking the true universal language of imagination. He whotranslates 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 samething--imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him thepower, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaksabout, 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. Andas regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the wholeof himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said athing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings asthere are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than aninterpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter betweenman and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, thepossession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspectedtreasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open underthe dusty path of our daily life. 

And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles, --a thing whichenables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead, --butall his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows onevery side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between thedry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shippingnews and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of statelyships, --"the city on the inconstant billows dancing, "--as there isbetween ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybodyremembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold tothe chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautifulchamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of afair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threwhimself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed andfell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, piecedtogether his broken recollections for him, and so at last made thevisions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real tohim again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us aretypified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscencesof the stately home of our childhood, --for we are all of us poets andgeniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice ofevery buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy, --and we all rememberthe beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there. Butsomehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sootytaskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end--tillsuddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, andof helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to ourtrue relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward naturethat the poet reintroduces us. 

But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a powerof expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blankmaterialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to showits title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he wassometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary orno, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse muchwith their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's footagainst a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor oldPyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity ofmatter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmedwas that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginativereproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up tothe first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I toldyou so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bonebroken. "

And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with humancharacter, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purelyphantasmal 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? Isnot Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is apurely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing. What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knewless geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understoodeternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are notdefined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas. 

No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrentbeat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is bythe understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world, and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form ofpractical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons towardthat other world which is always future, and makes us discontented withthis. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listensafter the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future withwhich it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as thecommon sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of thevisible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which thetwo moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras wherethe same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do wedepend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but uponobservation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternalpromontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lowersystem. 

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 isleft for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry inrailroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in BrotherJonathan. 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 thatwe live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant morethan we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said afoolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at anyrate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespearewas richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such apair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his toreport it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, whocontinues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor lessthan a "seer. " He is always the man who is willing to take the age helives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did notsit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of hislittle private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone morequietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to havedrawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current ofaffairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground forthe public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a merepiece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with suchravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stickand stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink. It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespearereceived everything that came along, --of what a _present_ man hewas, --that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought intoEngland, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford. 

It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for that veryreason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generationcontrives to catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. When thepoet comes, he always turns out to be the man who discovers that thepassing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is notto have lived in Homer's day, or Dante's, but to be alive now. To bealive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who livein the past, and men yet unborn that live in the future. We are likeHans in Luck, forever exchanging the burdensome good we have forsomething else, till at last we come home empty-handed. 

That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sextonwhose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is evennow reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, andthought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmusthat we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in theirtriumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy, looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them tobehold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-heartedand desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when therewas still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world. 

The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only itscostume. And that is what makes it prosaic--that we have not faithenough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presentedto posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity isthat of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statueof Sir Robert Peel, --a statesman whose merit consisted in yieldinggracefully to the present, --in which the sculptor had done his best totravesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period whenEngland produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse ofthis, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of LordBacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down tothe rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, "Thus satFrancis Bacon"--not "Cneius Pompeius"--"Viscount Verulam. " Those men hadfaith 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 rainingopportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago whowere intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up. We are likebeggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must becounterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece offamiliar 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 turnit over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised atfinding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes. Till Dante's timethe Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothingsinto but Latin, --and indeed a dead tongue was the best for deadthoughts, --but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which menbargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of theworld around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang. 

In our day, it is said despairingly, the understanding reignstriumphant: it is the age of common sense. If this be so, the wisest waywould be to accept it manfully. But, after all, what is the meaning ofit? Looking at the matter superficially, one would say that a strikingdifference between our science and that of the world's gray fathers isthat 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 amagnificent reach of sympathy, of which we are incapable, associatedwith the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only aprofessor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn andunapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanizedamong the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in everycalyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The starscan no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is aconjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sendsthither its special reporter with his telescope. Over those arcana oflife where once a mysterious presence brooded, we behold scientificexplorers skipping like so many incarnate notes of interrogation. We pryinto the counsels of the great powers of nature, we keep our ears at thekeyhole, and know everything that is going to happen. There is no longerany sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, andlife turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needsno more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" Wehave found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription uponit, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted. 

Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in ourcradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples theday with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimationof demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material forthought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, assapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathywith 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 solarsystem in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as asymbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can passthrough all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is amuseum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum ofsupernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has beengoing on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern andhistorical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time ofthe death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonicimagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus. 

Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On thosesublime 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 seefarther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom ofa crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all thisis because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorceditself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are notarrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps setall along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In myopinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderfulthan the discoveries themselves. "

But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if itwould, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination. No twomen have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, thatsomething more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that alogic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (asevery man's _own_ logic always is) is powerless against so delicate astructure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bringtogether the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one. When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if aleaf has fallen. I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in thepulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have not sometimesfound the popular giant as provokingly insensible. The [sqrt of -x] isnothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flowerwhich by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning dayof childhood. Demonstration may lead to the very gate of heaven, butthere she makes us a civil bow, and leaves us to make our way back againto Faith, who has the key. That science which is of the intellect alonesteps with indifferent foot upon the dead body of Belief, if only shemay reach higher or see farther. 

But we cannot get rid of our wonder--we who have brought down the wildlightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be ourerrand-boy and penny-postman. Wonder is crude imagination; and it isnecessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exactknowledge is not enough. Do we get nearer the truth or farther from itthat we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit? Wego on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it? The evasivegenius flits into something else, and defies us. The powers of the outerand inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connectionman is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and claspsit with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he wasvainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes itwonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man ofscience remakes the old spirit. But we seem to have created too manywonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, whenasked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them. Butnature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best butscotch it, not kill it. In this day of newspapers and electrictelegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a wholecontinent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon asMahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster onWitchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblinis laid at last!"--and while I mused the tables were turning, and thechairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have aneighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointedout 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 withit. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never sobrilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp. 

It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of somesort or other. If they cannot get the best they will get some substitutefor it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine's slur that it is wineof devils. The mind bound down too closely to what is practical eitherbecomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wildernessof "isms. " The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted somepersons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and foundrefreshment in taking a scalp now and then. Nature insists above allthings upon balance. She contrives to maintain a harmony between thematerial and spiritual, nor allows the cerebrum an expansion at the costof the cerebellum. If the character, for example, run on one side intoreligious enthusiasm, it is not unlikely to develop on the other acounterpoise of worldly prudence. Thus the Shaker and the Moravian arenoted for thrift, and mystics are not always the worst managers. Throughall changes of condition and experience man continues to be a citizen ofthe world of idea as well as the world of fact, and the tax-gatherers ofboth are punctual. 

And these antitheses which we meet with in individual character wecannot help seeing on the larger stage of the world also, a moralaccompanying a material development. History, the great satirist, bringstogether Alexander and the blower of peas to hint to us that the tube ofthe one and the sword of the other were equally transitory; butmeanwhile Aristotle was conquering kingdoms out of the unknown, andestablishing a dynasty of thought from whose hand the sceptre has notyet passed. So there are Charles V, and Luther; the expansion of traderesulting from the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, and theElizabethan literature; the Puritans seeking spiritual El Dorados whileso much valor and thought were spent in finding mineral ones. It seemsto be the purpose of God that a certain amount of genius shall go toeach generation, particular quantities being represented by individuals, and while no _one_ is complete in himself, all collectively make up awhole ideal figure of a man. Nature is not like certain varieties of theapple that cannot bear two years in succession. It is only that herexpansions are uniform in all directions, that in every age shecompletes her circle, and like a tree adds a ring to her growth be itthinner or thicker. 

Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, the one trivial andordinary, the other sacred and recluse; the one which he carries to thedinner-table and to his daily work, which grows old with his body anddies with it, the other that which is made up of the few inspiringmoments of his higher aspiration and attainment, and in which his youthsurvives for him, his dreams, his unquenchable longings for somethingnobler than success. It is this life which the poets nourish for him, and sustain with their immortalizing nectar. Through them he feels oncemore the white innocence of his youth. His faith in something noblerthan gold and iron and cotton comes back to him, not as an upbraidingghost that wrings its pale hands and is gone, but beautiful andinspiring as a first love that recognizes nothing in him that is nothigh and noble. The poets are nature's perpetual pleaders, and protestwith us against what is worldly. Out of their own undying youth theyspeak to ours. "Wretched is the man, " says Goethe, "who has learned todespise the dreams of his youth!" It is from this misery that theimagination and the poets, who are its spokesmen, rescue us. The worldgoes to church, kneels to the eternal Purity, and then contrives tosneer at innocence and ignorance of evil by calling it green. Let everyman thank God for what little there may be left in him of his vernalsweetness. Let him thank God if he have still the capacity for feelingan unmarketable enthusiasm, for that will make him worthy of the societyof the noble dead, of the companionship of the poets. And let him lovethe 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 findit out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a moreprosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is strippedof material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlyingmountain-farm of imagination, which did not appear in the schedule ofhis effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though henever thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a greatpoet 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 therest. We have had the practical forced upon us by our position. We havehad a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we aredescended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downrightwrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among thePuritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it shouldbe the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, orthey could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books areStates, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California. 

But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poeticalpeople. Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men invisible types. He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap ofinvisibility and the purse of Fortunatus. These were once stories forgrown men, and not for the nursery as now. We are apt ignorantly towonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction theabsurdity 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 allabout it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in thedark. Look at a child's toys, and we shall understand the matter wellenough. Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still), at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which shehas been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, anda bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur. 

But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet. In herrailroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness. Fine-Ear herselfcould not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listenin Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans. And what need ofAladdin's lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill? Theoffice of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back thesemiracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what thereis imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, thereis as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomedthat fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it thelines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soulof poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does notseem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the"Merchant of Venice" in it. Themes of song are waiting everywhere forthe right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one canpull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more troublethan 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 sailedout of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it asa type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil thatthose far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever mustbe filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity, but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that arace can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mightyAssyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces. Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every portof the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She liesdead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desertonly flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blotHolland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the spaceoccupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructibleas the soul. 

Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not as themere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme ilfaut_ for a great nation, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, for its power of making men better by arousing in them a perception oftheir own instincts for what is beautiful, and therefore sacred andreligious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will nothave succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of apeople, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were ourlittle mother-island sunk beneath the sea, or, worse, were she conqueredby Scythian barbarians, yet Shakespeare would be an immortal England, and would conquer countries, when the bones of her last sailor had kepttheir ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenchedthunders of her navy. 

Old Purchas in his "Pilgrims" tells of a sacred caste in India who, whenthey go out into the street, cry out, "Poo! Poo!" to warn all the worldout of their way lest they should be defiled by something unclean. Andit is just so that the understanding in its pride of success thinks topooh-pooh all that it considers impractical and visionary. But whateverof life there is in man, except what comes of beef and pudding, is inthe visionary and unpractical, and if it be not encouraged to find itsactivity or its solace in the production or enjoyment of art and beauty, if it be bewildered or thwarted by an outward profession of faithcovering up a practical unbelief in anything higher and holier than theworld of sense, it will find vent in such wretched holes and corners astable-tippings and mediums who sell news from heaven at a quarter of adollar the item. Imagination cannot be banished out of the world. Shemay be made a kitchen-drudge, a Cinderella, but there are powers thatwatch over her. When her two proud sisters, the intellect andunderstanding, think her crouching over her ashes, she startles andcharms by her splendid apparition, and Prince Soul will put up with noother bride. 

The practical is a very good thing in its way--if it only be not anothername for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane rootwhich the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat fromParthia--which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if theywere some great matter till he died. 

One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes himfeel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankindwere doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialismwhich comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy oldworld 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 tillbedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom andbeauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. Butdivine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles andmessengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss ashaving no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages ofAnnihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of thesixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepitsecond childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul ofShakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity, "trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year ofsunsets. 

No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with everychild. It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon. Every agesays to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I amlike"; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, hasneed of seers and will have them. Our time is not an unpoetical one. Weare in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces ofunsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though theymay be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone. It is nothing against usthat we are a commercial people. Athens was a trading community; Danteand Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was alreadycommercial 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 Godfrom whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselvesin an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as newduties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of thepoet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soulendures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that whilethere is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God willstill send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hangtheir ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God with us isforever the mystical name of the hour that is passing. The lives of thegreat poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who feltmost 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 acourse of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. Hissubject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successivelectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment, " illustrating theimaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision, " as the firstcharacteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances, " marking theadvent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads, "especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet ofreal life--the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representativeof the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8, Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "OnPoetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotisticimaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Functionand Prospects of Poetry. "

These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period ofdelivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, butthey came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues offamiliar studies and long reflection. No such criticism, at onceabundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished bybreadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, hadbeen heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiasticaudiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as theablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as theforemost of American men of letters. 

In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in HarvardUniversity, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, inspecial preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties ofthe chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointedMinister of the United States to Spain. 

During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses oflectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they weregiven more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject ofthese courses was in general the "Study of Literature, " treating indifferent years of different special topics, from the literature ofNorthern to that of Southern Europe, from the Kalevala and theNiebelungen Lied to the Provençal poets; from Wolfram von Eschenbach toRousseau; from the cycle of romances of Charlemagne and his peers toDante and Shakespeare. Some of these lectures, or parts of them, wereafterward prepared for publication, with such changes as were requiredto give them proper literary form; and the readers of Lowell's proseworks know what gifts of native power, what large and solid acquisitionsof learning, what wide and delightful survey of the field of life and ofletters, are to be found in his essays on Shakespeare, on Dante, onDryden, and on many another poet or prose writer. The abundance of hisresources as critic in the highest sense have never been surpassed, atleast in English literature. 

But considerable portions of the earlier as well as of the laterlectures remain unprinted, partly, no doubt, because his points of viewchanged with the growth of his learning, and the increasing depth aswell as breadth of his vision. There is but little in manuscript whichhe would himself, I believe, have been inclined to print withoutsubstantial change. Yet these unprinted remains contain so much thatseems to me to possess permanent value that, after some question andhesitation, I have come to the conclusion that selections from themshould be published. The fragments must be read with the fact constantlyheld in mind that they do not always represent Lowell's mature opinions;that, in some instances, they give but the first form of thoughtsdeveloped in other connections in one or other of his later essays; thatthey have not received his last revision; that they have the form ofdiscourse addressed to the ear, rather than that of literary workfinished for the eye. 

If so read, I trust that the reader, while he may find little in them toincrease Lowell's well-established reputation, may find much in them toconfirm a high estimate of his position as one of the rare masters ofEnglish prose as well as one of the most capable of critics; much tointerest him alike in their intrinsic character, and in theirillustration of the life and thought of the writer; and much to make himfeel a keen regret that they are the final contributions of their authorto 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 otherin the human soul. Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, thesecond for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourthfor money, and the fifth for a "place" in the country. I think he hasoverlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point oftime--the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master ofa chamber to one's self. 

