Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

It is from such a one that I am going to try to draw a few notes of music and of mirth to-night. Contemporary with Chaucer lived a man who satirized the clergy and gave some lively pictures of manners before the “Canterbury Tales” were written. His poem was very popular, as appears from the number of manuscript copies of it remaining, and after being forgotten for two centuries, it was revived again, printed, widely read, and helped onward the Reformation in England. It has been reprinted twice during the present century. This assures us that it must have had a good deal of original force and vivacity. It may be considered, however, to be tolerably defunct now. This poem is the vision of Piers Ploughman.

I have no hope of reviving it. Dead poets are something very dead, and critics blow their trumpets over them in vain. What I think is interesting and instructive in the poem is that it illustrates in a remarkable manner what may be considered the Anglo-Saxon element in English poetry. I refer to race, and not to language. We find here a vigorous common-sense, a simple and hearty love of nature, a certain homely tenderness, held in check always by a dogged veracity. Instead of Fancy we have Feeling; and, what more especially deserves notice, there is almost an entire want of that sense of form and outline and proportion which alone brings anything within the province of Art. Imagination shows itself now and then in little gleams and flashes, but always in the form of Humor. For the basis of the Anglo-Saxon mind is beef and beer; what it considers the real as distinguished from, or rather opposed to, the ideal. It spares nothing merely because it is beautiful. It is the Anglo-Saxon who invented the word Humbug, the potent exorcism which lays the spirit of poetry in the Red Sea. It is he who always translates Shows into Shams.

Properly speaking, “Piers Ploughman’s Vision” is not a poem at all. It is a sermon rather, for no verse, the chief end of which is not the representation of the beautiful, and whose moral is not included in that, can be called poetry in the true sense of the word. A thought will become poetical by being put into verse when a horse hair will turn into a snake by being laid in water. The poetical nature will delight in Mary Magdalen more for her fine hair than for her penitence. But whatever is poetical in this book seems to me characteristically Saxon. The English Muse has mixed blood in her veins, and I think that what she gets from the Saxon is a certain something homely and practical, a flavor of the goodwife which is hereditary. She is the descendant on one side of Poor Richard, inspired, it is true, but who always brings her knitting in her pocket. The light of the soul that shines through her countenance, that “light that never was on land or sea,” is mingled with the warm glow from the fireside on the hearth of Home. Indeed, may it not be attributed to the Teutonic heart as something peculiar to it, that it has breadth enough to embrace at once the chimney-corner and the far-reaching splendors of Heaven? Happy for it when the smoke and cookery-steam of the one do not obscure the other!

I find no fault with the author of Piers Ploughman for not being a poet. Every man cannot be a poet (fortunately), nor every poet a great one. It is the privilege of the great to be always contemporaneous, to speak of fugacious events in words that shall be perennial. But to the poets of the second rate we go for pictures of manners that have passed away, for transitory facts, for modes of life and ways of thinking that were circumstantial merely. They give us reflections of our outward, as their larger brethren do of our inward, selves. They deal, as it were, with costume; the other with man himself.

But these details are of interest, so fond are we of facts. We all have seen the congregation which grew sleepy while the preacher talked of the other world give a stir of pleased attention if he brought in a personal anecdote about this. Books are written and printed, and we read them to tell us how our forefathers cocked their hats, or turned up the points of their shoes; when blacking and starch were introduced; who among the Anglo-Saxons carried the first umbrella, and who borrowed it.

These trifles, also, acquire importance in proportion as they are older. If a naturalist showed us a toad, we should be indifferent, but if he told us that it had been found in a block of granite, we should instantly look with profound interest on a creature that perhaps ate moths in Abel’s garden, or hopped out of the path of Lamech. And the same precious jewel of instruction we find in the ugly little facts embedded in early literatures. They teach us the unchangeableness of man and his real independence of his accidents. He is the same old lay figure under all his draperies, and sits to one artist for a John and to another for a Judas, and serves equally well for both portraits. The oldest fable reappears in the newest novel. Aristophanes makes coats that fit us still. Voltaire is Lucian translated into the eighteenth century. Augustus turns up in Louis Napoleon. The whirligig of Time brings back at regular intervals the same actors and situations, and under whatever names—Ormuzd and Ahriman, Protestantism and Catholicism, Reform and Conservatism, Transcendentalism and Realism. We see the same ancient quarrel renewed from generation to generation, till we begin to doubt whether this be truly the steps of a Tower of Babel that we are mounting, and not rather a treadmill, where we get all the positive good of the exercise and none of the theoretic ill which might come if we could once solve the problem of getting above ourselves. Man’s life continues to be, as the Saxon noble described it, the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall, out of one darkness and into another, and the two questions whence? and whither? were no tougher to Adam than to us. The author of Piers Ploughman’s Vision has offered us his theory of this world and the next, and in doing so gives some curious hints of modes of life and of thought. It is generally agreed that one of his names was Langland, and it is disputed whether the other was Robert or William. Robert has the most authority, and William the strongest arguments in its favor. It is of little consequence now to him or us. He was probably a monk at Malvern. His poem is a long one, written in the unrhymed alliterative measure of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the plan of it is of the simplest kind. It is a continued allegory, in which all the vices, passions, and follies of the time, the powers of the mind, the qualities of the spirit, and the theological dogmas of the author, are personified and mixed up with real personages with so much simplicity, and with such unconscious interfusion of actual life as to give the whole an air of probability.

