LECTURE IDEFINITIONS

LECTURE IDEFINITIONS(Tuesday Evening, January 9, 1855)I

(Tuesday Evening, January 9, 1855)

Mr. Lowell began by expressing his sense of the responsibility he had assumed in undertaking a course of lectures on English Poets. Few men, he said, had in them twelve hours of talk that would be worth hearing onanysubject; but on a subject like poetry no person could hope to combine in himself the qualities that would enable him to do justice to his theme. A lecturer on science has only to show how much he knows—the lecturer on Poetry can only be sure how much hefeels.

Almost everybody has a fixed opinion about the merits of certain poets which he does not like to have disturbed. There are no fanaticisms so ardent as those of Taste, especially in this country, where we are so accustomed to settle everything by vote that if a majority should decide to put a stop to the precession of the Equinoxes we should expect to hear no more of that interesting ceremony.

A distinguished woman [Mrs. Stowe] who has lately published a volume of travels, affirms that it is as easy to judge of painting as of poetry by instinct.Itisas easy. But without reverent study of their works no instinct is competent to judge of the masters of either art.

Yet every one has a right to his private opinion, and the critic should deal tenderly with illusions which give men innocent pleasure. You may sometime see japonicas carved out of turnips, and if a near-sighted friend should exclaim, “What a pretty japonica!” do not growl “Turnip!” unless, on discovering his mistake, he endeavors to prove that the imitation is as good as the real flower.

In whatever I shall say, continued Mr. Lowell, I shall, at least, have done my best to think before I speak, making no attempt to say anything new, for it is only strange things and not new ones that come by effort. In looking up among the starry poets I have no hope of discovering a new Kepler’s law—one must leave such things to great mathematicians like Peirce. I shall be content with resolving a nebula or so, and bringing to notice some rarer shade of color in a double star. In our day a lecturer can hardly hope to instruct. The press has so diffused intelligence that everybody has just misinformation enough on every subject to make him thoroughly uncomfortable at the misinformation of everybody else.

Mr. Lowell then gave a brief outline of his course,stating that this first lecture would indicate his point of view, and treat in part of the imaginative faculty.

After some remarks upon Dr. Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” the lecturer proceeded: Any true criticism of poetry must start from the axiom that what distinguishes that which we call the poetical in anything, and makes it so, is that it transcends the understanding, by however little or much, and is interpreted by the intuitive operation of some quite other faculty of the mind. It is precisely the something-more of feeling, of insight, of thought, of expression which for the moment lulls that hunger for the superfluous which is the strongest appetite we have, and which always gives the lie to the proverb that enough is as good as a feast. The boys in the street express it justly when they define the indefinable merit of something which pleases them, by saying it is a touch beyond—or it is first-rate and a half. The poetry of a thing is this touch beyond, this third half on the farther side of first-rate.

Dr. Johnson said that that only was good poetry out of which good prose could be made. But poetry cannot be translated into prose at all. Its condensed meaning may be paraphrased, and you get the sense of it, but lose the condensation which isa part of its essence. If on Christmas day you should give your son a half-eagle, and should presently take it back, and give him the excellent prose version of five hundred copper cents, the boy would doubtless feel that the translation had precisely the same meaning in tops, balls, and gibraltars; but the feeling of infinite riches in a little room, of being able to carry in his waistcoat pocket what Dr. Johnson would have called the potentiality of tops and balls and gibraltars beyond the dreams of avarice—this would have evaporated. Bygoodprose the Doctor meant prose that was sensible and had a meaning. But he forgot his own theory sometimes when he thought he was writing poetry. How would he contrive to make any kind of sense of what he says of Shakspeare? that

Panting Time toiled after him in vain.

The difference between prose and poetry is one of essence and not one of accident. What may be called the negatively poetical exists everywhere. The life of almost every man, however prosaic to himself, is full of these dumb melodies to his neighbor. The farmer looks from the hillside and sees the tall ship lean forward with its desire for the ocean, every full-hearted sail yearning seaward, and takes passage with her from his drudgery to thebeautiful conjectured land. Meanwhile he himself has Pegasus yoked to his plough without knowing it, and the sailor, looking back, sees him sowing his field with the graceful idyl of summer and harvest. Little did the needle-woman dream that she was stitching passion and pathos into her weary seam, till Hood came and found them there.