How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of thatindependence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that smallchamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor poresover the "Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks, " his longing heightenedas the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney. There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties hispockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of thehousemaid. There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment ofSchwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel thecool shadow of the discoverer's laurel. There the antiquary begins hiscollections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistlesof Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late theproperty of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate, who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to makehis children the ornaments of society. There the potential Dibdin orDowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf--more fair to himthan the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe, " and"Gulliver, " perhaps "Gil Blas, " Goldsmith's Histories of Greece andRome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds, " the "Parent's Assistant, " and(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, " with other narrativesof the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life. With these are admitted also "Viri Romae, " Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, andeven the Latin grammar, because they _count_, playing here upon thesemimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators, a rôle in after years assumed by statelier and more celebratedvolumes--the "books without which no gentleman's library can becomplete. "

I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookeryof the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I wasfirst installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe ofthat remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be myunmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adornit. The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some printswhich 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 storytill they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther. Thesewere heads of ancient worthies[1]--Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca, and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortlybanished again with a _quousque tandem!_ Besides those I have mentioned, there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less theslave of tradition, I called Heraclĭtus--an error which my excellentschoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head bythe judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded thebirth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree ofknowledge, 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 ofancient wise men" in "An Interview with Miles Standish. "--C. E. N. ]

Well, over my chimney hung those two antithetical philosophers--the oneshowing his teeth in an eternal laugh, while the tears on the cheek ofthe 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 Idid firmly, that to weep and laugh had been respectively the solebusiness of their lives. I was puzzled to think which had the hardertime of it, and whether it were more painful to be under contract forthe delivery of so many tears _per diem_, or to compel that [Greek:anêrithmon gelasma][1] I confess, I pitied them both; for if it bedifficult to produce on demand what Laura Matilda would call the "tenderdew of sympathy, " he is also deserving of compassion who is expected tobe funny whether he will or no. As I grew older, and learned to look onthe two heads as types, they gave rise to many reflections, raising aquestion perhaps impossible to solve: whether the vices and follies ofmen were to be washed away, or exploded by a broadside of honestlaughter. I believe it is Southwell who says that Mary Magdalene went toHeaven by water, and it is certain that the tears that people shed forthemselves are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be savedby any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophersshould weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumberenough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good whileon that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nervesof conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straitsthey 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 theonly animal capable of that phenomenon--for the laugh of the hyena ispronounced by those who have heard it to be no joke, and to be classedwith those [Greek: gelasmata agelasta] which are said to come from theother side of the mouth. Whether, as Shaftesbury will have it, ridiculebe absolutely the test of truth or no, we may admit it to be relativelyso, inasmuch as by the _reductio ad absurdum_ it often shows thatabstract truth may become falsehood, if applied to the practical affairsof life, because its relation to other truths equally important, or tohuman nature, has been overlooked. For men approach truth from thecircumference, and, acquiring a knowledge at most of one or two pointsof that circle of which God is the centre, are apt to assume that thefixed 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 asmany hearty laughs as any humorous book I ever read. 

Men of one idea, --that is, who have one idea at a time, --men whoaccomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, areinevitably destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them begreat and noble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversityof human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by asingle idea, and that a small and rickety one--some seven months' childof thought--that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes tothe disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need nosatirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as ifNature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. Forexample, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecyto current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that twohundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of LodowickMuggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last greatantichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle inThessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished personwho, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm, the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrineto the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosmlikewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you wouldhave been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in thespots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into anepigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself, "exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth'saxis. " A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribablesatisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "Ihave had, " he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I neversucceeded in getting a Quaker kick before. " Could the fanaticism of thecollectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thusunconsciously by our passive enthusiast?

I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or seecertain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense ofthe comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at withoutlaughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the _haruspex haruspicem_)and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secretI will keep yours. " In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to beimplanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between bodyand soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasmwould lead us an endless dance. 

The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of oneidea--for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two. He is theuniversal disenchanter. He makes himself quite as much the subject ofironical study as his neighbor. Is he inclined to fancy himself a greatpoet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sitdown because a certain part of him was made of glass, and musessmilingly, "There are many forms of hypochondria. " This duality in hismind which constitutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of hischaracter. He is futile in action because in every path he is confrontedby the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusionthat nothing is very much worth the while. If he be independent ofexertion, his life commonly runs to waste. If he turn author, it iscommonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and "Don Quixote" wasthe fruit of a debtors' prison. 

It seems to be an instinct of human nature to analyze, to define, and toclassify. We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away inthe 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 theirappearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom;and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combinesappearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the sensesby impression, is poetry. A great part of criticism is scientific, butas the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possiblein this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far asthat, at some kind of classification that may help us toward thatexcellent property--compactness of mind. 

Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodnessproduces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say thatthis was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is therein the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic ofall 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 goodsubject 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, diffusedthrough the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the greatcomic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show theirfaces, or before they have spoken a word. 

The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with theunderstanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as theEnglish, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let usnot be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we takethe profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity. Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction whicharises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon theimpressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a greathumorist, 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 oflightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without ourbeing able to put our finger on any passage, and say, "It is here. " Witmust sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wisedeacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of humannatur' in man, " he might have added that there was a good deal more insome men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may behumorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presenceof mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase, this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must beinstantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and itsimpression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. As Galiani said ofNature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixesevery time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublimeoratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art ofsaying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country whereit is forbidden to say anything. " Wit must also have the quality ofunexpectedness. "Sometimes, " says Barrow, "an affected simplicity, sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it risesonly from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a craftywresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in oneknows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways areunaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberlessrovings of fancy and windings of language. "

That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpectedlikeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look atwhat is called a _conceit_, which has all the qualities of wit--exceptwit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a longpoem called "Albion's England, " which had an immense contemporarypopularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student oflanguage. 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, wereused 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 goodas a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as apun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should havebeen, --to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast, --itshould 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" asapplied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the properlogical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit whichbelongs, 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 mightalmost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionallyviolated in the word _broke_, and the sentence becomes absurd, thoughnot funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure ofthe 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 whosewit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almostrank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with acontemporary, and therefore transitory, subject. Butler says of loyaltythat 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 andMorris which I have just quoted? Simply that the comparison turning uponthe word _true_, the mind is satisfied, because the analogy between theword as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave nogap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over. But it is precisely thisjolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discomposeour thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the objectof a pun to give us. Wit of this kind treats logic with every possibleoutward demonstration of respect--"keeps the word of promise to the ear, and breaks it to the sense. " Dean Swift's famous question to the mancarrying the hare, "Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?" isperfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with anequally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hoodabounds in examples of this sort of fun--only that his analogies are ofa more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old sailor hesays, 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 isperfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mindis involved in an inextricable confusion of comical _non sequiturs_. Andyet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up inthe "and so. " Like this is the peddler's recommendation of hisear-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 themenagerie, Who could not even prey In their own way, and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginningwith 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 witalways suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostlingtogether the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense. Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down ina heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; butonce in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn, they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. Inthe 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 theword "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kickingdownstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise. Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the wholesentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment ofHuon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way thatmakes us laugh in spite of ourselves. 

Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit asdistinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, sofull 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 hisserious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it isas good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying offinto extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, thatconstitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny, hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into anepigram 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 themost eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor. With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus, " andwrath 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 aplace "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat, " and thishints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There iscertainly humor in "Gulliver, " especially in the chapters about theYahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, anddisgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. Butcommonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure himrather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an examplefrom 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 solemnpreface, is entirely of the essence of wit. So, too, is the sudden flirtof the scorpion's tail to sting you. It is almost the opposite of humorin one respect--namely, that it would make us think the solemnest thingsin life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humordelights in exposing. This further difference is also true: that witmakes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none ofits point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and drollerthe oftener we read it. If we cannot safely deny that Swift was ahumorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gonethrough the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid. We shouldnever forget that he died mad. Satirists of this kind, while they havethis quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower, differ from their nobler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is alwaysto the disadvantage of the higher. They purposely disenchant us--whilethe others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted atall. 

Ben Jonson, who had in respect of sturdy good sense very much the samesort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose "Discoveries, " as hecalls 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 alittle bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructedaccording to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a faultin comedy. I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniablytrue, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon thestage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also thewriters of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists thanas movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense thegreatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets inlimbo, 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 itappears 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 comediesnot 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 nodoubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. Buteven through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make outmore or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was amaster of language, for it becomes alive under his hands--puts forthbuds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when itfeels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns. Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polypswe hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many partsas you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independentbeing. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seemstoo mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of thedefinition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the trueflavor of Falstaff in him--"a million a minute and your expenses paid. "As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file. " Nowthey are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they cometumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in thecircus, with a "Here we are!" I can think of nothing like it butRabelais, 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 "TheBirds, " but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs, " nor doesthe fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region ofhumor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but hehas nothing like the scene in "The Frogs, " where Bacchus is terrifiedwith the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries, and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nortail. 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 theideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had beendegraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be withinthe limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as thosehand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabetsaw in Tartary?

Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, onthe same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, thegreatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not, --and I am inclinedto believe he did, --he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza hisesquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of humancharacter--the imagination and understanding. There is a great deal morethan this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book isoften little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested. Theplot is of the meagrest. A country gentleman of La Mancha, living verymuch by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances ofchivalry, 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 assquire. They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from whichthey 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 faras mere external characteristics are concerned. The latter knight andhis squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficientreason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that theyfurnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom. Theyrepresent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing. 

I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfectcharacter ever drawn. As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense, always a gentleman, --that is, as he is guilty of no crime that istechnically held to operate in defeasance of his title to that name as aman of the world, --so is Don Quixote, in everything that does notconcern 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 arethe boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment justso far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the illevent of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, fromhis own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes'streatment of him in the second part--which followed the other after aninterval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they deludethemselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besidesshocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castleare so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them. 

Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooneror later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal goodby material means. Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is thetype of the man with common sense. He always sees things in the daylightof reason. He is never taken in by his master's theory ofenchanters, --although superstitious enough to believe such thingspossible, --but he _does_ believe, despite all reverses, in his promisesof material prosperity and advancement. The island that has beenpromised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger beforeMacbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And, fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary islandof Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate--because statesmanshipdepends for its success so much less on abstract principle than onprecisely 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 resultin a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study ofideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of suchmen as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much lightupon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature asthe elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, anaccomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for thescholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worthonly in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, toknow the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes werecontemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermentingwith reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse fromthe invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while theNew World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promiseand its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsyand 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 ofsomething better than provincial scholarship. 

But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happiermoment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one cansay it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and longsteeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of thecarefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts. What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vastcombinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them upto a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with alllarge mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the firstsolid result of thought, however small--the nucleus of speculation. Thetrue aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify andsort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum ofscience. 

It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while itdemocratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracyof thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it hastaught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; ithas supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence ofreading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had fewbooks, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord itover the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature. Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions andprecautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre wouldhardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy ofVirgil. 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 threehundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequentlysurvived until our day. 

In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth weadmire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like thosebetter which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only uponthat as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which isdeeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man isforty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectualprogress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of hisdethroned gods. 

There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are veryfew. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, Ishould say that thus far one man had been able to use types souniversal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equallytrue in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-Europeanbranch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and thereneeds, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence thanthis very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the "Iliad" and the"Odyssey. " The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the workof one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us sonobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I shouldplace the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, in which the history of thespiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur ofoutline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the sameuniversal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural manset before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squireCervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature--theimagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. Thisis the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterlyindependent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the naturalhistory of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely theprojected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariableresult of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the onlyones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideallyrepresented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moralsignificance there may be in certain episodes of the "Odyssey, " the manof the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and theunderstanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive. There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there isnothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry, than that passage in the eleventh book of the "Odyssey, " where the shadeof Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorestshepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shadesof Hades. Dante's poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of manfrom the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moralconversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the greatcamp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, sorepresentatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of allmen. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradictionbetween the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking thetransition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect;and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectualculture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness, and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, buthuman, and record certain phases of man's nature, certain stages of hismoral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It willremain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as itremains for the future world to afford the example of his entire andharmonious development. 

I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under adifferent category. Though they mark the very highest level of humangenius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of theindividual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual lifeas he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certaindefinite conditions. We all of us _may_ be in the position of Macbeth orOthello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deedspotentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy ofour common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books Ihave mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us growup through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time, sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shapeour theory of the divine government of the universe; we all withCervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, andwith Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through theintellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do notmean 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 andperennial application to our consciousness and our experience accountsfor their permanence, and insures their immortality. 

THE IMAGINATION[1]

[Footnote 1: A small portion of this lecture appeared at the time of itsdelivery, in January, 1855, in a report printed in the _Boston DailyAdvertiser_. ]

Imagination is the wings of the mind; the understanding, its feet. Withthese it may climb high, but can never soar into that ampler ether anddiviner air whence the eye dominates so uncontrolled a prospect on everyhand. Through imagination alone is something like a creative powerpossible to man. It is the same in Aeschylus as in Shakespeare, thoughthe form of its manifestation varies in some outward respects from ageto age. Being the faculty of vision, it is the essential part ofexpression also, which is the office of all art. 

But in comparing ancient with modern imaginative literature, certainchanges especially strike us, and chief among them a stronger infusionof sentiment and what we call the picturesque. I shall endeavor toillustrate this by a few examples. But first let us discuss imaginationitself, and give some instances of its working. 

"Art, " says Lord Verulam, "is man added to Nature" (_homo additusnaturae_); and we may modernize his statement, and adapt it to thedemands of aesthetics, if we define art to be Nature infused with andshaped by the imaginative faculty of man; thus, as Bacon says elsewhere, "conforming the shows of things to the desires of the mind. " Art alwaysplatonizes: it results from a certain finer instinct for form, order, proportion, a certain keener sense of the rhythm there is in the eternalflow of the world about us, and its products take shape around some ideapreëxistent in the mind, are quickened into life by it, and strivealways (cramped and hampered as they are by the limitations andconditions of human nature, of individual temperament, and outwardcircumstances) toward ideal perfection--toward what Michelangelo called

 Ideal form, the universal mould. 

Shakespeare, whose careless generalizations have often the exactness ofscientific 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 aspirit not his own, and that he cannot poetize while he has a particleof understanding left. Again he says that the bacchantes, possessed bythe god, drink milk and honey from the rivers, and cannot believe, _tillthey recover their senses_, that they have been drinking mere water. Empedocles said that "the mind could only conceive of fire by beingfire. "

All these definitions imply in the imaginative faculty the capabilitiesof ecstasy and possession, that is, of projecting itself into the veryconsciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed bythe emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously thetone, the color, and the temperature thereof. Shakespeare is the highestexample of this--for example, the parting of Romeo and Juliet. There thepoet is so possessed by the situation, has so mingled his ownconsciousness 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 thepoet's imagination giving away its own consciousness to the objectcontemplated, 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 ofCalderon'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 substituteshis own _impression_ of the thing for the thing itself; he forces hisown consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of allsentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whoseexcess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of themain distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in itsexcess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural andhealthy 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, thatit is a token of disease. Then it is properly dyspepsia, liver-complaint--what you will, but certainly not imagination as thehandmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: oneas the _plastic_ or _shaping_ faculty, which gives form and proportion, and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unityforeordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other asthe _realizing_ energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts, not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity andcoherence. 

We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, inthe one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intensesympathy--a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as aCordelia, 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 kindof sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive, sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit ofbody of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "thedull substance of his flesh were thought. " It is not in mere intensityof phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, orthe situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witnessof itself in expression. I know nothing more profoundly imaginativetherefore in its bald simplicity than a line in Webster's "Duchess ofMalfy. " 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 tobe that the aim of the former is to express a mood of the mind, oftensomething in itself accidental and transitory, while that of the latteris to convey the impression made upon the mind by something outside ofit, but taken up into the mind and idealized (that is, stripped of allunessential particulars) by it. The one would fain set forth your viewof the thing (modified, perhaps, by your breakfast), the other would setforth the very thing itself in its most concise individuality. Subjective poetry may be profound and imaginative if it deal with theprimary emotions of our nature, with the soul's inquiries into its ownbeing and doing, as was true of Wordsworth; but in the very proportionthat it is profound, its range is limited. Great poetry should havebreadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere onthe open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on theiroccasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploringexpeditions among the crypts of metaphysics. 

