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Part II
Part II
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond
the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new
energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of
things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a
great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his
human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through
him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is
thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the
plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when
he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;" not with the
intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service,
and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the
ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with
the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way,
throws his reins on his horse`s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal
to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through
this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages
are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest
and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.
This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea,
opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other species of
animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to
add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they
prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling,
war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal
intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes
for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer
to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to
his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of
that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual
relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were
professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and
actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and
indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a
spurious mode of obtaining freedom, an emancipation not into the heavens, but
into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they
won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken
of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the
creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime
vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is
not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement
and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously,
but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men,
must drink water out of a wooden bowl.
For poetry is not "Devil`s wine," but God`s wine. It is with this as it
is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner
of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and
sufficing object of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and
stones, which should be their toys. So the poet`s habit of living should be
set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him.
His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice
for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit which
suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll
of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the
dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of
simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion
and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French
coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the
pinewoods.
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men.
The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy.
The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration
for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run
about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or
cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles,
and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a
new sense, and found within their world, another world or nest of worlds; for
the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now
consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which
also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition; as, when Aristotle
defines space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained; - or,
when Plato defines a line to be a flowing point; or, figure to be a bound of
solid; and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when
Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can build
any house well, who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in
Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain
incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which
temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world an animal; and
Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or affirms a man to be a
heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as
George Chapman, following him, writes, -
So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top;
when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which marks extreme old
age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when
Chaucer, in his praise of "Gentilesse," compares good blood in mean condition
to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount
of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty
thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the
world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her
untimely fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily
relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; - we take the cheerful
hint of the immortality of our essence, and its versatile habit and escapes,
as when the gypsies say, "it is vain to hang them, they cannot die."
The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the
title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the world." They are
free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at
first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at
the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books,
excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and
carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and
the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity,
let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and
criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius
Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who
introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic,
astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of
departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the best
success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world like a
ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study,
when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave
nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and
disappear like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream
delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed,
our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.
There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the
poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift
within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On
the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The
inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if
you come near to it, - you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you
are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison.
Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode,
or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He
unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.
This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it
must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect.
Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth,
that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. Every
verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care of its own
immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few
imaginative men.
But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The
poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither
may he rest in this meaning; but he makes the same objects exponents of his
new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the
last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but
soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is
vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for
conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in
the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The
morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behman,
and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand
for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as
naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a
jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally
good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held
lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent term which
others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, - All that you say is just
as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a
little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, - universal signs, instead of
these village symbols, - and we shall both be gainers. The history of
hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the
symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ
of language.
Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the
translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom
things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually
plays. Every thing on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature.
The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When some of his angels affirmed a
truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise
which, at a distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer
was found to be the voice of disputants. The men, in one of his visions, seen
in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in darkness: but, to each
other, they appeared as men, and, when the light from heaven shone into their
cabin, they complained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut the window
that they might see.
There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer, an object
of awe and terror, namely, that the same man, or society of men, may wear one
aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different aspect to higher
intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing very learnedly
together, appeared to the children, who were at some distance, like dead
horses: and many the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires,
whether these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs
in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me,
and perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I appear as a man
to all eyes. The Brahmins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if
any poet has witnessed the transformation, he doubtless found it in harmony
with various experiences. We have all seen changes as considerable in wheat
and caterpillars. He is the poet, and shall draw us with love and terror, who
sees, through the flowing vest, the firm nature, and can declare it.
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient
plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we
chant our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with
bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us
many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom
all things await. Dante`s praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography
in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in
America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable
materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another
carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in
the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs the newspaper and caucus,
methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the
same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and
are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics,
our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the
wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the
southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung.
Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the
imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that
excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I
aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers`
collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits, more than
poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the
ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton
is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.
But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must see the old
largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet
concerning his art.
Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or methods, are
ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist himself for
years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the
sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one
desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not
dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain
conditions, as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures;
the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others, in such scenes as
each has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new
desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with
wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with
the old painter, "By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me." He pursues a
beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every
solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by
he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would
say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we say, "That is
yours, this is mine;" but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is
as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like
eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have
enough of it, and, as an admirable creative power exists in these
intellections, it is of the last importance that these things get spoken. What
a little of all we know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science are
baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many
secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these
throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the
end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word.
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, "It is in me, and shall out." Stand
there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand
and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every
night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and
by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.
Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise
and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his
genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes,
pour into his mind as into a Noah`s ark, to come forth again to people a new
world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the
combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire
atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the
limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street,
ready to render an image of every created thing.
O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in
castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but
equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know
any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt
take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by
funeral chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding
tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that
thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others
speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all
courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding
actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded
to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and
apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for
a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his
well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall
console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the
names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And
this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions
of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome,
to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and
manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the
woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein
others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord!
Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet
in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into
celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty,
plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world
over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
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