The poetical element may find expression either in prose or verse. The “Undine” of Fouqué is poetical, but it is not poetry. A prose writer may have imagination and fancy in abundance and yet not be a poet. What is it, then, that peculiarly distinguishes the poet? It is not merely a sense of the beautiful, but so much keenerjoyin the sense of it (arising from a greater fineness of organization) that the emotion mustsing, instead of onlyspeakingitself.

The first great distinction of poetry isformor arrangement. This is not confined to poems alone, but is found involved with the expression of the poetical in all the Arts. It is here that the statue bids good-bye to anatomy and passes beyond it into the region of beauty; that the painter passes out of the copyist and becomes the Artist.

Mr. Lowell here quoted Spenser’s statement of Plato’s doctrine:

For of the soul the body form doth take,For soul is form and doth the body make.

For of the soul the body form doth take,

For soul is form and doth the body make.

This coördination of the spirit and form of a poem is especially remarkable in the “Divina Commedia” of Dante and the “Paradise Lost” of Milton, and that not only in the general structure, but in particular parts. The lines of Dante seem to answer his every mood: sometimes they have the compressed implacability of his lips, sometimes they ring like an angry gauntlet thrown down in defiance, and sometimes they soften or tremble as if that stern nature would let its depth of pity show itself only in a quiver of the voice; but always and everywhere there is subordination, and the pulse of the measure seems to keep time to the footfall of the poet along his fated path, as if a fate were on the verses too. And so in the “Paradise Lost” not only is there the pomp of long passages that move with the stately glitter of Milton’s own angelic squadrons, but if you meet anywhere a single verse, that, too, is obstinately epic, and you recognize it by its march as certainly as you know a friend by his walk.

The instinctive sensitiveness to order and proportion, this natural incapability of the formless and vague, seems not only natural to the highest poetic genius, but to be essential to the universality and permanence of its influence over the minds of men. The presence of it makes the charm of Pope’s“Rape of the Lock” perennial; its absence will always prevent such poems as the “Faëry Queene,” “Hudibras,” and the “Excursion” (however full of beauty, vivacity, and depth of thought) from being popular.

Voltaire has said that epic poems were discourses which at first were written in verse only because it was not yet the custom to narrate in prose. But instead of believing that verse is an imperfect and undeveloped prose, it seems much more reasonable to conclude it the very consummation and fortunate blossom of speech, as the flower is the perfection towards which the leaf yearns and climbs, and in which it at last attains to fullness of beauty, of honey, of perfume, and the power of reproduction.

There is some organic law of expression which, as it must have dictated the first formation of language, must also to a certain extent govern and modulate its use. That there is such a law a common drum-head will teach us, for if you cover it with fine sand and strike it, the particles will arrange themselves in a certain regular order in sympathy with its vibrations. So it is well known that the wood of a violin shows an equal sensibility, and an old instrument is better than a new one because all resistance has been overcome. I have observed, too, as something that distinguishes singingbirds from birds of prey, that their flight is made up of a series of parabolic curves, with rests at regular intervals, produced by a momentary folding of the wings; as if the law of their being were in some sort metrical and theyflewmusically.

Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme whose eye has ever been delighted by the visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and a downward heaven on the edge of an unrippled river; or, as the kingfisher flits from shore to shore, his silent echo flies under him and completes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world below? Who can question the divine validity of number, proportion, and harmony, who has studied the various rhythms of the forest? Look for example at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to spray, and leaf to leaf in ordered strophe and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied ode, through which the unthinking wind cannot wander without finding the melody that is in it and passing away in music.

Language, as the poets use it, is something more than an expedient for conveying thought. If mere meaning were all, then would the Dictionary be always the most valuable work in any tongue, for in it exist potentially all eloquence, all wisdom, allpathos, and all wit. It is a great wild continent of words ready to be tamed and subjugated, to have its meanings and uses applied. The prose writer finds there his quarry and his timber; but the poet enters it like Orpheus, and makes its wild inmates sing and dance and keep joyous time to every wavering fancy of his lyre.