But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengagewhat is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confusethe vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things aregregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. Itis only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts thatcan at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar toitself. That the power of abstraction has something to do with theimagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is adramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep. His acquaintances walk and talk before him on the stage of dreamprecisely as in life. When he wakes, his genius has flown away with hissleep. It was indeed nothing more than that his mind was not distractedby the multiplicity of details which the senses force upon it by day. Hethinks of Smith, and it is no longer a mere name on a doorplate or in adirectory; but Smith himself is there, with those marvellouscommonplaces of his which, could you only hit them off when you wereawake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too, that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforcedhis remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the cornerof the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a weekof newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination_bodies forth_? It is indeed the _verbum caro factum_--the word madeflesh and blood. 

I said that the imagination always idealizes, that in its highestexercise, for example, as in the representation of character, it goesbehind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types ofhuman nature, as in Don Quixote and Hamlet, Antigone and Cordelia, Alcestis and Amelia. By this I mean that those features are mostconstantly insisted upon, not in which they differ from other men butfrom other kinds of men. For example, Don Quixote is never set before usas a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when youanalyze it, of a very noble kind--nothing less, indeed, than devotion toan unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginativemen for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats anddisillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice atintervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one ofBeethoven's symphonies, a kind of clue to guide us through thoseintricacies of harmony. So in Lear, one of Shakespeare's profoundestpsychological studies, the weakness of the man is emphasized, as itwere, and forced upon our attention by his outbreaks of impotentviolence; so in Macbeth, that imaginative bias which lays him open tothe temptation of the weird sisters is suggested from time to timethrough the whole tragedy, and at last unmans him, and brings about hiscatastrophe in his combat with Macduff. This is what I call ideal andimaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries ofcharacter, not by arbitrary lines drawn at this angle or that, accordingto the whim of the tracer, but by those mountain-ranges of human naturewhich divide man from man and temperament from temperament. And as theimagination of the reader must reinforce that of the poet, reducing thegeneric again to the specific, and defining it into sharperindividuality by a comparison with the experiences of actual life, so, on the other hand, the popular imagination is always poetic, investingeach new figure that comes before it with all the qualities that belongto the genus; Thus Hamlet, in some one or other of his characteristicshas been the familiar of us all, and so from an ideal and remote figureis reduced to the standard of real and contemporary existence; whileBismarck, who, if we knew him, would probably turn out to be acomparatively simple character, is invested with all the qualities whichhave ever been attributed to the typical statesman, and is clearly asimaginative a personage as the Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's "DonCarlos. " We are ready to accept any _coup de théâtre_ of him. Now, thisprepossession is precisely that for which the imagination of the poetmakes us ready by working on our own. 

But there are also lower levels on which this idealization plays itstricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may becalled the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances todelude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from theassociations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroicstature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar facein "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left thecountenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awfulreverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that mostpenetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ ofexpression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor werewrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at anyrate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual andtrivial. Their stage showed nothing that could be met in the streets. Webarbarians, on the other hand, take delight precisely in that. We admirethe novels of Trollope and the groups of Rogers because, as we say, theyare so _real_, while it is only because they are so matter-of-fact, soexactly 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, andeven 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 essentialto the purpose of the poet, who has lost much of his advantage by theinvention of printing, which obliges him to appeal to the eye ratherthan the ear. The rhythm is no arbitrary and artificial contrivance. Itwas suggested by an instinct natural to man. It is taught him by thebeating of his heart, by his breathing, hastened or retarded by theemotion of the moment. Nay, it may be detected by what seems the mostmonotonous of motions, the flow of water, in which, if you listenintently, you will discover a beat as regular as that of the metronome. With the natural presumption of all self-taught men, I thought I hadmade a discovery in this secret confided to me by Beaver Brook, tillProfessor Peirce told me it was always allowed for in the building ofdams. Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not onlymetre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outwardnature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, rayout from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers tospray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree standsan embodied ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of proportion, number, and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen theblue river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been ravished by thevisible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward anddownward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watchedhow, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echoflies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionaryvault below? At least there can be no doubt that metre, by itssystematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes thesenses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself insympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predispositionto the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purposeof the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the rightway; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your ownsensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The rightreception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminarycondition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mindboth in poet and hearer. The imagination must be sensitized ere it willtake the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced andfixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun. Thenthat becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of thebrain. Your own passion must penetrate and mingle with that of theartist that you may interpret him aright. You must, I say, beprepossessed, for it is the mind which shapes and colors the reports ofthe senses. Suppose you were expecting the bell to toll for the burialof some beloved person and the church-clock should begin to strike. Thefirst lingering blow of the hammer would beat upon your very heart, andthence the shock would run to all the senses at once; but after a fewstrokes you would be undeceived, and the sound would become commonplaceagain. On the other hand, suppose that at a certain hour you knew that acriminal was to be executed; then the ordinary striking of the clockwould have the sullen clang of a funeral bell. So in Shakespeare'sinstance of the lover, does he not suddenly find himself sensible of abeauty in the world about him before undreamed of, because his passionhas somehow got into whatever he sees and hears? Will not the rustle ofsilk across a counter stop his pulse because it brings back to his sensethe odorous whisper of Parthenissa's robe? Is not the beat of thehorse's hoofs as rapid to Angelica pursued as the throbs of her ownheart huddling upon one another in terror, while it is slow to SisterAnne, as the pulse that pauses between hope and fear, as she listens onthe tower for rescue, and would have the rider "spur, though mounted onthe wind"?

Dr. Johnson tells us that that only is good poetry which may betranslated into sensible prose. I greatly doubt whether any veryprofound emotion can be so rendered. Man is a metrical animal, and it isnot in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joyover the new centre of hope and terror that is sucking life from herbreast. Translate passion into sensible prose and it becomes absurd, because subdued to workaday associations, to that level of common senseand convention where to betray intense feeling is ridiculous andunmannerly. Shall I ask Shakespeare to translate me his love "stillclimbing 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 MonsieurJourdains, at once her face could "launch a thousand ships and burn thetopless towers of Ilion"? Could Aeschylus, if put upon the stand, defendhis 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 explainany more than we can describe a perfume. There is a little quatrain ofGongora's quoted by Calderon in his "Alcalde of Zalamea" which has aninexplicable 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 itwill, I dare say, outlive much wiser things in my memory. It is the veryfunction of poetry to free us from that witch's circle of common sensewhich holds us fast in its narrow enchantment. In this disenthralment, language and verse have their share, and we may say that language alsois capable of a certain idealization. Here is a passage from the XXXthsong 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 Namingof 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 theidealization of that of Drayton, who becomes poeticalonly 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 dwellingon the generic characteristics. In "Antony and Cleopatra" Shakespearemakes Lepidus tipsy, and nothing can be droller than the drunken gravitywith which he persists in proving himself capable of bearing his part inthe conversation. We seem to feel the whirl in his head when we find hismind revolving round a certain fixed point to which he clings as to apost. Antony is telling stories of Egypt to Octavius, and Lepidus, drawninto 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 beencontradicted:

 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, heasks, 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 evadesembarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with thedagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aestheticsense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, thoughthese would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of thisthat led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything wassupposed to be made poetical by being called something else, andsomething longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the legencased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown, " whereasthe imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to themind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to thiswas a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, andpersonification with that typical expression which is the true functionof 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 singlestealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard themurderous 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 noiseor Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you willperceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffusenesswhich distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention. Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy asthe two points most apt to impress the imagination. 

The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on theother hand, adorns, illustrates, and commonly amplifies. The one issuggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander, " Iread--

 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 brightnessof her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune'sskies" we have not only the simple fact that the waters are theatmosphere of the sea-god's realm, but are reminded of that reflectedheaven which Hero must have so often watched as it deepened below hertower in the smooth Hellespont. I call this as high an example of fancyas could well be found; it is picture and sentiment combined--the veryessence of the picturesque. 

But when Keats calls Mercury "the star of Lethe, " the word "star" makesus see him as the poor ghosts do who are awaiting his convoy, while theword "Lethe" intensifies our sympathy by making us feel his coming asthey do who are longing to drink of forgetfulness. And this again reactsupon the word "star, " which, as it before expressed only the shining ofthe god, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitualassociation of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothingcan 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 fieldthrough Ruth's eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, notmerely 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 lightsand sounds and emotions that are outworn and familiar. It calls the soulback once more under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest bushburn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible presence of God. And itworks the same miracle for language. The word it has touched retains thewarmth of life forever. We talk about the age of superstition and fableas if they were passed away, as if no ghost could walk in the pure whitelight of science, yet the microscope that can distinguish between thedisks that float in the blood of man and ox is helpless, a mere deadeyeball, before this mystery of Being, this wonder of Life, the sympathywhich puts us in relation with all nature, before that mightycirculation of Deity in which stars and systems are but as theblood-disks in our own veins. And so long as wonder lasts, so long willimagination find thread for her loom, and sit like the Lady of Shalottweaving that magical web in which "the shows of things are accommodatedto the desires of the mind. "

It is precisely before this phenomenon of life in literature andlanguage that criticism is forced to stop short. That it is there weknow, but what it is we cannot precisely tell. It flits before us likethe bird in the old story. When we think to grasp it, we already hear itsinging just beyond us. It is the imagination which enables the poet togive away his own consciousness in dramatic poetry to his characters, innarrative to his language, so that they react upon us with the sameoriginal 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 liableto the danger of degenerating into mannerism. Nay, where the imaginationis absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theologicaldiscussions in "Paradise Lost, " it becomes mannerism of the mostwearisome 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 couldnever divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable. But allauthors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit liesless in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to becomemannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easilyimitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since histime, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influencehas in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined byhim. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there iscircumlocution in the crow of a cock. Cowper was only saved by mixingequal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind ofcross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we shouldnot forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and thatno one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters themajesty 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 theproof that he had it, and that of the very highest and subtlest kind, inthe fact that I can nowhere put my finger on it, and say it is here orthere. [1]

[Footnote 1: In his essay, "Shakespeare Once More" (_Works_, in, pp. 36-42), published in 1868, Mr. Lowell has treated of Shakespeare's stylein a passage of extraordinary felicity and depth of critical judgment. ]

I do not mean that things in themselves artificial may not be highlyagreeable. We learn by degrees to take a pleasure in the mannerism ofGibbon and Johnson. It is something like reading Latin as a livinglanguage. But in both these cases the man is only present by histhought. It is the force of that, and only that, which distinguishesthem from their imitators, who easily possess themselves of everythingelse. But with Burke, who has true style, we have a very differentexperience. If we _go_ along with Johnson or Gibbon, we are _carried_along by Burke. Take the finest specimen of him, for example, "TheLetter to a Noble Lord. " The sentences throb with the very pulse of thewriter. As he kindles, the phrase glows and dilates, and we feelourselves sharing in that warmth and expansion. At last we no longerread, we seem to hear him, so livingly is the whole man in what hewrites; and when the spell is over, we can scarce believe that thosedull types could have held such ravishing discourse. And yet we are toldthat 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 thatour nerves of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the violin issaid to do, to certain modulations, so that we receive them with areadier sympathy at every repetition. This is a part of the sweet charmof the classics. We are pleased with things in Horace which we shouldnot find especially enlivening in Mr. Tupper. Cowper, in one of hisletters, after turning a clever sentence, says, "There! if that had beenwritten in Latin seventeen centuries ago by Mr. Flaccus, you would havethought it rather neat. " How fully any particular rhythm gets possessionof us we can convince ourselves by our dissatisfaction with anyemendation made by a contemporary poet in his verses. Posterity maythink he has improved them, but we are jarred by any change in the oldtune. Even without any habitual association, we cannot help recognizinga certain power over our fancy in mere words. In verse almost every earis caught with the sweetness of alliteration. I remember a line inThomson's "Castle of Indolence" which owes much of its fascination tothree _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 allthe moving quality of a poem. It was something about the Arctic regions, and I could never read it without the same thrill. Dr. Prichard wascertainly far from being an inspired or inspiring author, yet there wassomething in those words, or in their collocation, that affected me asonly genius can. It was probably some dimly felt association, somethinglike that strange power there is in certain odors, which, in themselvesthe most evanescent and impalpable of all impressions on the senses, have yet a wondrous magic in recalling, and making present to us, someforgotten experience. 

Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems arefull of those little pitfalls for the fancy. Whatever you have read, whether in the classics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stiryou with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable. Graymakes use of the same artifice, and with the same success. 

There is a charm in the arrangement of words also, and that not only inverse, but in prose. The finest prose is subject to the laws of metricalproportion. For example, in the song of Deborah and Barak: "Awake, awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, utter a song! Arise, Barak, and lead thycaptivity captive, thou son of Abinoam!" Or again, "At her feet hebowed; he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where hebowed, there he fell down dead. "

Setting aside, then, all charm of association, all the influence towhich we are unconsciously subjected by melody, by harmony, or even bythe mere sound of words, we may say that style is distinguished frommanner by the author's power of projecting his own emotion into what hewrites. The stylist is occupied with the impression which certain thingshave made upon him; the mannerist is wholly concerned with theimpression he shall make on others. 

III. KALEVALA

But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in whichimagination may display itself--as an active power or as a passivequality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receivesfrom nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latterreproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration byconventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by theconscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself withexpression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we callart, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in avivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet wasconscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have notcommunicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have comedown to us to which every generation adds some new significance out ofits own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for theunderstanding, and, passing into the common currency of speech, becomethe property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, whichis the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is theproperty of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always herea certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrasesand images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditionsremove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happycombination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple andnatural relation with the world about him, however little or howevermuch, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his graciousand incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomeswith the advance of every generation in literary culture and socialrefinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never producedamong cultivated people. Like the mayflower, they love the woods, andwill not be naturalized in the garden. Now, the advantage of thatprimitive kind of poetry of which I was just speaking is that it findsits imaginative components ready made to its hand. But an illustrationis worth more than any amount of discourse. Let me read you a fewpassages from a poem which grew up under the true conditions of naturaland primitive literature--remoteness, primitiveness of manners, anddependence 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 wasto have been without schooling. This, I think, every one feels at onceto be poetry that sings itself. It makes its own tune, and the heartbeats in time to its measure. By and by poets will begin to say, likeGoethe, "I sing as the bird sings"; but this poet sings in that fashionwithout thinking of it or knowing it. And it is the very music of hisrace and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos. Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners tothe old national lays grow fewer every day. Before long the Fins will bewriting 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 isapt to look about it for models, instead of looking inward for thatnative force which makes models, but does not follow them. This rose oforiginality which we long for, this bloom of imagination whose perfumeenchants us--we can seldom find it when it is near us, when it is partof 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 criticalforeboding, in the product and tendency of our younger literature, musthave had his attention awakened and detained by the writings of Mr. James. Whatever else they may be, they are not common, and have that airof good breeding which is the token of whatever is properly calledliterature. They are not the overflow of a shallow talent forimprovisation too full of self to be contained, but show everywhere themarks of intelligent purpose and of the graceful ease that comes only ofconscientious training. Undoubtedly there was a large capital of nativeendowment to start from--a mind of singular subtlety and refinement; afaculty of rapid observation, yet patient of rectifying afterthought;senses daintily alive to every aesthetic suggestion; and a frankenthusiasm, kept within due bounds by the double-consciousness of humor. But it is plain that Mr. James is fortunate enough to possess, or to bepossessed by, that finer sixth sense which we call the artistic, andwhich controls, corrects, and discontents. His felicities, therefore, are not due to a lucky turn of the dice, but to forethought andafterthought. Accordingly, he is capable of progress, and gives renewedevidence of it from time to time, while too many of our authors showpremature marks of arrested development. They strike a happy vein ofstarting, perhaps, and keep on grubbing at it, with the rude helps ofprimitive mining, seemingly unaware that it is daily growing more andmore slender. Even should it wholly vanish, they persist in the vainhope of recovering it further on, as if in literature two successes ofprecisely the same kind were possible Nay, most of them have hit upon novein at all, but picked up a nugget rather, and persevere in raking thesurface of things, if haply they may chance upon another. The moral ofone of Hawthorne's stories is that there is no element of treasure-trovein success, but that true luck lies in the deep and assiduouscultivation of our own plot of ground, be it larger or smaller. Forindeed 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, andto have profited by the best modern appliances of self-culture. Inconception and expression is he essentially an artist and not anirresponsible _trouvère_. If he allow himself an occasionalcarelessness, it is not from incaution, but because he knows perfectlywell what he is about. He is quite at home in the usages of the bestliterary society. In his writing there is none of that hit-or-missplaying at snapdragon with language, of that clownish bearing-on in whatshould be the light strokes, as if mere emphasis were meaning, andnaturally none of the slovenliness that offends a trained judgment inthe work of so many of our writers later, unmistakably clever as theyare. In short, he has _tone_, the last result and surest evidence of anintellect reclaimed from the rudeness of nature, for it meansself-restraint. The story of Handel's composing always in full dressconveys at least the useful lesson of a gentlemanlike deference for theart 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 thelounging ease of a shooting-jacket, but he respects the usages ofconvention, and at the canonical hours is sure to be found in therequired toilet. He does not expect the company to pardon his ownindolence as one of the necessary appendages of originality. Alwaysconsiderate himself, his readers soon find reason to treat him withconsideration. For they soon come to see that literature may be lightand at the same time thoughtful; that lightness, indeed, results muchmore surely from serious study than from the neglect of it. 

