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Chapter XIV - LiteraturePart II
Part II
A few generalizations always circulate in the world, whose authors we do
not rightly know, which astonish, and appear to be avenues to vast kingdoms of
thought, and these are in the world constants, like the Copernican and
Newtonian theories in physics. In England, these may be traced usually to
Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or Hooker, even to Van Helmont and Behmen, and do
all have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks. Of this kind is
Lord Bacon`s sentence, that "nature is commanded by obeying her;" his doctrine
of poetry, which "accommodates the shows of things to the desires of the
mind," or the Zoroastrian definition of poetry, mystical, yet exact, "apparent
pictures of unapparent natures;" Spenser`s creed, that "soul is form, and doth
the body make;" the theory of Berkeley, that we have no certain assurance of
the existence of matter; Doctor Samuel Clarke`s argument for theism from the
nature of space and time; Harrington`s political rule that power must rest on
land, - a rule which requires to be liberally interpreted; the theory of
Swedenborg, so cosmically applied by him, that the man makes his heaven and
hell; Hegel`s study of civil history, as the conflict of ideas and the victory
of the deeper thought; the identity-philosophy of Schelling, couched in the
statement that "all difference is quantitative." So the very announcement of
the theory of gravitation, of Kepler`s three harmonic laws, and even of
Dalton`s doctrine of definite proportions, finds a sudden response in the
mind, which remains a superior evidence to empirical demonstrations. I cite
these generalizations, some of which are more recent, merely to indicate a
class. Not these particulars, but the mental plane or the atmosphere from
which they emanate, was the home and element of the writers and readers in
what we loosely call the Elizabethan age (say, in literary history, the period
from 1575 to 1625), yet a period almost short enough to justify Ben Jonson`s
remark on Lord Bacon: "About this time, and within his view, were born all the
wits that could honor a nation, or help study."
Such richness of genius had not existed more than once before. These
heights could not be maintained. As we find stumps of vast trees in our
exhausted soils, and have received traditions of their ancient fertility to
tillage, so history reckons epochs in which the intellect of famed races
became effete. So it fared with English genius. These heights were followed by
a meanness, and a descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no
high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the
type of philosophy, and his "understanding" the measure, in all nations, of
the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on
which they had once walked with echoing steps, and disused the studies once so
beloved; the powers of thought fell into neglect. The later English want the
faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes by an
insight of general laws so deep that the rule is deduced with equal precision
from few subjects or from one, as from multitudes of lives. Shakspeare is
supreme in that, as in all the great mental energies. The Germans generalize:
the English cannot interpret the German mind. German science comprehends the
English. The absence of the faculty in England is shown by the timidity which
accumulates mountains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of men and
miles of redoubts, to compensate the inspirations of courage and conduct.
The English shrink from a generalization. "They do not look abroad into
universality, or they draw only a bucket-full at the fountain of the First
Philosophy for their occasion, and do not go to the spring-head." Bacon, who
said this, is almost unique among his countrymen in that faculty, at least
among the prose-writers. Milton, who was the stair or high table-land to
let down the English genius from the summits of Shakspeare, used this
privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely in prose. For a long interval
afterwards, it is not found. Burke was addicted to generalizing, but his was a
shorter line; as his thoughts have less depth, they have less compass. Hume`s
abstractions are not deep or wise. He owes his fame to one keen observation,
that no copula had been detected between any cause and effect, either in
physics or in thought; that the term cause and effect was loosely or
gratuitously applied to what we know only as consecutive, not at all as
causal. Doctor Johnson`s written abstractions have little value; the tone of
feeling in them makes their chief worth.
Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has written the history of
European literature for three centuries, - a performance of great ambition,
inasmuch as a judgment was to be attempted on every book. But his eye does not
reach to the ideal standards: the verdicts are all dated from London: all new
thought must be cast into the old moulds. The expansive element which creates
literature is steadily denied. Plato is resisted, and his school. Hallam is
uniformly polite, but with deficient sympathy; writes with resolute
generosity, but is unconscious of the deep worth which lies in the mystics,
and which often outvalues as a seed of power and a source of revolution all
the correct writers and shining reputations of their day. He passes in
silence, or dismisses with a kind of contempt, the profounder masters: a lover
of ideas is not only uncongenial, but unintelligible. Hallam inspires respect
by his knowledge and fidelity, by his manifest love of good books, and he
lifts himself to own better than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare, and
better than Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in Hallam, or in the firmer
intellectual nerve of Mackintosh, one still finds the same type of English
genius. It is wise and rich, but it lives on its capital. It is retrospective.
