(Friday Evening, January 19, 1855)
IV
One of the laws of the historical Macbeth declares that “Fools, minstrels, bards, and all other such idle people, unless they be specially licensed by the King, shall be compelled to seek some craft to win their living,” and the old chronicler adds approvingly, “These and such-like laws were used by King Macbeth, through which he governed the realm ten years in good justice.”
I do not quote this in order to blacken the memory of that unhappy monarch. The poets commonly contrive to be even with their enemies in the end, and Shakspeare has taken an ample revenge. I cite it only for the phrase unless they be specially licensed by the King, which points to a fact on which I propose to dwell for a few moments before entering upon my more immediate object.
When Virgil said, “Arma virumque cano,” “Arms and the man I sing,” he defined in the strictest manner the original office of the poet, and the object of the judicious Macbeth’s ordinance was to prevent any one from singing the wrong arms and the rival man. Formerly the poet held a recognized place in the body politic, and if he has been deposed from it, it may be some consolation to think that the Fools, whom the Scottish usurper included in his penal statute, have not lost their share in the government of the world yet, nor, if we may trust appearances, are likely to for some time to come. But the Fools here referred to were not those who had least, but those who had most wit, and who assumed that disguise in order to take away any dangerous appearance of intention from their jibes and satires.
The poet was once what the political newspaper is now, and circulated from ear to ear with satire or panegyric. He it was who first made public opinion a power in the State by condensing it into a song. The invention of printing, by weakening the faculty of memory, and by transferring the address of language from the ear to the eye, has lessened the immediate power of the poet. A newspaper may be suppressed, an editor may be silenced, every copy of an obnoxious book may be destroyed, but in those old days when the minstrels were a power, a verse could wander safely from heart to heart and from hamlet to hamlet as unassailable as the memories on which it was imprinted. Its force was in its impersonality, for public opinion is disenchanted the moment it is individualized, and is terrible only so long as it is the opinion of no one in particular. Find its author, and the huge shadow which but now darkened half the heaven shrinks like the genius of the Arabian story into the compass of a leaden casket which one can hold in his hand. Nowadays one knows the editor, perhaps, and so is on friendly terms with public opinion. You may have dined with it yesterday, rubbed shoulders with it in the omnibus to-day, nay, carried it in your pocket embodied in the letter of the special correspondent.
Spenser, in his prose tract upon Ireland, has left perhaps the best description possible of the primitive poet as he was everywhere when the copies of a poem were so many living men, and all publication was to the accompaniment of music. He says: “There is amongst the Irish a certain kind of people called bards, which are to them instead of poets, whose profession is to set forth the praises or dispraises of men in their poems or rhythms; the which are held in such high regard or esteem amongst them that none dare to displease them for fear of running into reproach through this offense, and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men.”
Nor was the sphere of the bards confined to the present alone. They were also the embodied memory of the people. It was on the wings of verse that the names of ancestral heroes could float down securely over broad tracts of desert time and across the gulfs of oblivion. And poets were sometimes made use of by sagacious rulers to make legends serve a political purpose. The Persian poet Firdusi is a remarkable instance of this. Virgil also attempted to braid together the raveled ends of Roman and Greek tradition, and it is not impossible that the minstrels of the Norman metrical romances were guided by a similar instinct.
But the position of the inhabitants of England was a peculiar one. The Saxons by their conversion to Christianity, and the Normans still more by their conversion and change of language, were almost wholly cut off from the past. The few fragments of the Celtic race were the only natives of Britain who had an antiquity. The English properly so called were a people who hardly knew their own grandfathers. They no longer spoke the language, believed in the religion, or were dominated by the ideas of their ancestors.