We have said that Mr. James was emphatically a man of culture, and weare old-fashioned enough to look upon him with the more interest as aspecimen of exclusively _modern_ culture. Of any classical training wehave failed to detect the traces in him. His allusions, his citations, are in the strictest sense contemporary, and indicate, if we may trustour divination, a preference for French models, Balzac, De Musset, Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, especially the threelatter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, theirclever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by directbluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is anadmirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable byexample. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to becalled our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the Frenchsmall-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows thegraceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a mandistinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of lettingus feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusivelyaware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of hischaracter by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be madealways in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes andprejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proofof indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any faultwith Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, itwould be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like_bouder, se reconnaît, banal_, and the like), where our English, withoutbeing driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite asgood and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow asnear surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who sogenerally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us adisagreeable alien like _abandon_ (used as a noun), as if it could showan honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster. Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance thatescapes 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 inGeneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into therusticism that "remembers of" a thing. 

But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligentstudy 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 athoughtful observer of men and things. He has seen more cities andmanners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and ifwith less gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of hisartistic 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 ofthe world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not inhim degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imaginationransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity. He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results ina man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampeningthe ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line hehas chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of characterand psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities ofsociety, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature andart into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr. James does not see things with his eyes alone. His vision is alwaysmodified by his imaginative temperament. He is the last man we shouldconsult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow ofsensitive impression, and are positively better than the actualpilgrimage. We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, buthardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. _Et ego inArcadia_, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not thename 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 thegiddier sister)--it is always fact seen through imagination andtransfigured by it. A single example will best show what we mean. "It ispartly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftenedthat the aqueducts are so impressive. _They seem the very source of thesolitude in which they stand_; they look like architectural spectres, and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recedealong the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose outof Egyptian sands. " Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James'spages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chancecrevice 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 itstood. " 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 usinto many byways of serious and fruitful thought. Especially valuableand helpful have we found his _obiter dicta_ on the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture; for example, when he says of the Tuscanpalaces that "in their large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty ofeffect, [they] reproduce more than other modern styles the simplenobleness of Greek architecture. " And we would note also what he says ofthe 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 airilyover the middle term to the conclusion, leaving something in thelikeness of a ditch across the path of our slower intelligences, whichlook about them and think twice before taking the leap. Courage! thereare always fresh woods and pastures new on the other side. A curiousreflection has more than once flashed upon our minds as we lingered withMr. James over his complex and refined sensations: we mean the verystriking contrast between the ancient and modern traveller. The formersaw with his bodily eyes, and reported accordingly, catering for thecuriosity of homely wits as to the outsides and appearances of things. Even Montaigne, habitually introspective as he was, sticks to the oldmethod in his travels. The modern traveller, on the other hand, superseded by the guide-book, travels in himself, and records for us thescenery of his own mind as it is affected by change of sky and thevarious weather of temperament. 

Mr. James, in his sketches, frankly acknowledges his preference of theOld World. Life--which here seems all drab to him, without due lightsand shades of social contrast, without that indefinable suggestion ofimmemorial antiquity which has so large a share in picturesqueimpression--is there a dome of many-colored glass irradiating bothsenses and imagination. We shall not blame him too gravely for this, asif an American had not as good a right as any ancient of them all tosay, _Ubi libertas, ibi patria_. It is no real paradox to affirm that aman's love of his country may often be gauged by his disgust at it. Butwe think it might fairly be argued against him that the very absence ofthat distracting complexity of associations might help to produce thatsolitude which is the main feeder of imagination. Certainly, Hawthorne, with whom no modern European can be matched for the subtlety and powerof this marvellous quality, is a strong case on the American side of thequestion. 

Mr. James's tales, if without any obvious moral, are sure to have aclearly defined artistic purpose. They are careful studies of characterthrown into dramatic action, and the undercurrent of motive is, as itshould be, not in the circumstances but in the characters themselves. Itis by delicate touches and hints that his effects are produced. Thereader 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 anartist. Nowhere does he show his fine instinct more to the purpose thanin leaving the tragic element of tales (dealing as they do withcontemporary life, and that mainly in the drawing-room) to take care ofitself, and in confining the outward expression of passion within thelimits of a decorous amenity. Those who must have their intellectualgullets tingled with the fiery draught of coarse sensation must goelsewhere for their dram; but whoever is capable of the aroma of themore delicate vintages will find it here. In the volume before us"Madame de Mauves" will illustrate what we mean. There is no space fordetailed analysis, even if that were ever adequate to give the trueimpression of stories so carefully worked out and depending so much fortheir effect on a gradual cumulation of particulars each in itselfunemphatic. We have said that Mr. James shows promise as well asaccomplishment, gaining always in mastery of his material. It is but anatural inference from this that his "Roderick Hudson" is the fullestand most finished proof of his power as a story-teller. Indeed, we maysay frankly that it pleases us the more because the characters are drawnwith a bolder hand and in more determined outline, for if Mr. James needany friendly caution, it is against over-delicacy of handling. 

LONGFELLOW

THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH

The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon Englishsoil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt wasfirst systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metreremained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. GabrielHarvey, --a kind of Don Adriano de Armado, --whose chief claim toremembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he wasthe first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "FoureLetters" (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 SirPhillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and elsewhere. "This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an afterthoughtwith Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him and Spenser in1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a collaborator withSidney and others in the good work. The Earl of Surrey is said to havebeen the first who wrote thus in English. The most successful person, however, was William Webb, who translated two of Virgil's Eclogues witha good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in his "Schoolmaster" (1570), had already suggested the adoption of the ancient hexameter by Englishpoets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham in his "Art of Poesie")thought the number of monosyllabic words in English an insuperableobjection 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 newkind 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 thissentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdueEnglish to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, forexample, 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 earof 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, "thatdrunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill, like the waye betwixt Stamford and Beechfeeld, and goes like a horseplunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to thesaddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes. " It will be noticed that hisprose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England atthat time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so faruseful 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 theirgrave beauty and strength. 

The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann HeinrichVoss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer tothe contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His"Odyssey" (1783), his "Iliad" (1791), and his "Luise" (1795), wereconfessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann andDorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modernhexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other classic metresinto England, and we should be grateful to him, at least, for havinggiven the model for Canning's "Knife-grinder. " The exotic, however, again refused to take root, and for many years after we have no exampleof English hexameters. It was universally conceded that the temper ofour language was unfriendly to them. 

It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not onlytolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of theLord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but "Evangeline"(1847), though encumbered with too many descriptive irrelevancies, wasso full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made converts bythousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than this, it madeLongfellow at once the most popular of contemporary English poets. Clough's "Bothie"--poem whose singular merit has hitherto failed of thewide 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 astriking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we havenever been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is adangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniformfor true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellowinto 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 stylein other metres, as where he says

 Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_, using a word as essentially unpoetic as "surtout or pea-jacket. " Wethink one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustomsthe poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accentedsounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity ofphrase. 

But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we asfrankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "MilesStandish. " In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; thenarrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with afirmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness, andsimplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truestartistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than thepicture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is witha delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and charactersof the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of Priscillaspinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We feel charmedto see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the little oldfamiliar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are astonished, like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius could becontained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot associatesentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins may beconsoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the HuguenotDesmoulins--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon. 

Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporarypopularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always waitfor a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in anygeneral sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever toreceive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity initself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is andalways has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatlypopular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all thegreat poets--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply andnaturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, whichbrings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensedexpression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that isa proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one whois capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr. Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those criticsare 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 isa 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 fromany special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two stanzas couldbe cut off from "The Two Angels, " a poem which, without them, is asperfect as anything in the language. 

Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain jewelsin Maga's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should, perhaps, have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of our mostprecious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some veryunfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it seemed tous, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original poet. Thewriter who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more complex ormore esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite with thefew; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and notpersonal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the developmentof individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the gratitude andlove of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solaceand 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 epicnarration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. Inour love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the redpepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt tooverlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrativethan in "The Courtship of Miles Standish. " Apart from its intrinsicbeauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtfulconsideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdictof the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to nofleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of thatwhich charms now and charms always, --true power and originality, withoutgrimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic typeof strength. 

TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN

It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular ofAmerican, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of hisnature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of hisimages, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justifythe public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation willsettle into fame. That he has not _this_ of Tennyson, nor _that_ ofBrowning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other thingsthat are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in hisverse that make day for a moment in this dim cavern of consciousnesswhere we grope; but there is an equable sunshine that touches thelandscape 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 theless a master within his own sphere--all the more so, indeed, that he isconscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving tobe other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as inthese latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poetslike that of Irving among our prose-writers. Make whatever deductionsand qualifications, and they still keep their place in the hearts andminds of men. In point of time he is our Chaucer--the first who importeda finer foreign culture into our poetry. 

His present volume shows a greater ripeness than any of itspredecessors. We find a mellowness of early autumn in it. There is theold sweetness native to the man, with greater variety of character andexperience. The personages are all drawn from the life, and sketchedwith the light firmness of a practised art. They have no moreindividuality than is necessary to the purpose of the poem, whichconsists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellersgathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or itssentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is anatural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness ofhis Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find thesame airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicitiesof description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes, and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease ofstyle which is, of all things, the hardest to attain. The verse flowsclear and sweet as honey, and with a faint fragrance that tells, but nottoo plainly, of flowers that grew in many fields. We are made to feelthat, however tedious the processes of culture may be, the ripe resultin facile power and scope of fancy is purely delightful. We confess thatwe are so heartily weary of those cataclysms of passion and sentimentwith which literature has been convulsed of late, --as if the main objectwere, not to move the reader, but to shake the house about hisears, --that the homelike quiet and beauty of such poems as these is likean escape from noise to nature. 

As regards the structure of the work looked at as a whole, it strikes usas a decided fault, that the Saga of King Olaf is so disproportionatelylong, especially as many of the pieces which compose it are by no meansso well done as the more strictly original ones. We have no quarrel withthe foreign nature of the subject as such, --for any good matter isAmerican enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinkingthat Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness forfreshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himselffelt. Put into English, the Saga seems _too_ Norse; and there is often ahitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed forliteral closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, buthardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in theethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent"is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship, " whichhe learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland, where he played as a boy. We are willing, however, to pardon the partswhich 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, amongour elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression inthe Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in adrab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time tothe tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American ofour poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burnsall the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is notas a singular antithesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity ofhis is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as illustratinghow deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon thecommonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sectthey chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of thePuritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englanderis too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens toreverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of asincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poeticsentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitifulsnobbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of thePuritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest menbrought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of thedemocracy which was to develop itself from their institutions. Theybrought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly natureof the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate anddisperse itself. The same conditions have produced the same results alsoat the South, and nothing but slavery blocks the way to a perfectsympathy between the two sections. 

Mr. Whittier is essentially a lyric poet, and the fervor of histemperament gives his pieces of that kind a remarkable force andeffectiveness. Twenty years ago many of his poems were in the nature of_conciones ad populum_, vigorous stump-speeches in verse, appealing asmuch to the blood as the brain, and none the less convincing for that. By regular gradations ever since his tone has been softening and hisrange widening. As a poet he stands somewhere between Burns and Cowper, akin to the former in patriotic glow, and to the latter in intensity ofreligious anxiety verging sometimes on morbidness. His humanity, if itlack the humorous breadth of the one, has all the tenderness of theother. In love of outward nature he yields to neither. His delight in itis not a new sentiment or a literary tradition, but the genuine passionof a man born and bred in the country, who has not merely a visitingacquaintance with the landscape, but stands on terms of lifelongfriendship with hill, stream, rock, and tree. In his descriptions heoften catches the _expression_ of rural scenery, a very different thingfrom the mere _looks_, with the trained eye of familiar intimacy. Asomewhat shy and hermitical being we take him to be, and more a studentof his own heart than of men. His characters, where he introduces such, are commonly abstractions, with little of the flesh and blood of reallife in them, and this from want of experience rather than of sympathy;for many of his poems show him capable of friendship almost womanly inits purity and warmth. One quality which we especially value in him isthe intense home-feeling which, without any conscious aim at beingAmerican, gives his poetry a flavor of the soil surprisingly refreshing. Without being narrowly provincial, he is the most indigenous of ourpoets. In these times, especially, his uncalculating love of country hasa profound pathos in it. He does not flare the flag in our faces, butone feels the heart of a lover throbbing in his anxious verse. 

Mr. Whittier, if the most fervid of our poets, is sometimes hurried awayby this very quality, in itself an excellence, into being the mostcareless. 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 ripewine of expression. His rhymes are often faulty beyond the mostprovincial license even of Burns himself. Vigor without elegance willnever achieve permanent success in poetry. We think, also, that he hastoo often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path towhich his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, intometaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real lifeof his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a _smudge_, and givesevidence of itself in smoke instead of flame. Where he follows his truerinstincts, he is often admirable in the highest sense, and never withoutthe interest of natural thought and feeling naturally expressed. 

HOME BALLADS AND POEMS

The natural product of a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of manand reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been BernardBarton. _His_ verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of thesect; for from title-page to colophon there was no sin either in the wayof music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse, that brewed a cup, neither cheering unduly nor inebriating, out of theemptyings of Wordsworth's teapot. How that little busy B. Improved eachshining hour, how neatly he laid his wax, it gives us a cold shiver tothink of--_ancora ci raccappriccia!_ Against a copy of verses signed"B. B. , " as we remember them in the hardy Annuals that went to seed somany years ago, we should warn our incautious offspring as anexperienced duck might her brood against a charge of B. B. Shot. Itbehooves men to be careful; for one may chance to suffer lifelong fromthese intrusions of cold lead in early life, as duellists sometimescarry about all their days a bullet from which no surgery can relievethem. Memory avenges our abuses of her, and, as an awful example, wemention the fact that we have never been able to forget certain stanzasof another B. B. , who, under the title of "Boston Bard, " whilom obtainedfrom newspaper columns that concession which gods and men wouldunanimously have denied him. 

