“What do you think of Dr. Channing, Mr. Coleridge?” said a brisk young gentleman to the mighty discourser, as he sat next him at a small tea-party. “Before entering upon that question, sir,” said Coleridge, opening upon his inquirer those ‘noticeable gray eyes,’ with a vague and placid stare, and settling himself in his seat for the night, “I must put you in possession of my views, in extenso, on the origin, progress, present condition, future likelihoods, and absolute essence of the Unitarian controversy, and especially the conclusions I have, upon the whole, come to on the great question of what may be termed the philosophy of religious difference.” In like manner, before telling our readers what we think of Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, or of “V.,” or of Henry Ellison, the Bornnatural, or of E. V. K., it would have been very pleasant (to ourselves) to have given, in extenso, our views de Re Poeticâ, its nature, its laws and office, its means and ends; and to have made known how much and how little we agreed on these points with such worthies as Aristotle and Plato, Horace and Richard Baxter, Petronius Arbiter and Blaise Pascal, Ulric von Hütten and Boileau, Hurdis and Hurd, Dr. Arnold and Montaigne, Harris of Salisbury and his famous uncle, Burke and “John Buncle,” Montesquieu and Sir Philip Sidney, Dr. Johnson and the two Wartons, George Gascoyne and Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey, Puttenham and Webbe, George Herbert and George Sand, Petrarch and Pinciano, Vida and Julius Cæsar Scaliger, Pontanus and Savage Landor, Leigh Hunt and Quinctilian, or Tacitus (whichever of the two wrote the Dialogue De Oratoribus, in which there is so much of the best philosophy, criticism, and expression), Lords Bacon and Buchan and Dr. Blair, Dugald Stewart and John Dryden, Charles Lamb and Professor Wilson, Vinet of Lausanne and John Foster, Lord Jeffrey and the two brothers Hare, Drs. Fuller and South, John Milton and Dr. Drake, Dante and “Edie Ochiltree,” Wordsworth and John Bunyan, Plutarch and Winkelman, the Coleridges, Samuel, Sara, Hartley, Derwent, and Henry Nelson, Sir Egerton Bridges, Victor Cousin and “the Doctor,” George Moir and Madame de Staël, Dr. Fracastorius and Professor Keble, Martinus Scriblerus and Sir Thomas Browne, Macaulay and the Bishop of Cloyne, Collins and Gray and Sir James Mackintosh, Hazlitt and John Ruskin, Shakspeare and Jackson of Exeter, Dallas and De Quincey, and the six Taylors, Jeremy, William, Isaac, Jane, John Edward, and Henry. We would have had great pleasure in quoting what these famous women and men have written on the essence and the art of poetry, and to have shown how strangely they differ, and how as strangely at times they agree. But as it is not related at what time of the evening our brisk young gentleman got his answer regarding Dr. Channing, so it likewise remains untold what our readers have lost and gained in our not fulfilling our somewhat extensive desire.
It is with poetry as with flowers or fruits, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, we would all rather have them, and smell them, and taste them, than hear about them. It is a good thing to know all about a lily, its scientific ins and outs, its botany, its archæology, its æsthetics, even its anatomy and “organic radicals,” but it is a better thing to look at itself, and “consider” it how it grows—
“White, radiant, spotless, exquisitely pure.”
It is one thing to know what your peach is, that it is the fruit of a rosal exogen, and is of the nature of a true drupe, with its carpel solitary, and its style proceeding from the apex,—that its ovules are anatropal, and that its putamen separates sponte suâ from the sacrocarp; to know, moreover, how many kinds of peaches and nectarines there are in the world, and how happy the Canadian pigs must be of an evening munching the downy odoriferous drupes under the trees, and what an aroma this must give to the resulting pork,[44]—it is another and a better thing to pluck the peach, and sink your teeth into its fragrant flesh. We remember only one exception to this rule. Who has ever yet tasted the roast pig of reality which came up to the roast pig of Charles Lamb? Who can forget “that young and tender suckling, under a moon old, guiltless as yet of the style, with no original speck of the amor immunditiæ—the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest, and which, when prepared aright, is, of all the delicacies in the mundus edibilis, the most delicate—obsoniorum facile princeps—whose fat is not fat, but an indefinable sweetness growing up toward it—the tender blossoming of fat—fat cropped in the bud—taken in the shoot—in the first innocence, the cream and quintessence of the child-pig’s yet pure food—the lean not lean, but a kind of animal manna—cœlestis—cibus ille angelorum—or rather shall we say, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosial result.” But here, as elsewhere, the exception proves the rule, and even the perusal of “Original” Walker’s delicious schemes of dinners at Lovegrove’s, with flounders water-zoutched, and iced claret, would stand little chance against an invitation to a party of six to Blackwall, with “Tom Young of the Treasury” as Prime Minister.
Poetry is the expression of the beautiful—by words—the beautiful of the outer and of the inner world; whatever is delectable to the eye or the ear, the every sense of the body and of the soul—it presides over veras dulcedines rerum. It implies at once a vision and a faculty, a gift and an art. There must be the vivid conception of the beautiful, and its fit manifestation in numerous language. A thought may be poetical, and yet not poetry; it may be a sort of mother liquor, holding in solution the poetical element, but waiting and wanting its precipitation,—its concentration into the bright and compacted crystal. It is the very blossom and fragrancy and bloom of all human thoughts, passions, emotions, language; having for its immediate object—its very essence—pleasure and delectation rather than truth; but springing from truth, as the flower from its fixed and unseen root. To use the words of Puttenham in reference to Sir Walter Raleigh, poetry is a lofty, insolent (unusual) and passionate thing.
It is not philosophy, it is not science, it is not morality, it is not religion, any more than red is or ever can be blue or yellow, or than one thing can ever be another; but it feeds on, it glorifies and exalts, it impassionates them all. A poet will be the better of all the wisdom, and all the goodness, and all the science, and all the talent he can gather into himself, but quâ poet he is a minister and an interpreter of τὸ καλὸν, and of nothing else. Philosophy and poetry are not opposites, but neither are they convertibles. They are twin sisters;—in the words of Augustine:—“Philocalia et Philosophia prope similiter cognominatæ sunt, et quasi gentiles inter se videri volunt et sunt. Quid est enim Philosophia? amor sapientiæ. Quid Philocalia? amor pulchritudinis. Germanæ igitur istæ sunt prorsus, et eodem parente procreatæ.” Fracastorius beautifully illustrates this in his “Naugerius, sive De Poeticâ Dialogus.” He has been dividing writers, or composers as he calls them, into historians, or those who record appearances; philosophers, who seek out causes; and poets, who perceive and express veras pulchritudines rerum, quicquid maximum et magnificum, quicquid pulcherrimum, quicquid dulcissimum; and as an example, he says, if the historian describe the ongoings of this visible universe, I am taught; if the philosopher announce the doctrine of a spiritual essence pervading and regulating all things, I admire; but if the poet take up the same theme, and sing—
“Principio cælum ac terras camposque liquentes
Lucentemque globum lunæ, titaniaque astra,
Spiritus intus alit; totamque infusa per artus