The author of Piers Ploughman’s Vision avoids any appearance of incongruity by laying his scene in a world which is neither wholly real nor wholly imaginary—the realm of sleep and dreams. There it does not astonish us that Langland should meet and talk with the theological virtues, and that very avoirdupois knights, monks, abbots, friars, and ploughmen should be found in company with such questionable characters as Do-well, Do-better, Do-best, Conscience, Nature, Clergy, and Activa Vita. He has divided his poem into twenty “steps,” as he calls them, in each of which he falls asleep, has a dream, and wakes up when it becomes convenient or he is at a loss what else to do. Meanwhile his real characters are so very real, and his allegorical ones mingle with them on such a common ground of easy familiarity, that we forget the allegory altogether. We are not surprised to find those Utopian edifices, the Tower of Truth and the Church of Unity, in the same street with an alehouse as genuine as that of Tam o’ Shanter, and it would seem nothing out of the common if we should see the twelve signs of the Zodiac saving themselves from Deucalion’s flood in an arc of the Ecliptic.

Mr. Lowell here read long extracts from the poem, with a commentary of his own, generally brief, of which we can give only the following fine passage on Personification.

The truth is, that ideal personifications are commonly little better than pinchbeck substitutes for imagination. They are a refuge which unimaginative minds seek from their own sterile imaginativeness. They stand in the same relation to poetry as wax figures to sculpture. The more nearly they counterfeit reality, the more unpleasant they are, and there is always a dejected irresponsibleness about the legs and a Brattle street air in the boots that is ludicrous. The imagination gives us no pictures, but the thing itself. It goes out for the moment to dwell in and inform with its own life the object of its vision—as Keats says somewhere in one of his letters, “I hop about the gravel and pick up crumbs in the sparrows.” And so, in personifying, the imagination must have energy to project its own emotion so as to see it objectively—just as the disease of the hypochondriac runs before him in a black dog. Thus it was that the early poets, “who believed the wonders that they sang,” peopled the forests, floods, and mountains with real shapes of beauty or terror; and accordingly in primitive times ecstasy is always attributed to the condition of the poetic mind. To the great poets these ecstasies are still possible, and personification had its origin in the tradition of these, and the endeavor of inferior minds to atone for their own languor by what we may call historical or reminiscental imagination. Here is indicated the decline from faith to ritual. Shakspeare has illustrated the true secret of imaginative personification when he makes the conscience of Macbeth become external and visible to him in the ghastly shape at the banquet which he alone can see, and Lady Macbeth’s afterwards in the blood-stain on her hand. This is the personification of the creative mind whose thoughts are not images, but things. And this seems to have been the normal condition of Shakspeare’s genius, as it is the exceptional one of all other poets. He alone has embodied in flesh and blood his every thought and fancy and emotion, his every passion and temptation. Beside him all other poets seem but the painters and not the makers of men. He sent out his profound intellect to look at life from every point of view, and through the eyes of all men and women from the highest to the lowest. In every one he seems to have tapped it with the knuckles, to have said sadly, Tinnit, inane est, It rings, it is hollow; and then to have gone down quietly to wait for death and another world at Stratford.

As fine an example as any of the prose imagination, of the intellect acting pictorially, is where Hobbes compares the Papacy to the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting upon its tomb. This implies a foregone personification, but the pleasure it gives springs chiefly from our sense of its historic and intellectual truth. And this subordinate form of imagination uses typically and metaphorically those forms in which ecstasy had formerly visibly clothed itself, flesh-and-blooded itself, so to speak; as where Lord Bacon says that Persecution in the name of Religion is “to bring down the Holy Ghost, not in the likeness of a dove, but in the shape of a vulture or a raven.”