George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays onestablished order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made himcrazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else itmight 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 inthe men themselves. Poetry demands a richer and more various culture, and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and EliasBoudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth issomething very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety ofthe same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment asthey will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequatefor the waste of human life as the Journal of an average Quaker. Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singingsprings, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness. 

Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, whocan never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as shemade a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choicebetween Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on thewhole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. Hesings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery. He has not forgiven thePuritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admiresthem 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 thanwith 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 meritthat he smacks of the soil. It is a New England heart he buttons hisstraight-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain nowand 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_. Forthe last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the restwe can make no terms whatever, --they must march out with no honors ofwar. The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would givea flavor of _essence-pennyr'y'l_ to the very Beatitudes. It differs fromLowland Scotch as a _patois_ from a dialect. 

But criticism is not a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has otherand better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in theheart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soilmight have made him a Burns or a Béranger for us. New England is dry andhard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where themagnolia 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, theentire outfit of Shakespeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere"; andwhen the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir ofapproval. But it is all _bosh_, nevertheless. Nature is _not_ the samehere, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled hisbeing with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped inhistory, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere ofthought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition. Nature without anideal background is nothing. We may claim whatever merits we like (andour orators are not too bashful), we may be as free and enlightened aswe choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We maybe as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear tothe political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has littleof that marvellous bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finerissues than a gregarious activity in hoarding. The Puritans left us afine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but theydisinherited us of the past. Not a single stage-property of poetry didthey bring with them but the good old Devil, with his graminivorousattributes, and even he could not stand the climate. Neither horn norhoof nor tail of him has been seen for a century. He is as dead as thegoat-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, intellectualatmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artistscomplain that it rounds no edges. We have sometimes thought that hisverses suffered from a New England taint in a too great tendency tometaphysics 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 thepresent volume there is little of it. It is more purely objective thanany of its forerunners, and is full of the most charming rural picturesand glimpses, in which every sight and sound, every flower, bird, andtree, 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 whichsees only what it ought, and that artistic memory which brings homecompositions and not catalogues. There is hardly a hill, rock, stream, or sea-fronting headland in the neighborhood of his home that he has notfondly remembered. Sometimes, we think, there is too much description, the besetting sin of modern verse, which has substituted what should becalled wordy-painting for the old art of painting in a single word. Theessential character of Mr. Whittier's poetry is lyrical, and the rush ofthe lyric, like that of a brook, allows few pictures. Now and then theremay 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 withthe prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it. This volumecontains 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 modernballads. There are others nearly as good in their way, and all, with asingle exception, embodying native legends. In "Telling the Bees, " Mr. Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of exquisitegrace and feeling. "The Garrison of Cape Ann" would have been a finepoem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at theend of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point of a sword. It ispleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to CottonMather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much badEnglish and worse Latin. With all his faults, that conceited old pedantcontrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written onthis side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the troubleto give us a tolerably correct edition of it. Absurdity is commonenough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightfulgift. 

This last volume has given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier'spowers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, hisearnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every thirdstump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have saidDemosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softerand more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. Thehalf-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and, we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia. " Theyears deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richerquality in these verses where the ferment is over and the _rile_ hasquietly settled. We have had no more purely American poet than Mr. Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorousexpression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has beenso true to the present. 

SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL

At the close of his poem Mr. Whittier utters a hope that it may recallsome pleasant country memories to the overworked slaves of our greatcities, and that he may deserve those thanks which are all the moregrateful that they are rather divined by the receiver than directlyexpressed by the giver. The reviewer cannot aspire to all the merit ofthis confidential privacy and pleasing shyness of gratitude, but he mayfairly lay claim to a part of it, inasmuch as, though obliged to speakhis thanks publicly, he need not do it to the author's face. We areagain indebted to Mr. Whittier, as we have been so often before, for avery real and a very refined pleasure. The little volume before us hasall his most characteristic merits. It is true to Nature and in localcoloring, pure in sentiment, quietly deep in feeling, and full of thosesimple touches which show the poetic eye and the trained hand. Here is aNew England interior glorified with something of that inward light whichis apt to be rather warmer in the poet than the Quaker, but which, blending the qualities of both in Mr. Whittier, produces that kind ofspiritual picturesqueness which gives so peculiar a charm to his verse. There is in this poem a warmth of affectionate memory and religiousfaith as touching as it is uncommon, and which would be altogetherdelightful if it did not remind us that the poet was growing old. Notthat there is any other mark of senescence than the ripened sweetness ofa life both publicly and privately well spent. There is fire enough, butit glows more equably and shines on sweeter scenes than in the poet'searlier verse. It is as if a brand from the camp-fire had kindled theselogs on the old homestead's hearth, whose flickering benediction touchestremulously those dear heads of long ago that are now transfigured witha holier light. The father, the mother, the uncle, the schoolmaster, theuncanny guest, are all painted in warm and natural colors, with perfecttruth of detail and yet with all the tenderness of memory. Of the familygroup the poet is the last on earth, and there is something deeplytouching in the pathetic sincerity of the affection which has outlivedthem all, looking back to before the parting, and forward to the assuredreunion. 

But aside from its poetic and personal interest, and the pleasure itmust give to every one who loves pictures from the life, "Snow-Bound"has something of historical interest. It describes scenes and mannerswhich the rapid changes of our national habits will soon have made asremote from us as if they were foreign or ancient. Already, alas! evenin farmhouses, backlog and forestick are obsolescent words, andclose-mouthed stoves chill the spirit while they bake the flesh withtheir grim and undemonstrative hospitality. Already are the railroadsdisplacing the companionable cheer of crackling walnut with the doggedself-complacency and sullen virtue of anthracite. Even where woodsurvives, he is too often shut in the dreary madhouse cell of anairtight, round which one can no more fancy a social mug of flipcircling 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 forus shall still warm and cheer, when a wood fire is as faint a traditionin New as in Old England. 

We have before had occasion to protest against Mr. Whittier'scarelessness in accents and rhymes, as in pronouncing "ly'ceum, " andjoining in unhallowed matrimony such sounds as _awn_ and _orn_, _ents_and _ence_. We would not have the Muse emulate the unidiomaticpreciseness of a normal school-mistress, but we cannot help thinkingthat, if Mr. Whittier writes thus on principle, as we begin to suspect, he errs in forgetting that thought so refined as his can be fitlymatched only with an equal refinement of expression, and loses somethingof its charm when cheated of it. We hope he will, at least, never mountPega'sus, or water him in Heli'con, and that he will leave Mu'seum tothe more vulgar sphere and obtuser sensibilities of Barnum. Where Naturehas sent genius, she has a right to expect that it shall be treated witha certain elegance of hospitality. 

POETRY AND NATIONALITY[1]

[Footnote 1: This essay, to which I have given the above title, formsthe 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 DeanHowells, 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 poetshould come out of the West, fashioned on a scale somewhat proportionedto our geographical pretensions. Our rivers, forests, mountains, cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in him their antitypeand voice. Shaggy he was to be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties, unhampered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse, half-alligatorbreed. 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. Itwas a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judiciousprophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of itsterms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dareaffirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he wasimpossible? And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless. 

Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturallylevy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images andillustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhereoutside of the life that lay immediately about him. Life in its largesense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, isthe only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always closeat hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and thedifference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota isalmost inappreciable. Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always tounderlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it. The Iliadand the Odyssey paint manners that are only here and there incidentallytrue to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either neverexisted or had long since passed away. Had Dante's scope been narrowedto contemporary Italy, the "Divina Commedia" would have been apicture-book merely. But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspiredhim was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theoriesas abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shakespeare shows us less ofthe England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time. The struggle of Goethe's whole life was to emancipate himself fromGermany, and fill his lungs for once with a more universal air. 

Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in these rare fruits, somegift of the sun peculiar to the region that ripened them. If we are everto have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality will be ofthis subtile essence, something that shall make him unspeakably nearerto us, while it does not provincialize him for the rest of mankind. Thepopular recipe for compounding him would give us, perhaps, the mostsublimely furnished bore in human annals. The novel aspects of lifeunder our novel conditions may give some freshness of color to ourliterature; but democracy itself, which many seem to regard as thenecessary Lucina of some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract aninfluence to serve for any such purpose. If any American author may belooked on as in some sort the result of our social and political ideal, it is Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the traditional, in theirresponsible freedom of his speculation, and his faith in the absolutevalue 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 faras possible from the shaggy hero of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, whohave tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and maysafely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be ourrepresentative singer. [1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to thecredit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hopefor better things. 

[Footnote 1: This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who ismentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. TheHowells essay appeared two years before the above. A. M. ]

The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; andif a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and thegift of the right word, --for it is these, and not sublime spaces, thatmake a poet, --he will be original rather in spite of democracy than inconsequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite as much to theaccumulations of the Old World as to the promises of the New. But for along while yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not, perhaps, forthe birth of such a man, but for his development and culture. Atpresent, with the largest reading population in the world, perhaps nocountry ever offered less encouragement to the higher forms of art orthe more thorough achievements of scholarship. Even were it not so, itwould be idle to expect us to produce any literature so peculiarly ourown as was the natural growth of ages less communicative, less open toevery breath of foreign influence. Literature tends more and more tobecome a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality. Anymore Cids, or Songs of Roland, or Nibelungens, or Kalewalas are out ofthe question, --nay, anything at all like them; for the necessaryinsulation of race, of country, of religion, is impossible, even were itdesirable. Journalism, translation, criticism, and facility ofintercourse tend continually more and more to make the thought and turnof expression in cultivated men identical all over the world. Whether welike it or not, the costume of mind and body is gradually becoming ofone cut. 

W. D. HOWELLS

VENETIAN LIFE

Those of our readers who watch with any interest the favorable omens ofour literature from time to time, must have had their eyes drawn toshort poems, remarkable for subtilty of sentiment and delicacy ofexpression, and bearing the hitherto unfamiliar name of Mr. Howells. Such verses are not common anywhere; as the work of a young man they arevery uncommon. Youthful poets commonly begin by trying on variousmanners before they settle upon any single one that is prominently theirown. But what especially interested us in Mr. Howells was, that hiswritings were from the very first not merely tentative and preliminary, but had somewhat of the conscious security of matured _style_. This issomething which most poets arrive at through much tribulation. It issomething which has nothing to do with the measure of their intellectualpowers or of their moral insight, but is the one quality whichessentially distinguishes the artist from the mere man of genius. Amongthe English poets of the last generation, Keats is the only one whoearly showed unmistakable signs of it, and developed it more and morefully until his untimely death. Wordsworth, though in most respects afar profounder man, attained it only now and then, indeed only onceperfectly, --in his "Laodamia. " Now, though it be undoubtedly true fromone point of view that what a man has to say is of more importance thanhow he says it, and that modern criticism especially is more apt to beguided by its moral and even political sympathies than by aestheticprinciples, it remains as true as ever that only those things have beensaid finally which have been said perfectly, and that this finishedutterance is peculiarly the office of poetry, or of what, for want ofsome word as comprehensive as the German _Dichtung_, we are forced tocall imaginative literature. Indeed, it may be said that, in whateverkind of writing, it is style alone that is able to hold the attention ofthe world long. Let a man be never so rich in thought, if he is clumsyin the expression of it, his sinking, like that of an old Spanishtreasureship, will be hastened by the very weight of his bullion, andperhaps, after the lapse of a century, some lucky diver fishes up hisingots and makes a fortune out of him. 

That Mr. Howells gave unequivocal indications of possessing this finequality interested us in his modest preludings. Marked, as they no doubtwere, by some uncertainty of aim and indefiniteness of thought, that"stinting, " as Chaucer calls it, of the nightingale "ere he beginnethsing, " there was nothing in them of the presumption and extravagancewhich young authors are so apt to mistake for originality and vigor. Sentiment predominated over reflection, as was fitting in youth; butthere was a refinement, an instinctive reserve of phrase, and a felicityof 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 asensation, --one of those authors more rare than ever in our day ofhand-to-mouth cleverness, who has a conscious ideal of excellence, and, as we hope, the patience that will at length reach it. We made occasionto find out something about him, and what we learned served to increaseour interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of therough-and-ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man withno advantage of college-training, who, passing from the compositor'sdesk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty ofthe humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated. Asingular fruit, we thought, of our shaggy democracy, --as interesting aphenomenon in that regard as it has been our fortune to encounter. Whereis the rudeness of a new community, the pushing vulgarity of animperfect civilization, the licentious contempt of forms that marks ourunchartered freedom, and all the other terrible things which have solong been the bugaboos of European refinement? Here was a naturalproduct, as perfectly natural as the deliberate attempt of "WaltWhitman" to answer the demand of native and foreign misconception wasperfectly artificial. Our institutions do not, then, irretrievably doomus to coarseness and to impatience of that restraining precedent whichalone makes true culture possible and true art attainable. Unless we aremistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howellswhich is a better argument for the American social and political systemthan any empirical theories that can be constructed against it. 

We know of no single word which will so fitly characterize Mr. Howells'snew volume about Venice as "delightful. " The artist has studied hissubject for four years, and at last presents us with a series ofpictures having all the charm of tone and the minute fidelity to naturewhich were the praise of the Dutch school of painters, but with a highersentiment, a more refined humor, and an airy elegance that recalls thebetter moods of Watteau. We do not remember any Italian studies sofaithful or the result of such continuous opportunity, unless it be the"Roba di Roma" of Mr. Story, and what may be found scattered in theworks of Henri Beyle. But Mr. Story's volumes recorded only the chanceobservations of a quick and familiar eye in the intervals of aprofession to which one must be busily devoted who would rise to theacknowledged eminence occupied by their author; and Beyle's mind, thoughsingularly acute and penetrating, had too much of the hardness of a manof the world and of Parisian cynicism to be altogether agreeable. Mr. Howells, during four years of that consular leisure which only Venicecould make tolerable, devoted himself to the minute study of the superbprison to which he was doomed, and his book is his "Prigioni. " Venicehas been the university in which he has fairly earned the degree ofMaster. There is, perhaps, no European city, not even Bruges, not evenRome herself, which, not yet in ruins, is so wholly of the past, at oncealive and turned to marble, like the Prince of the Black Islands in thestory. And what gives it a peculiar fascination is that its antiquity, though venerable, is yet modern, and, so to speak, continuous; whilethat of Rome belongs half to a former world and half to this, and isbroken irretrievably in two. The glory of Venice, too, was theachievement 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 streetsaccords perfectly with the spiritual mood which makes us feel as if wewere passing through a city of dream. Fancy now an imaginative young manfrom Ohio, where the log-hut was but yesterday turned to almost lessenduring brick and mortar, set down suddenly in the midst of all thisalmost immemorial permanence of grandeur. We cannot think of any one onwhom the impression would be so strangely deep, or whose eyes would beso quickened by the constantly recurring shock of unfamiliar objects. Most men are poor observers, because they are cheated into a delusion ofintimacy with the things so long and so immediately about them; butsurely we may hope for something like seeing from fresh eyes, and thosetoo a poet's, when they open suddenly on a marvel so utterly alien totheir daily vision and so perdurably novel as Venice. Nor does Mr. Howells disappoint our expectation. We have here something like afull-length portrait of the Lady of the Lagoons. 