How can it discern and hail the new forms that are looming up on the horizon,
- new and gigantic thoughts which cannot dress themselves out of any old
wardrobe of the past?
The essays, the fiction, and the poetry of the day have the like
municipal limits. Dickens, with preternatural apprehension of the language, of
the manners, and the varieties of street life, with pathos and laughter, with
patriotic and still enlarging generosity, writes London tracts. He is a
painter of English details, like Hogarth; local and temporary in his tints and
style, and local in his aims. Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional
ability, is distinguished for his reverence of intellect as a temporality, and
appeals to the worldly ambition of the student. His romances tend to fan these
low flames. Their novelists despair of the heart. Thackeray finds that God has
made no allowance for the poor thing in his universe; - more`s the pity, he
thinks; - but `tis not for us to be wiser: we must renounce ideals, and accept
London.
The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing
classes of the day, explicitly teaches that good means good to eat, good to
wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction
on "fruit"; to yield economical inventions; and that its merit is to avoid
ideas, and to avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian
philosophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the
intellect from theories of the all - Fair and all - Good, and pinning it down
to the making a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid; -
this not ironically, but in good faith; - that "solid advantage," as he calls
it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of
astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to
bring home their lemons and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious
result, in which the civility and religion of England for a thousand years
ends in denying morals, and reducing the intellect to a saucepan.
The critic hides his scepticism under the English cant of practical. To
convince the reason, to touch the conscience, is romantic pretension. The fine
arts fall to the ground. Beauty, except as luxurious commodity, does not
exist. It is very certain, I may say in passing, that if Lord Bacon had been
only the sensualist his critic pretends, he would never have acquired the fame
which now entitles him to this patronage. It is because he had imagination,
the leisures of the spirit, and basked in an element of contemplation out of
all modern English atmospheric gauges, that he is impressive to the
imaginations of men, and has become a potentate not to be ignored. Sir David
Brewster sees the high place of Bacon without finding Newton indebted to him,
and thinks it a mistake. Bacon occupies it by specific gravity or levity, not
by any feat he did, or by any tutoring, more or less, of Newton, &c., but an
effect of the same cause which showed itself more pronounced afterwards in
Hooke, Boyle, and Halley.
Coleridge, a catholic mind with a hunger for ideas, with eyes looking
before and after to the highest bards and sages, and who wrote and spoke the
only high criticism in his time, - is one of those who save England from the
reproach of no longer possessing the capacity to appreciate what rarest wit
the island has yielded. Yet the misfortune of his life, his vast attempts but
most inadequate performings, failing to accomplish any one masterpiece, seems
to mark the closing of an era. Even in him, the traditional Englishman was too
strong for the philosopher, and he fell into accommodations: and, as Burke had
striven to idealize the English State, so Coleridge "narrowed his mind: in the
attempt to reconcile the Gothic rule and dogma of the Anglican Church with
eternal ideas. But for Coleridge, and a lurking taciturn minority, uttering
itself in occasional criticism, oftener in private discourse, one would say
that in Germany and in America is the best mind in England rightly respected.
It is the surest sign of national decay, when the Bramins can no longer read
or understand the Braminical philosophy.
In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed all this materialism,
Carlyle was driven by his disgust at the pettiness and the cant, into the
preaching of Fate. In comparison with all this rottenness, any check, any
cleansing, though by fire, seemed desirable and beautiful. He saw little
difference in the gladiators, or the "causes" for which they combated; the one
comfort was that they were all going speedily into the abyss together: And his
imagination, finding no nutriment in any creation, avenged itself by
celebrating the majestic beauty of the laws of decay, The necessities of
mental structure force all minds into a few categories, and where impatience
of the tricks of men makes Nemesis amiable, and builds altars to the negative
Deity, the inevitable recoil is to heroism or the gallantry of the private
heart, which decks its immolation with glory, in the unequal combat of will
against fate.
Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the
champion of Hahnemann, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a native
vigor, with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts
and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of old. There is in
the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest
waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest
centrality. If his mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit
is larger and the return is not yet: but a master should inspire a confidence
that he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present studies always
the same high place.
