(Friday Evening, February 9, 1855)
X
No one who has read any early poems, of whatever nation, can have failed to notice a freshness in the language—a sort of game flavor, as it were—that gradually wastes out of it when poetry becomes domesticated, so to speak, and has grown to be a mere means of amusement both to writers and readers, instead of answering a deeper necessity in their natures. Our Northern ancestors symbolized the eternal newness of song by calling it the Present, and its delight by calling it the drink of Odin.
There was then a fierce democracy of words; no grades had then been established, and no favored ones advanced to the Upper House of Poetry. Men had a meaning, and so their words had to have one, too. They were not representatives of value, but value itself. They say that Valhalla was roofed with golden shields; that was what they believed, and in their songs they called them golden shingles. We should think shields the more poetical word of the two; but to them the poetry was in the thing, and the thought of it and the phrase took its life and meaning from them.
It is one result of the admixture of foreign words in our language that we use a great many phrases without knowing the force of them. There is a metaphoric vitality hidden in almost all of them, and we talk poetry as Molière’s citizen did prose, without ever suspecting it. Formerly men named things; now we merely label them to know them apart. The Vikings called their ships sea-horses, just as the Arabs called their camels ships of the desert. Capes they called sea-noses, without thinking it an undignified term which the land would resent. And still, where mountains and headlands have the luck to be baptized by uncultivated persons, Fancy stands godmother. Old Greylock, up in Berkshire, got his surname before we had State geologists or distinguished statesmen. So did Great Haystack and Saddle-Mountain. Sailors give good names, if they have no dictionary aboard, and along our coasts, here and there, the word and the thing agree, and therefore are poetical. Meaning and poetry still cling to some of our common phrases, and the crow-foot, mouse-ear, goat’s-beard, day’s-eye, heart’s-ease, snow-drop, and many more of their vulgar little fellow-citizens of the wood and roadsides are as happy as if Linnæus had never been born. Such names have a significance even to one who has never seen the things they stand for, but whose fancy would not be touched about a pelargonium unless he had an acquired sympathy with it. Our “cumulus” language, heaped together from all quarters, is like the clouds at sunset, and every man finds something different in a sentence, according to his associations. Indeed, every language that has become a literary one may be compared to a waning moon, out of which the light of beauty fades more and more. Only to poets and lovers does it repair itself from its luminous fountains.
The poetical quality of diction depends on the force and intensity of meaning with which it is employed. We are all of us full of latent significance, and let a poet have but the power to touch us, we forthwith enrich his word with ourselves, pouring into his verse our own lives, all our own experience, and take back again, without knowing it, the vitality which we had given away out of ourselves. Put passion enough into a word, and no matter what it is it becomes poetical; it is no longer what it was, but is a messenger from original man to original man, an ambassador from royal Thee to royal Me, and speaks to us from a level of equality. Pope, who did not scruple to employ the thoughts of Billingsgate, is very fastidious about the dress they come in, and claps a tawdry livery-coat on them, that they may be fit for the service of so fine a gentleman. He did not mind being coarse in idea, but it would have been torture to him to be thought commonplace. The sin of composition which he dreaded was,
Lest ten low words should creep in one dull line.
But there is no more startling proof of the genius of Shakspeare than that he always lifts the language up to himself, and never thinks to raise himself atop of it. If he has need of the service of what is called a low word, he takes it, and it is remarkable how many of his images are borrowed out of the street and the workshop. His pen ennobled them all, and we feel as if they had been knighted for good service in the field. Shakspeare, as we all know (for does not Mr. Voltaire say so?), was a vulgar kind of fellow, but somehow or other his genius will carry the humblest things up into the air of heaven as easily as Jove’s eagle bore Ganymede.
Whatever is used with a great meaning, and conveys that meaning to others in its full intensity, is no longer common and ordinary. It is this which gives their poetic force to symbols, no matter how low their origin. The blacksmith’s apron, once made the royal standard of Persia, can fill armies with enthusiasm and is as good as the oriflamme of France. A broom is no very noble thing in itself, but at the mast-head of a brave old De Ruyter, or in the hands of that awful shape which Dion the Syracusan saw, it becomes poetical. And so the emblems of the tradesmen of Antwerp, which they bore upon their standards, pass entirely out of the prosaic and mechanical by being associated with feelings and deeds that were great and momentous.