We have been struck in this volume, as elsewhere in writings of the sameauthor, with the charm of _tone_ that pervades it. It is so constant asto bear witness, not only to a real gift, but to the thoughtfulcultivation of it. Here and there Mr. Howells yields to the temptationof _execution_, to which persons specially felicitous in language areliable, and pushes his experiments of expression to the verge of beingunidiomatic, in his desire to squeeze the last drop of significance fromwords; but this is seldom, and generally we receive that unconsciouspleasure in reading him which comes of naturalness, the last and highesttriumph of good writing. Mr. Howells, of all men, does not need to betold that, as wine of the highest flavor and most delicate _bouquet_ ismade from juice pressed out by the unaided weight of the grapes, so inexpression we are in danger of getting something like acridness if wecrush in with the first sprightly runnings the skins and kernels ofwords in our vain hope to win more than we ought of their color andmeaning. But, as we have said, this is rather a temptation to which henow and then shows himself liable, than a fault for which he can oftenbe blamed. If a mind open to all poetic impressions, a sensibility toosincere ever to fall into maudlin sentimentality, a style flexible andsweet without weakness, and a humor which, like the bed of a stream, isthe support of deep feeling, and shows waveringly through it in spots offull sunshine, --if such qualities can make a truly delightful book, thenMr. Howells has made one in the volume before us. And we give himwarning that much will be expected of one who at his years has alreadyshown himself capable of so much. 

EDGAR A. POE[1]

[Footnote 1: The following notice of Mr. Poe's life and works waswritten at his own request, and accompanied a portrait of him publishedin _Graham's Magazine_ for February, 1845. It is here [in R. W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)] given with a few alterationsand 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 intomany systems, each revolving round its several sun, and often presentingto the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capitalcity, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from whichlife and vigor radiate to the extremities, but resembles more anisolated umbilicus, stuck down as near as may be to the centre of theland, and seeming rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than toserve any present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has itsliterature almost more distinct than those of the different dialects ofGermany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one of her own, ofwhich some articulate rumor barely has reached us dwellers by theAtlantic. 

Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism ofcontemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give praise whereit is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often seducesthe iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she writes whatseems rather like an epitaph than a criticism. Yet if praise be given asan alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into any man's hat. Thecritic's ink may suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgallsor of sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and wemight readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding-placeof truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we usually findmixed with it. 

Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life ofimaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude andpeculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of aromantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted byMr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed thewarranty of a large estate to the young poet. Having received aclassical education in England, he returned home and entered theUniversity of Virginia, where, after an extravagant course, followed byreformation at the last extremity, he was graduated with the highesthonors of his class. Then came a boyish attempt to join the fortunes ofthe insurgent Greeks, which ended at St. Petersburg, where he got intodifficulties through want of a passport, from which he was rescued bythe American consul, and sent home. [1] He now entered the militaryacademy at West Point from which he obtained a dismissal on hearing ofthe birth of a son to his adopted father, by a second marriage, an eventwhich cut off his expectations as an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, inwhose will his name was not mentioned, soon after relieved him of alldoubt in this regard, and he committed himself at once to authorship fora support. Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) asmall volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, andexcited high expectations of its author's future distinction in theminds of many competent judges. 

[Footnote 1: There is little evidence for this story, which somebiographers have dismissed as a myth created by Poe himself. SeeWoodberry's _Poe_, v. I, p. 337. ]

That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet's earliest lispingsthere are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare's first poems, thoughbrimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness, give but a very faintpromise of the directness, condensation, and overflowing moral of hismaturer works. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare is hardly a case in point, his "Venus and Adonis" having been published, we believe, in histwenty-sixth year. Milton's Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye fornature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hintof the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have allthe sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity andeloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callownamby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original geniuswhich he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lostmore in the "marvellous boy, " Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitatorof obscure and antiquated dulness. Where he becomes original (as it iscalled) the interest of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. KirkeWhite's promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southeybut surely with no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of atraditional piety, which, to our mind, if uttered at all, had been lessobjectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raimentof prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowningpertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasionalsimple, lucky beauty. Burns, having fortunately been rescued by hishumble station from the contaminating society of the "best models" wrotewell and naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough tohave had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems fromwhich, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel fromthe mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whateverof 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 intrepidand indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there isbut a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's earlypoems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patientinvestigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorerof the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a manwho should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer andmore sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliestspecimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of thatethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regionsof words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hopeof resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as awonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity forrhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventionalcombinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicatephysical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is onlyremarkable when it displays an effort of _reason_, and the rudest versesin which we can trace some conception of the ends of poetry, are worthall the miracles of smooth juvenile versification. A schoolboy, onewould say, might acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by anassociation with the motion of the play-ground tilt. 

Mr. Poe's early productions show that he could see through the verse tothe spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the lifeand grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of theother. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have everread. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity ofpurpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre. Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only expressby the contradictory phrase of _innate experience_. We copy one of theshorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is alittle dimness in the filling up, but the grace and symmetry of theoutline are such as few poets ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosiaabout 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 itsteens, none of the drawing-room sans-culottism which Byron had broughtinto vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the GreekHelicon in it. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It is not ofthat kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of thefingers. It is of that finer sort which the inner ear alone canestimate. It seems simple, like a Greek column, because of itsperfection. In a poem named "Ligeia, " under which title he intended topersonify the music of nature, our boy-poet gives us the followingexquisite 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 longcapriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similarpassages, 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 thereis none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power. Lettalent 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. Talentsticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot ofclay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, sothat a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton, and ifShakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his versesshall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent maymake friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations thedivine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling towhat itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who hasnot himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits areallied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried awayby their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securelyprisoned in the pommel of its sword. To the eye of genius, the veil ofthe spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive theministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man ofmere talent ever flung his inkstand at the devil. 

When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he hasproduced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it at allis to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence for thetrust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and the greenestlaurels. If we may believe the Longinuses and Aristotles of ournewspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order torender a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness ofattainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is, according to these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion ofthe country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortableresidence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitudebe, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of theiridiosyncrasy. 

Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorousyet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The firstof these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledgeof anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him toconceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw acorrect outline, while the second groups, fills up, and colors. Both ofthese Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his proseworks, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the first in hislater ones. In judging of the merit of an author, and assigning him hisniche among our household gods, we have a right to regard him from ourown point of view, and to measure him by our own standard. But, inestimating the amount of power displayed in his works, we must begoverned by his own design, and, placing them by the side of his ownideal, find how much is wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinionsof the objects of art. He esteems that object to be the creation ofBeauty, and perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that wedisagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we shalltake his own standard as our guide. The temple of the god of song isequally accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it forall who bring offerings, or seek an oracle. 

In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in thatdim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probableinto the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in avery remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; apower of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows ofmystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or abutton unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of thepredominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded, analysis. It is this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at oncereaches forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bringabout certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate partstend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is mathematical tohis own mind. To him _x_ is a known quantity all along. In any picturethat he paints, he understands the chemical properties of all hiscolors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless theshadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of ageometrical 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, andthe commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the otherhand, 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, bygiving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderfulreality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with greatpower. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and totrace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images ofhorror, also, he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by adusky hint some terrible _doubt_ which is the secret of all horror. Heleaves to imagination the task of finishing the picture, a task to whichonly 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 ofform. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly classical. Itwould be hard to find a living author who had displayed such variedpowers. 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 Grotesqueand Arabesque. " It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no onecould read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombrebeauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have beenenough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master of a classicstyle. In this tale occurs, perhaps, the most beautiful of his poems. 

The great masters of imagination have seldom resorted to the vague andthe unreal as sources of effect. They have not used dread and horroralone, but only in combination with other qualities, as means ofsubjugating the fancies of their readers. The loftiest muse has ever ahousehold and fireside charm about her. Mr. Poe's secret lies mainly inthe skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mysteryand terror. In this his success is so great and striking as to deservethe name of art, not artifice. We cannot call his materials the noblestor purest, but we must concede to him the highest merit of construction. 

As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient. Unerring in hisanalysis of dictions, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in thefaculty 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 ofmathematical demonstrations. Yet they stand in strikingly refreshingcontrast 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, toogenerally overlooked, that analytic power is a subordinate quality ofthe critic. 

On the whole, it may be considered certain that Mr. Poe has attained anindividual eminence in our literature, which he will keep. He has givenproof of power and originality. He has done that which could only bedone once with success or safety, and the imitation or repetition ofwhich would produce weariness. 

THACKERAY

ROUNDABOUT PAPERS

The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death ofThackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still oursocial and literary capital. Not even the loss of Irving called forth souniversal and strong an expression of sorrow. And yet it had been thefashion to call Thackeray a cynic. We must take leave to doubt whetherDiogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been sotenderly regretted. We think there was something more in all this thanmere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius. There wasa universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better, --atrue 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 scepticalso; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfishsuspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself, but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest qualityalways 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 isand man as he might be, between the real snob and the ideal image of hisCreator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm;the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility fromthe harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used tosay, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master andteacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, ofall manner of _shams_, an equally intense love for every kind ofmanliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eyefor pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; whereverit fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure tobetray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would havebeen the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparisonbetween the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that luridlight, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, thatflares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that_ingenium perfervidum_ of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-MallJeremiah 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 likeShakespeare, she sends two who are the complements of eachother, --Fielding and Richardson, Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and GeorgeSand, and now again Thackeray and Dickens. We are not fond ofcomparative criticism, we mean of that kind which brings forward themerit of one man as if it depreciated the different merit of another, nor of supercilious criticism, which measures every talent by some idealstandard of possible excellence, and, if it fall short, can find nothingto admire. A thing is either good in itself or good for nothing. Yetthere is such a thing as a contrast of differences between two eminentintellects by which we may perhaps arrive at a clearer perception ofwhat is characteristic in each. It is almost impossible, indeed, toavoid some sort of parallel _à la_ Plutarch between Thackeray andDickens. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they maybe equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a fewstriking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paintscharacter, and Dickens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages areall 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 theillustrations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such aswe meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for Dickensinvariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style isperfect, that of Dickens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrastless remarkable in the quality of character which each selects. Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from thereporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of thegreatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created moretypes of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation ismarvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character isvery limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, hadpretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters aremasterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted uponby those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They neveract like heroes and heroines, but like men and women. 

Thackeray's style is beyond praise, --so easy, so limpid, showingeverywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture, it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was naturalto him, --his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond, " for example)being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respectsthe 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 hisloss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked aboveFielding, --a position which no one would have been so eager indisclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on theirpedestals. Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written inEnglish since Shakespeare. Of a broader and deeper nature, of a largerbrain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter isSociety. The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common wasRichard Steele, as these "Roundabout Papers" show plainly enough. Headmired 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 growdamper and chillier as one's footsteps disturb the silence between thegrave of its famous Dean and that of Stella, in death as in life nearyet divided from him, as if to make their memories more inseparable andprolong the insoluble problem of their relation to each other. Nor wasthere wanting, when we made our pilgrimage thither, a touch of grimhumor in the thought that our tipsy guide (Clerk of the Works he haddubbed himself for the nonce), as he monotonously recited hiscontradictory anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane, " varied by times withan irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinarybiographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled ourcicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse intorhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind ofconjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servantPatrick, but in that sad presence his grotesqueness was as shocking asthe clown in one of Shakespeare's tragedies to Châteaubriand. A shillingsent him back to the neighboring pot-house whence a half-dozen raggedvolunteers had summoned him, and we were left to our musings. Onedominating thought shouldered aside all others--namely, how strange astroke of irony it was, how more subtle even than any of the master'sown, that our most poignant association with the least sentimental ofmen should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to thatof Abélard and Héloïse should invest the memory of him who had done morethan all others together to strip life and human nature of their lastinstinctive decency of illusion. His life, or such accounts as we had ofit, had been full of antitheses as startling as if some malign enchanterhad embodied one of Macaulay's characters as a conundrum to bewilder thehistorian himself. A generous miser; a sceptical believer; a devoutscoffer; a tender-hearted misanthrope; a churchman faithful to his orderyet loathing to wear its uniform; an Irishman hating the Irish, as Heinedid the Jews, [1] because he was one of them, yet defending them with thescornful fierceness of one who hated their oppressors more; a man honestand of statesmanlike mind, who lent himself to the basest services ofparty politics for purely selfish ends; a poet whose predominant facultywas that of disidealizing; a master of vernacular style, in whose worksan Irish editor finds hundreds of faults of English to correct;strangest of all, a middle-aged clergyman of brutal coarseness, whocould inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with afruitless passion that broke her heart, the other with a love thatsurvived hope and faith to suck away the very sources of that lifewhereof it was the only pride and consolation. No wonder that a new lifeof so problematic a personage as this should be awaited with eagerness, the more that it was to be illustrated with much hitherto unpublishedmaterial and was to be written by the practised hand of Mr. Forster. Inconsistency of conduct, of professed opinion, whether of things ormen, we can understand; but an inconsistent character is somethingwithout example, and which nature abhors as she does false logic. Opportunity may develop, hindrance may dwarf, the prevailing set oftemptation may give a bent to character, but the germ planted at birthcan never be wholly disnatured by circumstance any more than soil orexposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it iscumulative, whether for good or ill; the general tenor of the life is alogical sequence from it, and a man can always explain himself tohimself, 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 itotherwise, that sense of conscious identity which alone makes life aserious thing and immortality a rational hope, would be impossible. Itis with the means of finding out this unknown quantity--in other words, of penetrating to the man's motives or his understanding of them--thatthe 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 ourinsight. 

[Footnote 1: Lowell was mistaken. Heine never lost his love for theJews. He regretted his apostasy and always regarded himself as a Jew, and not a Christian. His own genius was Hebraic, and not, as MatthewArnold thought, Hellenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowellhad great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitchell once toldme that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even wished that hehad a Hebraic nose. Several documents attest to Lowell's ideas on thesubject. He even claimed that his middle name "Russell" showed that hehad Jewish blood. A. M. ]

If Mr. Forster's mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality ofgenius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for histask. The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which isbeset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer. A finer sense might recoilbefore investigations whose importance is not at first so clear as theirpromise of unsavoriness. So far as Mr. Forster has gone, we think he hassucceeded in the highest duty of a biographer: that of making hissubject interesting and humanly sympathetic to the reader--a feat surelyof some difficulty with a professed cynic like Swift. He lets him in themain 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, wasalmost 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 airof 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 theThird Part of Temple's "Miscellanea" (1701) that he "cannot well informthe reader upon what occasion" the essay upon Ancient and ModernLearning "was writ, having been at that time in another kingdom"; andthe professed confidant of a ministry, whom the Stuart Papers haveproved to have been in correspondence with the Pretender, puts on an airof innocence (in his "Enquiry into the Behavior of the Queen's lastMinistry") and undertakes to convince us that nothing could be moreabsurd than to accuse them of Jacobitism. It may be, as Orrery asserted, that Swift was "employed, not trusted, " but this is hardly to bereconciled with Lewis's warning him on the Queen's death to burn hispapers, or his own jest to Harley about the one being beheaded and theother hanged. The fact is that, while in certain contingencies Swift wasas unscrupulous a liar as Voltaire, he was naturally open and truthful, and showed himself to be so whenever his passions or his interest wouldlet him. That Mr. Forster should make a hero of the man whose life hehas undertaken to write is both natural and proper; for without sympathythere can be no right understanding, and a hearty admiration is alonecapable of that generosity in the interpretation of conduct to which allmen have a right, and which he needs most who most widely transcends theordinary standards or most resolutely breaks with traditionary rules. That so virile a character as Swift should have been attractive to womenis not wonderful, but we think Mr. Forster has gone far towards provingthat he was capable of winning the deep and lasting affection of menalso. Perhaps it may not always be safe to trust implicitly the finephrases of his correspondents; for there can be no doubt that Swiftinspired fear as well as love. Revengefulness is the great and hatefulblot on his character; his brooding temper turned slights into injuries, gave substance to mere suspicion, and once in the morbid mood he wasutterly reckless of the means of vengeance. His most playful scratch hadpoison in it. His eye was equally terrible for the weak point of friendand foe. But giving this all the value it may deserve, the weight of theevidence is in favor of his amiability. The testimony of a man sosweet-natured and fair-minded as Dr. Delany ought to be conclusive, andwe do not wonder that Mr. Forster should lay great stress upon it. Thedepreciatory conclusions of Dr. Johnson are doubtless entitled toconsideration; but his evidence is all from hearsay, and there wereproperties in Swift that aroused in him so hearty a moral repulsion asto disenable him for an unprejudiced opinion. Admirable as therough-and-ready conclusions of his robust understanding often are, hewas better fitted to reckon the quantity of a man's mind than thequality of it--the real test of its value; and there is something almostcomically pathetic in the good faith with which he applies hisbeer-measure to juices that could fairly plead their privilege to begauged by the wine standard. Mr. Forster's partiality qualifies him fora fairer judgment of Swift than any which Johnson was capable offorming, or, indeed, would have given himself the trouble to form. 