It would be easy to add exceptions to the limitary tone of English
thought, and much more easy to adduce examples of excellence particular veins:
and if, going out of the region of dogma, we pass into that of general
culture, there is no end of the graces and amenities, wit, sensibility, and
erudition, of the learned class. But the artificial succor which marks all
English performance, appears in letters also: much of their aesthetic
production is antiquarian and manufactured, and literary reputations have been
achieved by forcible men, whose relation to literature was purely accidental,
but who were driven by tastes and modes they found in vogue into their several
careers. So, at this moment, every ambitious young man studies geology: so
members of Parliament are made, and churchmen.
The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted on the national
mind. They are incapable of an inutility, and respect the five mechanic powers
even in their song. The voice of their modern muse has a slight hint of the
steam-whistle, and the poem is created as an ornament and finish of their
monarchy, and by no means as the bird of a new morning which forgets the past
world in the full enjoyment of that which is forming. They are with difficulty
ideal; they are the most conditioned men, as if, having the best conditions,
they could not bring themselves to forfeit them. Every one of them is a
thousand years old, and lives by his memory: and when you say this, they
accept it as praise.
Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, statistics,
tabulation, and engineering, and even what is called philosophy and letters is
mechanical in its structure, as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope,
no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more. The tone
of colleges, and of scholars and of literary society, has this mortal air. I
seem to walk on a marble floor, where nothing will grow. They exert every
variety of talent on a lower ground, and may be said to live and act in a sub
- mind. They have lost all commanding views in literature, philosophy, and
science. A good Englishman shuts himself out of three-fourths of his mind,
and confines himself to one-fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of
labor, and logic: but a faith in the laws of the mind like that of Archimedes;
a belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must follow and not
lead the laws of the mind; a devotion to the theory of politics like that of
Hooker, and Milton, and Harrington, the modern English mind repudiates.
I fear the same fault lies in their science, since they have known how to
make it repulsive, and bereave nature of its charm; - though perhaps the
complaint flies wider, and the vice attaches to many more than to British
physicists. The eye of the naturalist must have a scope like nature itself, a
susceptibility to all impressions, alive to the heart as well as to the logic
of creation. But English science puts humanity to the door. It wants the
connection which is the test of genius. The science is false by not being
poetic. It isolates the reptile or mollusk it assumes to explain; whilst
reptile or mollusk only exists in system, in relation. The poet only sees it
as an inevitable step in the path of the Creator. But, in England, one hermit
finds this fact, and another finds that, and lives and dies ignorant of its
value. There are great exceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas; perhaps of
Robert Brown, the botanist; and of Richard Owen, who has imported into Britain
the German homologies, and enriched science with contributions of his own,
adding sometimes the divination of the old masters to the unbroken power of
labor in the English mind. But for the most part, the natural science in
England is out of its loyal alliance with morals, and is as void of
imagination and free play of thought, as conveyancing. It stands in strong
contrast with the genius of the Germans, those semi-Greeks, who love
analogy, and, by means of their height of view, preserve their enthusiasm, and
think for Europe.
No hope, no sublime augury, cheers the student, no secure striding from
experiment onward to a foreseen law, but only a casual dipping here and there,
like diggers in California "prospecting for a placer" that will pay. A horizon
of brass of the diameter of his umbrella shuts down around his senses. Squalid
contentment with conventions, satire at the names of philosophy and religion,
parochial and shop - till politics, and idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of
life and spirit, As they trample on nationalities to reproduce London and
Londoners in Europe and Asia, so they fear the hostility of ideas, of poetry,
of religion, - ghosts which they cannot lay; - and, having attempted to
domesticate and dress the Blessed Soul itself in English broad cloth and
gaiters, they are tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that will
sweep their system away. The artists say, "Nature puts them out;" the scholars
have become un-ideal. They parry earnest speech with banter and levity; they
laugh you down, or they change the subject. "The fact is," say they, over
their wine, "all that about liberty, and so forth, is gone by; it won`t do any
longer." The practical and comfortable oppress them with inexorable claims,
and the smallest fraction of power remains for heroism and poetry. No poet
dares murmur of beauty out of the precinct of his rhymes. No priest dares hint
at a Providence which does not respect English utility. The island is a
roaring volcano of fate, of material values, of tariffs, and laws of
repression, glutted markets, and low prices.
In the absence of the highest aims, of the pure love of knowledge, and
the surrender to nature, there is the suppression of the imagination, the
priapism of the senses and the understanding; we have the factitious instead
of the natural; tasteless expense, arts of comfort, and the rewarding as an
illustrious inventor whosoever will contrive one impediment more to interpose
between the man and his objects.
