[From the London Eclectic Review.]
HAVE GREAT POETS BECOME IMPOSSIBLE?[18]
"Poetry is declining—poetry is being extinguished—poetry is extinct. To talk of poetry now is eccentricity—to write it is absurdity—to publish it is moonstruck madness." So the changes are rung. Now, it is impossible to deny that what is called poetry has become a drug, a bore, and nuisance, and that the name "Poet," as commonly applied, is at present about the shabbiest in the literary calendar. But we are far from believing that poetry is extinct. We entertain, on the contrary, sanguine hopes of its near and glorious resurrection. Soon do we hope to hear those tones of high melody, which are now like the echoes of forgotten thunder:
"From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence become music."
We expect, about the very time, when the presumption against the revivication of poetry shall have attained the appearance of absolute certainty, to witness a Tenth Avatar of Genius—and to witness its effect, too, upon the sapient personages who had been predicting that it was forever departed.
But this, it seems, is "not a poetical age." For our parts, we know not what age has not been poetical—in what age have not existed all the elements of poetry, been developed all its passions, and been heard many of its tones. "Were the dark ages poetical?" it will be asked. Yes, for then, as now, there was pathos—there was passion—there were hatred, revenge, love, grief, despair, religion. Wherever there is the fear of death and of judgment, there is, and must be poetry—and when was that feeling more intensely developed than during that dim period? The victims of a spell are objects of poetical interest. Here was a strong spell, embracing a world. Was no arm during the dark ages bared aloft in defense of outraged innocence? Or was no head then covered with the snows of a hundred winters, through one midnight despair? Was the voice of prayer then stifled throughout Europe's hundred lands? Was the mighty heart of man—the throbbing of which is just poetry, then utterly silent? But it was not expressed! We maintain, on the contrary, that it was—expressed at the time, in part by monks, and scalds, and orators, and expressed afterward in the glad energy of the spring which human nature made from its trance, into new life and motion. The elements of poetry had been accumulating in secret. The renovation of letters merely opened a passage for what had been struggling for vent. What is Dante's work but a beautiful incarnation of the spirit of the Middle Ages? His passion is that of a sublimated Inquisitor. His "Inferno" is such a dream as might have been dreamed by a poet monk, whose body had been macerated by austerities, and whose spirit had been darkened by long broodings on the fate of the victims of perdition. It is the poetical part of the passion of those ages of darkness finding a full voice—an eternal echo. And it was not in vain that so deep had been the slumber, when such had been its visions. There is a grandeur about any passion when carried to excess. Superstition, therefore, became the inspiration of one of the greatest productions of the universe. Dante was needed precisely when he appeared. The precise quantity of poetical material to answer the ends of a great original poet was accumulated; and the mighty Florentine, when he rose, became the mouth-piece and oracle of his age and of its cognate ages past—the exact index of all that redeemed, animated, excited, or adorned them.
The crusades, too, were another proof that the slumber in which Europe had been buried was not absolutely and altogether that of stupor or death. They occurred after the noon of that period we usually denominate dark. But they were the realization of a dream which had often passed through the monkish heart—the embodiment, of a wish which had often brought tears into the eyes of genuine enthusiasts. There was, surely, as much sublimity in the first conception as in the execution. What indeed were the crusades, but the means of bringing to light, feelings, desires, passions, a lofty disinterested heroism, which the very depth of the former darkness had tended to foster and fire?
If the dark ages had thus their poetical tendencies, climbing toward a full poetic expression, surely no age need or can be destitute of theirs—need or can be called unpoetical. But the misfortune is, that men will not look at the essential poetry which is lying around them, and under their feet. They suppose their age to be unpoetical, merely because they grapple not with its great excitements, nor will venture to sail upon its "mighty stream of tendency." They overlook the volcano in the next mountain—while admiring or deploring those which have been extinct for centuries, or which are a thousand miles away. They are afraid that if they catch the spirit of their age in verse, they will give it a temporary stamp; and therefore they either abstain from writing, and take to abusing the age on which they have unluckily fallen, or else come to the same resolution after an unsuccessful attempt to revive faded stimulants. Dante embodied, for instance, his countrymen's rude conception of future punishment—and he did well. But our modern religious poets have never ventured to meddle with those moral aspects of the subject which have now so generally supplanted the material. They talk instead, with Pollok, of the "rocks of dark damnation," or outrage common sense by such barbarous mis-creations as he has sculptured on the gate of hell, and think they have written an "Inferno," or that, if they have failed, it is because their age is not poetical.
Indeed, the least poetry is sometimes written in the most poetical ages. Men, when acting poetry, have little time either to write or to read it. There was less poetry written in the age of Charles I., than in that which preceded it, and more poetry enacted. But the majority of men only listen to the reverberations of emotion in song. They sympathize not with poetry, but with poets. And, therefore, when a cluster of poets die, or are buried before they be dead, they chant dirges over the death of poetry—as if it ever did or ever could die! as if its roots, which are just the roots of the human soul, were perishable—as if, especially when a strong current of excitement was flowing, it were not plain, that there was a poetry which should, in due time, develop its own masters to record and prolong it forever. Surely, as long as the grass is green and the sky is blue, as long as man's heart is warm and woman's face is fair, poetry, like seed-time and harvest, like summer and winter shall not cease.
There was little poetry, some people think, about England's civil war, because the leader of one party was a red-nosed fanatic. They, for their part, cannot extract poetry from a red nose; but they are in raptures with Milton. Fools! but for that civil war, its high and solemn excitement, the deeds and daring of that red-nosed fanatic, would the "Paradise Lost" ever have been written, or written as it has been? That stupendous edifice of genius seems cemented by the blood of Naseby and of Marston Moor.