But this partiality in a biographer, though to be allowed and evencommended as a quickener of insight, should not be strong enough to warphis mind from its judicial level. While we think that Mr. Forster ismainly right in his estimate of Swift's character, and altogether so ininsisting on trying him by documentary rather than hearsay evidence, itis equally true that he is sometimes betrayed into overestimates, andinto positive statement, where favorable inference would have beenwiser. Now and then his exaggeration is merely amusing, as where hetells us that Swift, "as early as in his first two years after quittingDublin, was _accomplished in French_, " the only authority for such astatement being a letter of recommendation from Temple saying that he"had _some French_. " Such compulsory testimonials are not on their _voirdire_ any more than epitaphs. So, in speaking of Betty Jones, with whomin 1689 Swift had a flirtation that alarmed his mother, Mr. Forsterassumes that she "was an educated girl" on the sole ground, so far asappears, 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 akitchen-maid, " and this, perhaps, may be Mr. Forster's authority. But, as the letters _were_ genuine, the inference should have been the otherway. The "letters to Eliza, " by the way, which Swift in 1699 directsWinder, his successor at Kilroot, to burn, were doubtless thoseaddressed to Betty Jones. Mr. Forster does not notice this; but thatSwift should have preserved them, or copies of them, is of someconsequence, as tending to show that they were mere exercises incomposition, thus confirming what he says in the remarkable letter toKendall, written in 1692, when he was already off with the old love andon with a new. 

These instances of the temptation which most easily besets Mr. Forsterare trifles, but the same leaning betrays him sometimes into gravermistakes of overestimate. He calls Swift the best letter-writer in thelanguage, though Gray, Walpole, Cowper, and Lamb be in some essentialqualities his superiors. He praises his political writing soextravagantly that we should think he had not read the "Examiner, " wereit not for the thoroughness of his work in other respects. All thatSwift wrote in this kind was partisan, excellently fitted to itsimmediate purpose, as we might expect from his imperturbable good sense, but by its very nature ephemeral. There is none of that reach ofhistorical imagination, none of that grasp of the clue of fatalcontinuity and progression, none of that eye for country which divinesthe future highways of events, that makes the occasional pamphlets ofBurke, with all their sobs of passionate sentiment, permanentacquisitions 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 thatthe author, as we have little doubt was the fact, was trying all alongto conceal his personality under a disguise of decorous commonplace. Inthe same uncritical way Mr. Forster tells us that "the ancients couldshow no such humor and satire as the 'Tale of a Tub' and the 'Battle ofthe Books. '" In spite of this, we shall continue to think Aristophanesand even Lucian clever writers, considering the rudeness of the times inwhich they lived. The "Tale of a Tub" has several passages ofrough-and-tumble satire as good as any of their kind, and some hints ofdeeper suggestion, but the fable is clumsy and the execution unequal anddisjointed. In conception the "Battle" is cleverer, and it containsperhaps the most perfect apologue in the language, but the best strokesof satire in it are personal (that of Dryden's helmet, for instance), and we enjoy them with an uneasy feeling that we are accessaries insomething like foul play. Indeed, it may be said of Swift's humorgenerally that it leaves us uncomfortable, and that it too oftenimpregnates the memory with a savor of mortal corruption proof againstall disinfectants. Pure humor cannot flow from so turbid a source as_soeva indignatio_, and if man be so filthy and disgusting a creature asSwift represents him to be, if he be truly "by nature, reason, learning, blind, " satire is thrown away upon him for reform and cruel ascastigation. 

Mr. Forster not only rejects the story of Stella's marriage with Swiftas lacking substantial evidence, but thinks that the limits of theirintercourse were early fixed and never overpassed. According to him, their relation was to be, from the first, one "of affection, notdesire. " We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only womanSwift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, thathe probably did marry her, [1] but only when all hope of the oldopen-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 noexplanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brieffolly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkenedhis lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it withremorseful self-contempt. Nothing could be more galling to a proud manthan the feeling that he had been betrayed by his vanity. It is commonlyassumed that pride is incompatible with its weaker congener. But pride, after all, is nothing more than a stiffened and congealed vanity, andmelts back to its original ductility when exposed to the mildertemperature of female partiality. Swift could not deny himself theflattery of Vanessa's passion, and not to forbid was to encourage. Hecould 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 didtell 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. Thiswas the extent of his crime, and it would have been none if there hadbeen no such previous impediment. This alone gives any meaning to whathe 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 marriedStella. A. M. ]

Shame there might have been, but surely no guilt on any theory exceptthat of an implicit engagement with Stella. That there was something ofthe 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 nodoubt. 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, Ishould certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice, " sheaccepted the implied terms and rejected her suitor, though otherwise notunacceptable to her. She would wait. It is true that Swift had notabsolutely committed himself, but she had committed him by dismissingTisdall. Without assuming some such tacit understanding, his letters toher are unintelligible. He repeatedly alludes to his absence from her asonly tolerable because it was for her sake no less than his own, and thedetails of his petty economies would be merely vulgar except to her forwhom their motive gave them a sweetness of humorous pathos. The evidenceof the marriage seems to be as conclusive as that of a secret can wellbe. 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 byone whose authority was Stella herself. Mr. Monck-Berkeley had it fromthe widow of Bishop Berkeley, and she from her husband, who had it fromDr. Ashe, by whom they were married. These are at least unimpeachablewitnesses. The date of the marriage is more doubtful, but Sheridan isprobably not far wrong when he puts it in 1716. It was simply areparation, and no union was implied in it. Delany intimates thatVanessa, like the young Chevalier, vulgarized her romance in drink. Morethan this, however, was needful to palliate even in Swift the brutalallusion to her importunacy in "Gulliver, " unless, as is but toopossible, the passage in question be an outbreak of ferocious spleenagainst her victorious rival. Its coarseness need not make this seemimpossible, for that was by no means a queasy age, and Swift continuedon intimate terms with Lady Betty Germaine after the publication of thenasty verses on her father. The communication of the secret to BishopBerkeley (who was one of Vanessa's executors) may have been thecondition of the suppressing Swift's correspondence with her, and wouldhave exasperated him to ferocity. 

II

We cannot properly understand Swift's cynicism and bring it into anyrelation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiabilitywithout taking his whole life into account. Few give themselves thetrouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enoughto the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose naturewas an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till iteffaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet. With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-polewhich has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope ofmomentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the CowleianPindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint ofParisian rather than Theban origin. If the master was but a freshexample of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of theflying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not eventhe secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earthwhile with perfect good faith he went through all the motions ofsoaring? Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment, though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, andthe recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent. He whocould not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not ifhe could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage thesimpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was atrick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everythingsomething else than it was, he would see things as they were--or as, inhis sullen disgust, they seemed to be--and call them all by their rightnames with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of aHottentot--nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeblecompromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and notashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of consciousexposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocriticalfig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with thebrutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willedand aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began withhimself. He despised mankind because he found something despicable inJonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion totheir likeness with himself. He had more or less consciously sacrificedself-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man'saccidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, asno other "man of his level" in Ireland was, to being happy with thewoman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and theindependence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude afterall. "Money, " he was fond of saying, "is freedom, " but he never learnedthat self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect. With ahearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yetbring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier ofthree royal strumpets. How should he be happy who had defined happinessto be "the perpetual possession of being well deceived, " and who couldnever be deceived himself? It may well be doubted whether what hehimself calls "that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth ofthings and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveriesthat in the inside they are good for nothing, " be of so penetrative aninsight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not ratherthat to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had themicroscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was theloathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things thattainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But withall Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of hisshallow friend Gay that life was a jest. To his nobler temper it wasalways profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, wesuspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears. The lesson isworth 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 readyto forgive a man everything if he will only be a genius. Sir RobertWalpole used to say "that it was fortunate so few men could be primeministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shockingwickedness of mankind. " Swift, from his peculiar relation to twosuccessive ministries, was in a position to know all that they knew, andperhaps, as a recognized place-broker, even more than they knew, of theselfish servility of men. He had seen the men who figure so imposinglyin the stage-processions of history too nearly. He knew the real Jacksand Toms as they were over a pot of ale after the scenic illusion wasdone with. He saw the destinies of a kingdom controlled by men far lessable than himself; the highest of arts, that of politics, degraded to atrade in places, and the noblest opportunity, that of office, abused forpurposes of private gain. His disenchantment began early, probably inhis intimacy with Sir William Temple, in whom (though he says that allthat was good and great died with him) he must have seen the weak sideof 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 theimmediate influence of Dickens, if more slipshod than when repressed byLandor) is not in essentials better or worse than usual. It is notalways clear nor always idiomatic. On page 120 he tells us that "Scottdid not care to enquire if it was likely that stories of the kindreferred to should have contributed to form a character, or if it werenot likelier still that they had grown and settled round a characteralready famous as well as formed. " Not to speak of the confusion ofmoods and tenses, the phrase "to form a character" has been so longappropriated to another meaning than that which it has here, that thesense of the passage vacillates unpleasantly. He tells us that Swift was"under engagement to Will Frankland to christen _the baby his wife isnear bringing to bed_. " Parthenogenesis is a simple matter to this. Andwhy _Will_ Frankland, _Joe_ Beaumont, and the like? We cannot claim somuch intimacy with them as Swift, and the eighteenth century might beallowed to stand a little on its dignity. If Mr. Forster had beenquoting the journal to Stella, there would be nothing to say except thatSwift took liberties with his friends in writing to her which he wouldnot have ventured on before strangers. In the same odd jargon, which theEnglish journals are fond of calling American, Mr. Forster says that"Tom [Leigh] was not _popular_ with Swift. " Mr. Forster is not only nomodel for contemporary English, but (what is more serious) sometimesmistakes the meaning of words in Swift's day, as when he explains that"strongly engaged" meant "interceded with or pressed. " It meant muchmore than that, as could easily be shown from the writings of Swifthimself. 

All the earlier biographers of Swift Mr. Forster brushes contemptuouslyaside, though we do not find much that is important in his own biographywhich industry may not hit upon somewhere or other in the confusednarrative of Sheridan, for whom and for his sources of information heshows a somewhat unjust contempt. He goes so far as sometimes todiscredit anecdotes so thoroughly characteristic of Swift that he cannotresist copying them himself. He labors at needless length the questionof Swift's standing in college, and seems to prove that it was notcontemptible, though there can be no doubt that the contrary opinion wasfounded on Swift's own assertion, often repeated. We say he seems toprove it, for we are by no means satisfied which of the two Swifts onthe 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, butthey are more likely to have been arranged alphabetically, in which caseJonathan would have preceded Thomas, and at best there is little tochoose 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 materialshitherto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving thatSwift's Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707. Thisshows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whigto Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his formerassociates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency ifnot of desertion to the enemy. Whatever the motives of his change, itwould have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty, and in spite of Mr. Forster's assertion that Addison continued to loveand trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was anycordiality in their intercourse after 1710. No one familiar with Swift'smanner of thinking will deem his political course of much import injudging of his moral character. At the bottom of his heart he had animpartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aimsof both were more or less consciously selfish. Even if sincere, thematters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment asthat which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput. With him thequestion was simply one between men who galled his pride and men whoflattered it. Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceableinferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footingof friendship. To him they were all, more or less indifferently, roundsin the ladder by which he hoped to climb. He always claimed to have beena consistent Old Whig--that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchmanwho accepted the Revolution of 1688. This, to be sure, was not quitetrue, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on aCavalier grandfather, and whose first known verses were addressed to thenon-juring primate Sancroft after his deprivation, to become first aTory and then a conniver at the restoration of the Stuarts as the bestdevice for preventing a foreign succession and an endless chance ofcivil war. A man of Swift's way of thinking would hardly have balked atthe scruple of creed, for he would not have deemed it possible that thePretender should have valued a kingdom at any lower rate than hisgreat-grandfather had done before him. 

The more important part of Mr. Forster's fresh material is to come infuture volumes, if now, alas! we are ever to have them. For some of whathe gives us in this we can hardly thank him. One of the manuscripts hehas unearthed is the original version of "Baucis and Philemon" as it wasbefore it had passed under the criticism of Addison. He seems to thinkit in some respects better than the revised copy though in our judgmentit entirely justifies the wisdom of the critic who counselled itscurtailment and correction. The piece as we have hitherto had it comesas near poetry as anything Swift ever wrote except "Cadenus andVanessa, " though neither of them aspires above the region of clevernessand fancy. Indeed, it is misleading to talk of the poetry of one whosefatal gift was an eye that disidealized. But we are not concerned herewith the discussion of Swift's claim to the title of poet. What we areconcerned about is to protest in the interests of good literatureagainst the practice, now too common, of hunting out and printing whatthe author would doubtless have burned. It is unfair to the dead writerand the living reader by disturbing that unitary impression which everygood piece of work aims at making, and is sure to make, only inproportion 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 throughwhich the castigating pen has been drawn. 

Mr. Forster may almost claim to have rediscovered Swift's journals toEsther Johnson, to such good purpose has he used them in giving life andlight to his narrative. He is certainly wrong, however, in saying to thedisparagement 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 apassage in the journal of 14th October, 1710, printed by Mr. Forsterhimself. At least, we know not what "Stellakins" means unless it be"little Stella. " The value of these journals for their elucidation ofSwift's character cannot be overestimated, and Mr. Forster is quiteright in insisting upon the importance of the "little language, " thoughwe are by no means sure that he is always so in his interpretation ofthe cipher. It is quite impossible, for instance, that ME can stand forMadam Elderly, and so for Dingley. It is certainly addressed, like theother endearing epithets, to Esther Johnson, and may mean My Esther oreven Marry Esther, for anything we know to the contrary. 

