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Chapter XIV - LiteraturePart I.
Part I.
A strong common-sense, which it is not easy to unseat or disturb, marks
the English mind for a thousand years: a rude strength newly applied to
thought, as of sailors and soldiers who had lately learned to read. They have
no fancy, and never are surprised into a covert or witty word, such as pleased
the Athenians and Italians, and was convertible into a fable not long after;
but they delight in strong earthly expression, not mistakable, coarsely true
to the human body, and, though spoken among princes, equally fit and welcome
to the mob. This homeliness, veracity, and plain style appear in the earliest
extant works, and in the latest. It imports into songs and ballads the smell
of the earth, the breath of cattle, and, like a Dutch painter, seeks a
household charm, though by pails and pans. They ask their constitutional
utility in verse. The kail and herrings are never out of sight. The poet
nimbly recovers himself from every sally of the imagination. The English muse
loves the farmyard, the lane, and market. She says, with De Stael, "I tramp in
the mire with wooden shoes, whenever they would fore me into the clouds." For,
the Englishman has accurate perceptions; takes hold of things by the right
end, and there is no slipperiness in his grasp. He loves the axe, the spade,
the oar, the gun, the steam-pipe: he has built the engine he uses. He is
materialist, economical, mercantile. He must be treated with sincerity and
reality, with muffins, and not the promise of muffins; and prefers his hot
chop, with perfect security and convenience in the eating of it, to the
chances of the amplest and Frenchiest bill of fare, engraved on embossed
paper. When he is intellectual, and a poet or a philosopher, he carries the
same hard truth and the same keen machinery into the mental sphere. His mind
must stand on a fact. He will not be baffled, or catch at clouds, but the mind
must have a symbol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in Dante is the
vice-like tenacity with which he holds a mental image before the eyes, as if
it were a scutcheon painted on a shield. Byron "liked something craggy to
break his mind upon." A taste for plain strong speech, what is called a
biblical style, marks the English. It is in Alfred, and the Saxon Chronicle,
and in the Sagas of the Northmen. Latimer was homely. Hobbes was perfect in
the "noble vulgar speech." Donne, Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys,
Hooker, Cotton, and the translators wrote it. How realistic or materialistic
in treatment of his subject is Swift. He describes his fictitious persons, as
if for the police. Defoe has no insecurity or choice. Hudibras has the same
hard mentality, - keeping the truth at once to the senses, and to the
intellect.
It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer`s hard painting of his Canterbury
pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, in their
loftiest ascents, have this national grip and exactitude of mind. This mental
materialism makes the value of English transcendental genius; in these
writers, and in Herbert, Henry More, Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxon
materialism and narrowness, exalted into the sphere of intellect, makes the
very genius of Shakspeare and Milton. When it reaches the pure element, it
treads the clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its elevations,
materialistic, its poetry is common-sense inspired; or iron raised to white
heat.
The marriage of the two qualities is in their speech. It is a tacit rule
of the language to make the frame or skeleton of Saxon words, and, when
elevation or ornament is sought, to interweave Roman; but sparingly; nor is a
sentence made of Roman words alone, without loss of strength. The children and
laborers use the Saxon unmixed. The Latin unmixed is abandoned to the colleges
and Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the English island; and, in their
dialect, the male principle is the Saxon; the female, the Latin; and they are
combined in every discourse. A good writer, if he has indulged in a Roman
roundness, makes haste to chasten and nerve his period by English
monosyllables.
When the Gothic nations came into Europe, they found it lighted with the
sun and moon of Hebrew and of Greek genius. The tablets of their brain, long
kept in the dark, were finely sensible to the double glory. To the images from
this twin source (of Christianity and art), the mind became fruitful as by the
incubation of the Holy Ghost. The English mind flowered in every faculty. The
common-sense was surprised and inspired. For two centuries, England was
philosophic, religious, poetic. The mental furniture seemed of larger scale;
the memory capacious like the storehouse of the rains; the ardor and endurance
of study; the boldness and facility of their mental construction; their fancy,
and imagination, and easy spanning of vast distances of thought the enterprise
or accosting of new subjects; and, generally, the easy exertion of power,
astonish, like the legendary feats of Guy of Warwick. The union of Saxon
precision and Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the perfect example, is
shared in less degree by the writers of two centuries. I find not only the
great masters out of all rivalry and reach, but the whole writing of the time
charged with a masculine force and freedom.
