|
Part I
Part I
A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon`s edge,
Searched with Apollo`s privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have
acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an
inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are
beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn
that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you
should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest
remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and
particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for
amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of
beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost
the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no
doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is
put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment
between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of
the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe
in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition.
Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a
ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the
solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a
civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a
safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world
have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the
quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous
fact: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and
the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and
barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the
fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three
removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the
fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are
intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature
and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty, to the means and materials he
uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time.
The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He
stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his
wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because,
to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as
he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of
loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same
time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but
with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or
later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in
art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our
painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his
expression.
Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is
rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter: but the great majority
of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own,
or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There
is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and
stars, earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar
service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our
constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble
fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should
thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in
conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or
appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to
reach the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet
is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment,
who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of
experience, and its representative of man, in virtue of being the largest
power to receive and to impart.
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear,
under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called
cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or,
theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call
here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the
love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three
are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be
surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others
latent in him, and his own patent.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a
sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned,
but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful
things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not
any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is
infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and
activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not,
overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent
into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose
province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer`s words
are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon`s victories are to
Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act
and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken,
reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him,
secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or
as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely
organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we
hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever
and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus
miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more
faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the
nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is
reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words
and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also
actions, and actions are a kind of words.
The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no
man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the
only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he
describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and
causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and
skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other
day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head
appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and
command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question
arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to
confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not
stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up
from the torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the
herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is
the landscapegarden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues,
with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces.
We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life.
Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The
argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, - a
thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an
animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of
genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a
whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all
men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age
requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet, I
remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning by tidings that
genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work,
and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but
could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told: he could tell
nothing but that all was changed, - man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How
gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in
the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to
be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than
that. Rome, - what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf,
and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been
written this very day, under this very roof by your side. What! that wonderful
spirit has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated!
I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her
fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been
streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one
knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is
profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain
ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of
course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may
frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good earnest, have
availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost
watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken,
and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of
the world for that time.
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the
principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for
the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made
it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an
inspiration. And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these
clouds and opaque airs in which I live, - opaque, though they seem
transparent, - and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my
relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles
animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a
noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be
discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday:
then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real. Such
is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged
man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps
and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound
heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, and slow in perceiving that he does
not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his
skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or
the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that
man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead
the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility
of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.
But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how
nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet`s fidelity to his office of
announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things, which becomes a
new, and higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him
as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears
in the object, far better than its old value, as the carpenter`s stretched
cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze.
"Things more excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, "are expressed
through images." Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a
symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand,
has expression; and there is no body without its spirit of genius. All form is
an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of life; all harmony, of
health; (and for this reason, a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or
proper only to the good). The beautiful rests on the foundations of the
necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches: -
So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a
holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the
secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into
Variety.
The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that
bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore
superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we
sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of
that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said Proclus, "exhibits, in its
transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions;
being moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual
natures." Therefore, science always goes abreast with the just elevation of
the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science
is an index of our self-knowledge. Since every thing in nature answers to a
moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the
corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.
No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with
a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the
sense; to the poet, and to all others; or if you please, every man is so far a
poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature: for all men have
the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the
fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only
poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also
hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their affection in
their choice of life, and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders
what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, and dogs. It is
not superficial qualities. When you talk with him, he holds these at as slight
a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is
commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present.
No imitation, or playing of these things, would content him; he loves the
earnest of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty not
explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is
nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by
life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere rites.
The inwardness and mystery of this attachment, drives men of every class
to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not more
intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs. In our
political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball
which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill! In the political processions,
Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the
cider-barrel, the log cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the
cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies,
leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into
credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a
fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest,
or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they
are all poets and mystics!
Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the
divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple,
whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity,
in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense
of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of
low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol.
Thought makes every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man
would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would
be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new
connection of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their
grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the
low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The
meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the
more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest box, or
case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are
found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord
Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey`s Dictionary, when he was
preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for
all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts?
Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well
as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the
significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a
terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word
was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and
deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the
world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists
observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan,
blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.
For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes
things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, -
re-attaching even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by a
deeper insight - disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers
of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry
of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet
consecrated in their readings; but the poet sees them fall within the great
Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider`s geometrical web. Nature
adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars
she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how
many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so
surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain`s weight. The
spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no
mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. As
shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent
citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not
see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw such before, but he
disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief
value of the new fact, is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life,
which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum,
and the commerce of America, are alike.
The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he
who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs,
and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named,
yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols;
workman, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems;
but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical
uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an
ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use
forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object.
He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of
the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus
were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and
shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that
better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing
or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of
every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and,
following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and
so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal
economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage
of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a
new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to
the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry,
vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs
them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with
these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is
adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he
rides on them as the horses of thought.
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker,
naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence,
and giving to every one its own name and not another`s, thereby rejoicing the
intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the
words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say
it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words
is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained
currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker
and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a
brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the
continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so
language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use,
have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the
thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This
expression or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first,
as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated
motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not
leave another to baptize her, but baptizes herself; and this through the
metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet described it to me thus:
Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly
or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature through all her kingdoms,
insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down
from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being
preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The new
agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed
is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its
parent two rods off. She makes a man; and having brought him to ripe age, she
will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches
from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the
individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of
thought she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, - a fearless,
sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the
weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such
was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and
far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the
beauty of the poet`s soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal
parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far
greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged.
At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received
from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of
the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.
So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a
higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely,
ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew, in my younger
days, the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public
garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, what made him happy,
or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day,
according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as
the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days after, he strove to
express this tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the
form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is said,
all persons who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his
mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem in a
manner totally new. The expression is organic, or, the new type which things
themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint their images on
the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe,
tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the
metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms, is their change into
melodies. Over every thing stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the
thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a
melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist,
or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when
any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and
endeavors to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving them. And
herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind`s faith, that the poems
are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made
to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the
iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of
flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a
tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant: a summer, with its harvest
sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably
executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these,
glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?
This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a
very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect
being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things
through forms, and making them translucid to others. The path of things is
silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not
suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, - him they
will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet`s part, is his
resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and
accompanying that.
|