Mr. Forster brings down his biography no farther than the early part of1710, so that we have no means of judging what his opinion would be ofthe conduct of Swift during the three years that preceded the death ofQueen Anne. But he has told us what he thinks of his relations withEsther Johnson; and it is in them, as it seems to us, that we are toseek the key to the greater part of what looks most enigmatical in hisconduct. At first sight, it seems altogether unworthy of a man ofSwift's genius to waste so much of it and so many of the best years ofhis life in a sordid struggle after preferment in the church--a careerin which such selfish ambitions look most out of place. How much betterto 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 littleappetite for literary fame, and all of whose immortal progeny werebegotten of the moment's overmastering impulse, were thrown namelessupon the world by their father, and survived only in virtue of the vigorthey had drawn from his stalwart loins. But how if Swift's worldlyaspirations, and the intrigues they involved him in, were not altogetherselfish? How if he was seeking advancement, in part at least, foranother, and that other a woman who had sacrificed for him not only herchances of domestic happiness, but her good name? to whom he was boundby gratitude? and the hope of repairing whose good fame by making herhis own was so passionate in that intense nature as to justify any andevery expedient, and make the patronage of those whom he felt to be hisinferiors endurable by the proudest of men? We believe that this was thetruth, 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 nothave been, however Mr. Forster may argue to the contrary, much abovedomestic servitude. This experience deepened in him the prevailingpassions of his life, first for independence and next for consideration, the only ones which could, and in the end perhaps did, obscure thememory and hope of Stella. That he should have longed for London with apersistency that submitted to many a rebuff and overlived continualdisappointment will seem childish only to those who do not consider thatit was a longing for life. It was there only that his mind could bequickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dyingdaily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, ifthere be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy withoutimpair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age. 

This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the worldis just opening. In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, "Idesire that you and all my friends will take a special care that mydisaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I havecredible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from thetwenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age. " His contempt formankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfugesby which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify andconceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of itscleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than beingprime minister. How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody whenhis old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophicrelief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty!

Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose alsowith 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 wouldhave us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than toprove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimatefriends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to himsometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman. Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a professionwhich was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfectindependence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes. He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while hewas bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery amongsavages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stoodin his way. A man's little faults are more often the cause of hisgreatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whateverrespects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainlyhad the advantage of him in that _savoir vivre_ which makes so large anelement of worldly success. In judging him, however, we must take intoaccount that his first literary hit was made when he was alreadythirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of othersand distrust of himself. 

The reaction in Swift's temper and ambition told with the happiesteffect on his prose. For its own purposes, as good working English, hisstyle (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had nostyle at all), has never been matched. It has been more praised thanstudied, or its manifest shortcomings, its occasional clumsiness, itswant of harmony and of feeling for the finer genialities of language, would be more often present in the consciousness of those who discourseabout it from a superficial acquaintance. With him language was a meansand not an end. If he was plain and even coarse, it was from choicerather 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 simplegood humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a manof genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both makehim an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which ismore wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it bemore truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his daysin the rose's neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of histemperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is healways from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm asshall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been bornmiddle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinnerand of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved theproblem of having your cake and eating it, at which the asceticinterpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up hisworldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relishto the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a betterChristian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir ThomasBrowne, love to lose himself in an _O, altitudo!_ yet the sky-piercingpeaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on thehorizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continuallygets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldominvites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nooklike the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestledamid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becomingintervals to the "primal duties, " he turns back with a settledpredilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet likeflowers. " But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to himand to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the motherof the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who ismost like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or thatpassage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down thevolume 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 thegreat Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, andwho for the first time soften from their marble alienation and becomehuman. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings hislessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessiblevirtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion, patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example whichassociates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching istheosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotsondisencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christianunbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commendedhim as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hintswhich follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarchin the essay on "Physiognomy. " After speaking of some "escripts encoresplus révérez, " he asks, in his idiomatic way, "à, quoy faire nous allonsnous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however, Montaigne liked him because he was _good talk_, as it is called, abetter companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which arenoble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversationbetween Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his styleis not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are inPlutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derivedperhaps from authors much more ancient. " But if they are borrowed, theyhave none of the discordant effect of the _purpureus pannus_, for thewarm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes themhis own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is trulyoriginal. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is thisselectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the naturalelevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato orsat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. Weare speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays aretrivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here andthere with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience hasflowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into theports of every nation, " says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introductionto 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 andquotation. 

It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser, in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whosemind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative(if we take the "Lives" and the "Morals" together) in the thought andaction of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And onthe whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogethergood, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning themover to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was hisown curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to theirpurpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among menand ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. Hisinfluence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of anyother ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been theRobinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed aremote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years, living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination hadpeopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound ofhis cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspectthat Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most ofus. Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past wasinhabited by creatures like ourselves. 

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECHAND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECHAND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS

I must beg allowance to use the first person singular. I cannot, likeold Weller, spell myself with a We. Ours is, I believe, the onlylanguage that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (tohimself) as to erect the first personal pronoun into a kind of votivecolumn to the dignity of human nature. Other tongues have, or pretend, agreater modesty. 

 I

What a noble letter it is! In it every reader sees himself as in aglass. As for me, without my I's, I should be as poorly off as the greatmole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity ofreason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess Ialways liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek dramawhich were well sprinkled with _ai ai_, they were so grandly simple. Theforce of great men is generally to be found in their intenseindividuality, --in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of thisessay 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 begunto set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence andStatuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for humanhabitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on verywell in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from thefish which we cured, _more medicorum_, by laying them out. But thissummer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association. Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the townwished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain numberof the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into theirown hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to calltheir 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. PhilipVandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, fromwhat I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as theintroductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything likeuniversal brotherhood. He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster, without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into theworld in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular. Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way ofvaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right ofPrivate Judgment as distinguished from the Right of PublicVituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand thenature of philanthropy. 

Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example. He loves his kind so much thathe has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother's son ofthem. He goes about to save them by proving that not one of them isworth damning. And he does it all from the point of view of an early (a_knurly_) Christian. Let me illustrate. I was sauntering along Broadwayonce, and was attracted by a bird-fancier's shop. I like dealers inout-of-the-way things, --traders in bigotry and virtue are toocommon, --and so I went in. The gem of the collection was a terrier, --aperfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as aCockney would say, than the 'ole British hairystocracy. "A'n't he astunner?" 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 inproportion 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, thata young lady is sure to fall in love with a young man for whom she feelsat first an unconquerable aversion; and it must be on the same principlethat the first symptoms of love for our neighbor almost always manifestthemselves in a violent disgust at the world in general, on the part ofthe apostles of that gospel. They give every token of hating theirneighbors consumedly; _argal_, they are going to be madly enamored ofthem. Or, perhaps, this is the manner in which Universal Brotherhoodshows itself in people who wilfully subject themselves to infection as aprophylactic. In the natural way we might find the disease inconvenientand 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 ourordinary business of detesting our brethren as usual. It only shows thatthe milder type of the disease has penetrated the system, which willthus be enabled to out-Jenneral its more dangerous congener. Before longwe shall have physicians of our ailing social system writing to the"Weekly Brandreth's Pill" somewhat on this wise:--"I have a very markedand hopeful case in Pequawgus Four Corners. Miss Hepzibah Tarbell, daughter of that archenemy of his kind, Deacon Joash T. , attended onlyone of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were mostencouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family, --accusingher father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother ZenoC. Of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of themagnetic needle. If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of PrimitiveChristian were well-founded, I think we may entertain them now. "

What I chiefly object to in the general-denunciation sort of reformersis that they make no allowance for character and temperament. They wishto repeal universal laws, and to patch our natural skins for us, as ifthey always wanted mending. That while they talk so much of the godlikenature of man, they should so forget the human natures of men! TheFlathead Indian squeezes the child's skull between two boards till itshapes itself into a kind of gambrel roof against the rain, --thereadiest way, perhaps, of uniforming a tribe that wear no clothes. Butdoes he alter the inside of the head? Not a hair's-breadth. You rememberthe striking old gnomic poem that tells how Aaron, in a moment offanatical zeal against that member by which mankind are so readily ledinto mischief, proposes a rhinotomic sacrifice to Moses? What is theanswer 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 thereptile nature in him, and to achieve the higher sphere of the Croakersat a single hop? Why, it is all he steers by; without it, he would be ashelpless as a compass under the flare of Northern Lights; and he nodoubt regards it as a mark of blood, the proof of his kinship with thepreadamite family of the Saurians. Shall we send missionaries to theBear to warn him against raw chestnuts, because they are sometimes sodiscomforting to our human intestines, which are so like his own? Onesermon from the colic were worth the whole American Board. 

Moreover, as an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Streetagainst a unanimity in goodness. Not to mention that a Quaker world, allfaded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious, --what shouldwe do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, noliterature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to asudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would bethrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with asindeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits memonthly, --what claim would she have upon me, were not her husbandforever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? Thepusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take thevery ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her andhim of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of thecurse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; sheis persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long beenfeeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us. Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in NathanielGreene, and makes a general of him, to confute five generations ofBroadbrims. The Puritans were good in their way, and we enjoy themhighly as a preterite phenomenon; but they were _not_ good at cakes andale, 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 amuckwhenever he likes, --so it be not down our street. I confess to a gooddeal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in No. 21, haveplenty 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 aboutStatues. 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 thegreater nuisances; but I am sure of this, that there are too many ofboth. They used to be _rare_ (to use a Yankeeism omitted by Bartlett), but nowadays they are overdone. I am half inclined to think that thesculptors club together to write folks up during their lives in thenewspapers, quieting their consciences with the hope of some day makingthem look so mean in bronze or marble as to make all square again. Or dowe really have so many? Can't they help growing twelve feet high in thisnew soil, any more than our maize? I suspect that Posterity will notthank 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 BenjaminWebster. I am not a Boston man, and have, therefore, the privilege ofthinking for myself. Nor do I object to his claiming for women the rightto make books and pictures and (shall I say it?) statues, --only thislast becomes a grave matter, if we are to have statues of all the greatwomen, too! To be sure, there will not be the trousers-difficulty, --atleast, not at present; what we may come to is none of my affair. I evengo beyond him in my opinions on what is called the Woman Question. Inthe gift of speech, they have always had the advantage of us; and thoughthe jealousy of the other sex have deprived us of the orations ofXantippe, yet even Demosthenes does not seem to have produced greatereffects, 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 theeloquence with which he expressed them. He does not like statues betterthan I do; but is it possible that he fails to see that the one nuisanceleads directly to the other, and that we set up three images of Talkersfor one to any kind of man who was useful in his generation? Let himbeware, or he will himself be petrified after death. Boston seems to bespecially unfortunate. She has more statues and more speakers than anyother 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 titleto be called the _tire_ than the _hub_ of creation. What with thespeeches of her great men while they are alive, and those of hersurviving great men about those aforesaid after they are dead, and thosewe look forward to from her _ditto ditto_ yet to be upon her _dittoditto_ 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 thatJack built. 

And yet I remember once visiting the Massachusetts State House and beingstruck with the Pythagorean fish hung on high in the Representatives'Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to beobserved except on Sundays. Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal to you as aman and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there areplenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-waterthat threatens the land. Let us adopt as our creed these twopropositions:--

I. _Tongues were given us to be held. _

II. _Dumbness sets the brute below the man: Silence elevates the manabove the brute. _

Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought thanthat of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into accounthow large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to becommemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conceptionis positively stunning. 

Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the lateTown Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREANIHIL, " as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general. _He_, at least, never betrayed his clients. As it is, there is no end toit. We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the NormalSchoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the sameill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any manhad ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all. We are the victims of a droll antithesis. Daniel would not give in toNebuchadnezzar's taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall downand worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would havegone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor. I do notthink lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one isso apt to encounter;--I met one once at an evening party. But I would bethrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with thatstatue. Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in themonumental line! Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom ofconvalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his latevisit, got off without a single speech. The cheerful hospitalities ofMount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, butnothing more melancholy. In his case I doubt the expediency of theomission. Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, itwould have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powersof the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together. 

In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts ourfriends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) areput to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay forit. The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the StarkMills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for makinga very dead bronze horse stand on his hind legs. For twenty-five cents Ihave seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful, --make a veryliving bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occursto me that _hind legs_ is indelicate) posterior extremities to thewayward music of an out-of-town (_Scoticè_, out-o'-toon) band. Now, Iwill make a handsome offer to the public. I propose for twenty-fivethousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of adistinguished general officer as he _would have_ appeared at the Battleof Buena Vista. This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown thenew dome of the Capitol at Washington. By this happy contrivance, thehorse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earthat all, --thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race fororiginality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of thehorse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate whichway the wind blows by going along with it. The inferior animal I haveresolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection. Inthis way I shall combine two striking advantages. The advocates of theIdeal in Art cannot fail to be pleased with a charger which embodies, asit were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attentionof the spectator will not be distracted from the principal figure. Thematerial to be pure brass. I have also in progress an allegorical groupcommemorative of Governor Wise. This, like-Wise, represents only apotentiality. I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment whenand the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury atWashington. His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of hisspeeches. Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling onhis own steel pen; a broken telegraph wire hints at the weight of thethoughts to which it has found itself inadequate; while the Army andNavy of the United States are conjointly typified in a horse-marine whoflies headlong with his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. Ithink 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 withwhich Virginia shall have paid her public debt. It may be objected, thatplaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itselfcould hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor's speeches. Butit must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype, have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of thespectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some reasonable hopeof silence. This design, also, is intended only _in terrorem_, and willbe suppressed for an adequate consideration. 

I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. Thefear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone maydeter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselvesinto greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel awholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any otherway account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge ofthe horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected withthe terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, inthe course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek newvictims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the woodenhorse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr. Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatevermaterial) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing shortof a general. 

Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures. He counsels us to sell our realestate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's reputation withposterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor. Toa mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose militaryreputation insures his cutting and running (I mean, of course, in marbleand bronze), the question becomes an interesting one, --To whom, in caseof a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have the land allto themselves, --until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancientheritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness willrevive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican Art. For my ownpart, I never look at one of them now without thinking of at least onehuman sacrifice. 

I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing's proposal, and yet somethingought 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 pistolpointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left handrests, --no bad type of the great man's state of mind after thenomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call apenal statue. But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and thatLake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues? I goback to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment. I had even gone so faras to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of theSecond Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under itwould be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that ourgraven images did really present a likeness to any of the objectsenumerated in the divine ordinance. Perhaps a double-barrelled statutemight be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and themonumental difficulty. Let a law be passed that all speeches deliveredmore for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and alleulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel ofthe Deaf and Dumb asylum, and all statues be set up within the groundsof the Institution for the Blind. Let the penalty for infringement inthe one case be to read the last President's Message, and in the otherto look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long asto violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusualpunishments. 

Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they shouldpass so self-denying an ordinance. They might, perhaps, make all oratorybut their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debatesmight be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessedby a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to beby an appetite for slate pencils. _Vita brevis, lingua longa. _ I protestthat among lawgivers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all theCamenae, 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, theadvantage of communication with America. Now the Greeks had a Muse ofBeginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and howhard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and moreexcellent Muse of Leaving-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her outand kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a goddess to beworshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!

Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch'slives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughtsand zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men incomparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had ninelives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print areas 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 ofus old-fashioned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it"The Jolly Oysters. " No member is allowed to open his mouth except athigh-tide by the calendar. We have biennial festivals on the evening ofelection day, when the constituency avenges itself in some small measureon its Representative elect by sending a baker's dozen of orators tocongratulate him. 

But I am falling into the very vice I condemn, --like Carlyle, who hastalked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue. And yetsomething should be done about it. Even when we get one orator safelyunderground, there are ten to pronounce his eulogy, and twenty to do itover again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue. I go tolisten: we all go: we are under a spell. 'T is true, I find a casualrefuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he calledSleep the child of Silence. Speech begets her as often. But there is nosure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, letthere be written on my head-stone, with impartial application to theseBlack Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to ourequestrian statues, --

 _Os sublime_ did it!

THE END