There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor, and closeness to the matter
in hand, even in the second and third class of writers; and, I think, in the
common style of the people, as one finds it in the citation of wills, letters,
and public documents, in proverbs, and forms of speech. The more hearty and
sturdy expression may indicate that the savageness of the Norseman was not all
gone. Their dynamic brains hurled off their words, as the revolving stone
hurls off scraps of grit. I could cite from the seventeenth century sentences
and phrases of edge not to be matched in the nineteenth. Their poets by simple
force of mind equalized themselves with the accumulated science of ours. The
country gentlemen had a posset or drink they called October; and the poets, as
if by this hint, knew how to distil the whole season into their autumnal
verses: and, as nature, to pique the more, sometimes works up deformities into
beauty, in some rare Aspasia, or Cleopatra; and, as the Greek art wrought many
a vase or column, in which too long, or too lithe, or nodes, or pits and
flaws, are made a beauty of; so these were so quick and vital, that they could
charm and enrich by mean and vulgar objects.
A man must think that age well taught and thoughtful, by which masques
and poems, like those of Ben Jonson, full of heroic sentiment in a manly
style, were received with favor. The unique fact in literary history, the
unsurprised reception of Shakspeare; - the reception proved by his making his
fortune; and the apathy proved by the absence of all contemporary panegyric, -
seems to demonstrate an elevation in the mind of the people. Judge of the
splendor of a nation, by the insignificance of great individuals in it. The
manner in which they learned Greek and Latin, before our modern facilities
were yet ready, without dictionaries, grammars, or indexes, by lectures of a
professor, followed by their own searchings, - required a more robust memory,
and cooperation of all the faculties; and their scholars, Camden, Usher,
Selden, Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, Burton, Bentley, Brian Walton, acquired
the solidity and method of engineers.
The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. Their minds loved
analogy; were cognizant of resemblances, and climbers on the staircase of
unity. `Tis a very old strife between those who elect to see identity, and
those who elect to see discrepancies; and it renews itself in Britain. The
poets, of course, are of one part; the men of the world, of the other. But
Britain had many disciples of Plato; - More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord
Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spenser, Chapman, Milton, Crashaw, Norris,
Cudworth, Berkeley, Jeremy Taylor.
Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries of observations, on
useful science, and his experiments, I suppose, were worth nothing. One hint
of Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a talent for
experiment, was worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles. But he drinks of
a diviner stream, and marks the influx of idealism into England. Where that
goes, is poetry, health, and progress. The rules of its genesis or its
diffusion are not known. That knowledge, if we had it, would supersede all the
we call science of the mind. It seems an affair of race, or of meta -
chemistry; - the vital point being, - how far the sense of unity, or instinct
of seeking resemblances, predominated. For, wherever the mind takes a step, it
is, to put itself at one with a larger class, discerned beyond the lesser
class with which it has beeb conversant. Hence all poetry and all affirmative
action come.
Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the analogists, of the
idealists, or (as we popularly say, naming from the best example) Platonists.
Whoever discredits analogy, and requires heaps of facts, before any theories
can be attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing original or beautiful will
be produced by him. Locke is as surely the influx of decomposition and of
prose, as Bacon and the Platonists of growth. The Platonic is the poetic
tendency; the so-called scientific is the negative and poisonous. `Tis quite
certain that Spenser, Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth will be Platonists; and
that the dull men will be Lockists. Then politics and commerce will absorb
from the educated class men of talents without genius, precisely because such
have no resistance.
Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, required, in his map of the
mind, first of all, universality, or prima philosophia, the receptacle for all
such profitable observations and axioms as fall not within the compass of any
of the special parts of philosophy, but are more common, and of a higher
stage. He held this element essential: it is never out of mind: he never
spares rebukes for such as neglect it; believing that no perfect discovery can
be made in a flat or level, but you must ascend to a higher science. "If any
man thinketh philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not
consider that all professions are from thence served and supplied, and this I
take to be a great cause that has hindered the progression of learning,
because these fundamental knowledges have been studied but in passage." He
explained himself by giving various quaint examples of the summary or common
laws, of which each science has its own illustration. He complains that "he
finds this part of learning very deficient, the profounder sort of wits
drawing a bucket now and then for their own use, but the spring-head
unvisited. This was the dry light which did scorch and offend most men`s
watery natures." Plato had signified the same sense, when he said, "All the
great arts require a subtle and speculative research into the law of nature,
since loftiness of thought and perfect mastery over every subject seem to be
derived from some such source as this. This Pericles had, in addition to a
great natural genius. For, meeting with Anaxagoras,who was a person of this
kind, he attached himself to him, and nourished himself with sublime
speculations on the absolute intelligence; and imported thence into the
oratorical art whatever could be useful to it."
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