Thus poetry is degraded, and made ornamental. Pope and his school wrote
poetry fit to put round frosted cake. What did Walter Scott write without
stint? a rhymed traveller`s guide to Scotland. And the libraries of verses
they print have this Birmingham character. How many volumes of well-bred
metre we must gingle through, before we can be filled, taught, renewed! We
want the miraculous; the beauty which we can manufacture at no mill, - can
give no account of; the beauty of which Chaucer and Chapman had the secret.
The poetry of course is low and prosaic; only now and then, as in Wordsworth,
conscientious; or in Byron, passional, or in Tennyson, factitious. But if I
should count the poets who have contributed to the bible of existing England
sentences of guidance and consolation which are still glowing and effective, -
how few! Shall I find my heavenly bread in the reigning poets? Where is great
design in modern English poetry? The English have lost sight of the fact that
poetry exists to speak the spiritual law, and that no wealth of description or
of fancy is yet essentially new, and out of the limits of prose, until this
condition is reached. Therefore the grave old poets, like the Greek artists,
heeded their designs, and less considered the finish. It was their office to
lead to the divine sources, out of which all this, and much more, readily
springs; and, if this religion is in the poetry, it raises us to some purpose,
and we can well afford some staidness, or hardness, or want of popular tune in
the verses.
The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of Wordsworth. He had no
master but nature and solitude. "He wrote a poem," says Landor, "without the
aid of war." His verse is the voice of sanity in a worldly and ambitious age.
One regrets that his temperament was not more liquid and musical. He has
written longer than he was inspired. But for the rest, he has no competitor.
Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Wordsworth wanted. There is
no finer ear, nor more command of the keys of language. Color, like the dawn,
flows over the horizon from his pencil, in waves so rich that we do not miss
the central form. Through all his refinements, too, he has reached the public,
- a certificate of good sense and general power, since he who aspires to be
the English poet must be as large as London, not in the same kind as London,
but in his own kind. But he wants a subject, and climbs no mount of vision to
bring its secrets to the people. He contents himself with describing the
Englishman as he is, and proposes no better. There are all degrees in poetry,
and we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But it is only a first
success, when the ear is gained. The best office of the best poets has been to
show how low and uninspired was their general style, and that only once or
twice they have struck the high chord.
That expansiveness which is the essence of the poetic element, they have
not. It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, who said, "Let us be crowned with roses,
let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new
forms." A stanza of the song of nature the Oxonian has no ear for, and he does
not value the salient and curative influence of intellectual action, studious
of truth, without a by-end.
By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistible taste for
Orientalism in Britain. For a self-conceited modish life, made up of trifles
clinging to a corporeal civilization, hating ideas, there is no remedy like
the Oriental largeness. That astonishes and disconcerts English decorum. For
once there is thunder it never heard, light it never saw, and power which
trifles with time and space. I am not surprised, then, to find an Englishman
like Warren Hastings, who had been struck with the grand style of thinking in
the Indian writings, deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen, while
offering them a translation of the Bhagvat. "Might I, an unlettered man,
venture to prescribe bounds to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in
estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from the ancient or
modern literature of Europe, all references to such sentiments or manners as
are become the standards of propriety for opinion and action in our modes,
and, equally all, appeals to our revealed tenets of religion and moral
duty."^1 He goes on to bespeak indulgence to "ornaments of fancy unsuited to
our taste, and passages elevated to a tract of sublimity into which our habits
of judgment will find it difficult to pursue them."
[Footnote 1: Preface to Wilkins` Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta.]
Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies in the English race, which
seems to make any recoil possible; in other words, there is at all times a
minority of profound minds existing in the nation, capable of appreciating
every soaring of intellect and every hint of tendency. While the constructive
talent seems dwarfed and superficial, the criticism is often in the noblest
tone, and suggests the presence of the invisible gods. I can well believe what
I have often heard, that there are two nations in England; but it is not the
Poor and the Rich; nor is it the Normans and Saxons; nor the Celt and the
Goth. These are each always becoming the other; for Robert Owen does not
exaggerate the power of circumstance. But the two complexions, or two styles
of mind, - the perceptive class, and the practical finality class, - are ever
in counterpoise, interacting mutually; one in hopeless minorities; the other,
in huge masses; one studious, contemplative, experimenting; the other, the
ungrateful pupil, scornful of the source, whilst availing itself of the
knowledge for gain; these two nations, of genius and of animal force, though
the first consist of only a dozen souls, and the second of twenty millions,
forever by their discord and their accord yield the power of the English
State.
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