Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

the gift of conferring good or evil immortality.

The first histories were in verse, and, sung as they were at the feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust, because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said only two centuries ago: “When I read Homer I feel as if I were twenty feet high.”

Nor have poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith and Brown of some provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard III. as smooth as they can; they will never get over the wrench that Shakspeare gave them.

The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have a double meaning; that underneath its natural we find ourselves continually seeing and suspecting a supernatural meaning. Even in the older epics the characters seem to be only half-historical and half-typical. They appear as the Pilgrim Fathers do in Twenty-second of December speeches at Plymouth. The names may be historical, but the attributes are ideal. The orator draws a portrait rather of what he thinks the founders ought to have been than a likeness which contemporaries would have recognized. Thus did early poets endeavor to make reality out of appearances. For, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for a purposeless moment, and enter the dark again after they have performed the nothing they came for.

The poet’s gift, then, is that of seer. He it is that discovers the truth as it exists in types and images; that is the spiritual meaning, which abides forever under the sensual. And his instinct is to express himself also in types and images. But it was not only necessary that he himself should be delighted with his vision, but that he should interest his hearers with the faculty divine. Pure truth is not acceptable to the mental palate. It must be diluted with character and incident; it must be humanized in order to be attractive. If the bones of a mastodon be exhumed, a crowd will gather out of curiosity; but let the skeleton of a man be turned up, and what a difference in the expression of the features! Every bystander then creates his little drama, in which those whitened bones take flesh upon them and stalk as chief actor.

The poet is he who can best see or best say what is ideal; what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he celebrates the brave and good, or the gods, or the beautiful as it appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still clings to him. He may be unconscious of his mission; he may be false to it, but in proportion as he is a great poet, he rises to the level of it more often. He does not always directly rebuke what is bad or base, but indirectly, by making us feel what delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil it is with such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the mean and low and bad. It is something to be thought of, that all the great poets have been good men. He who translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual, is the reverse of a poet.

It seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late; that there has been a feast of the imagination formerly, and all that is left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs, and especially in Brother Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But, because he is a materialist, shall there be no poets? When we have said that we live in a materialistic age, we have said something which meant more than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another; and, at any rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakspeare seems richer than our own only because he was lucky enough to have such a pair of eyes as his to see it and such a gift as his to report it. Shakspeare did not sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his little private mill there at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more quietly about his business than any playwright in London; to have drawn off what water-power he wanted from the great prosy current of affairs that flows alike for all, and in spite of all; to have ground for the public what grist they want, coarse or fine; and it seems a mere piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink. It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakspeare received everything that came along, of what a present man he was, that in the very same year that the mulberry tree was brought into England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.

It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for this very reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky’s falling. When the poet comes he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not to have lived in Homer’s day or Dante’s, but to be alive now. To be alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live in the past, and men yet unborn who live in the future. We are like Hans-in-Luck, forever exchanging the burthensome good we have for something else, till at last we come home empty-handed. The people who find their own age prosaic are those who see only its costume. And this is what makes it prosaic: that we have not faith enough in ourselves to think that our own clothes are good enough to be presented to Posterity in. The artists seem to think that the court dress of posterity is that of Vandyke’s time or Cæsar’s. I have seen the model of a statue of Sir Robert Peel—a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding gracefully to the present—in which the sculptor had done his best to travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of this, and we are thankful to the man who made the monument of Lord Bacon that he had genius enough to copy every button of his dress, everything down to the rosettes on his shoes. These men had faith even in their own shoe-strings. Till Dante’s time the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings into but Latin (and, indeed, a dead tongue was the best for dead thoughts), but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men bargained, and scolded, and made love, good enough for him, and out of the world around him made such a poem as no Roman ever sang.

We cannot get rid of our wonder, we who have brought down the wild lightning from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven to be our errand-boy and penny postman. In this day of newspapers and electric telegraphs, in which common-sense and ridicule can magnetise a whole continent between dinner and tea, we may say that such a phenomenon as Mahomet were impossible; and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret! Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of Webster on “Witchcraft” which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, Well, that goblin is laid at last! And while I mused, the tables were dancing and the chairs beating the devil’s tattoo all over Christendom. I have a neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay-slate to a spring pointed out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son’s seventh son, and the water is sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin’s lamp.

It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some sort or another. If they cannot get the best, they will get at some substitute for it. But there is as much poetry as ever in the world if we can ever know how to find it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped of his material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying mountain-farm of imagination, which does not appear in the schedule of his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep alive, though he never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.