All language is dead invention, and our conversational currency is one of shells like that of some African tribes—shells in which poetic thoughts once housed themselves, and colored with the tints of morning. But the poet can give back to them their energy and freshness; can conjure symbolic powers out of the carnal and the trite. For it is only an enchanted sleep, a simulated death, that benumbs language; and see how, when the true prince-poet comes, the arrested blood and life are set free again by the touch of his fiery lips, and as Beauty awakens through all her many-chambered palace runs a thrill as of creation, giving voice and motion and intelligence to what but now were dumb and stiffened images.

The true reception of whatever is poetical or imaginative presupposes a more exalted, or, at least, excited, condition of mind both in the poet and the reader. To take an example from daily life, look at the wholly diverse emotions with which a partizanand an indifferent person read the same political newspaper. The one thinks the editor a very sound and moderate person whose opinion is worth having on a practical question; the other wonders to see one very respectable citizen drawn as a Jupiter Tonans, with as near an approach to real thunderbolts as printer’s ink and paper will concede, and another, equally respectable and a member of the same church, painted entirely black, with horns, hoofs, and tail. The partizan is in the receptive condition just spoken of; the indifferent occupies the solid ground of the common sense.

To illustrate the superiority of the poetic imagination over the prosaic understanding, Mr. Lowell quoted a story told by Le Grand in a note to one of his “Fabliaux.” A sinner lies dying, and an angel and a fiend, after disputing the right to his soul, agree to settle the affair by a throw of dice. The fiend gets the first chance, and the fatal cubes come up—two sixes! He chuckles and rubs his claws, for everybody knows that no higher number is possible. But the angel thinks otherwise, throws, and, behold, a six and seven! And thus it is, that when the understanding has done its best, when it has reached, as it thinks, down to the last secret of music and meaning that language is capable of, the poetical sense comes in with its careless miracle,and gets one more point than there are in the dice.

Imagination is not necessarily concerned with poetic expression. Nothing can be more poetical than the lines of Henry More the Platonist:

What doth moveThe nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?The thrush or lark, that mounting high above,Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn,Heavily hanging in the dewy morn.

What doth move

The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?

The thrush or lark, that mounting high above,

Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn,

Heavily hanging in the dewy morn.

But compare it with Keats’

Ruth, when sick for home,She stood in tears amid thealiencorn.

Ruth, when sick for home,

She stood in tears amid thealiencorn.

The imagination has touched that word “alien,” and in it we see the field through Ruth’s eyes, asshelooked round on the hostile spikes, and not through those of the poet.

Imagination enters more or less into the composition of allgreatminds, all minds that have what we callbreadthas distinguished from mere force or acuteness. We find it in philosophers like Plato and Bacon, in discoverers like Kepler and Newton, in fanatics like George Fox, and in reformers like Luther.

The shape which the imaginative faculty will takeis modified by the force of the other qualities with which it is coördinated in the mind. If the moral sense predominates, the man becomes a reformer, or a fanatic, and his imagination gets itself uttered in his life. Bunyan would have been nothing but a fanatic, if he had not been luckily shut up in Bedford jail, alone with his imagination, which, unable to find vent in any other way, possessed and tortured him till it had wrung the “Pilgrim’s Progress” out of him—a book the nearest to a poem, without being one, that ever was written. Uniting itself with the sense of form, Imagination makes a sculptor; with those of form and color, a painter; with those of time and tune, a musician. For in itself it is dumb, and can find expression only through the help of some other faculty.

Imaginationplusthe poetic sense is poesy,minusthe poetic sense it is science, though it may clothe itself in verse. To those who are familiar with Dr. Donne’s verses, I need only mention his name as a proof of my last position. He solves problems in rhyme, that is all.

Shakspeare was so charged with the highest form of the poetic imagination, as some persons are with electricity, that he could not point his finger at a word without a spark of it going out of him. I will illustrate it by an example taken at randomfrom him. When Romeo is parting from Juliet, Shakspeare first projects his own mind into Romeo, and then, as Romeo becomes so possessed with the emotion of the moment that his words take color from it, all nature is infected and is full ofpartings. He says:

But look whatenviousstreaksDo lace theseveringclouds.

But look whatenviousstreaks

Do lace theseveringclouds.

Shakspeare’s one hundred and thirteenth sonnet was here also quoted in illustration.

The highest form of imagination, Mr. Lowell said, is the dramatic, of which Shakspeare must always stand for the only definition. Next is the narrative imagination, where the poet forces his own personal consciousness upon us and makes our senses the slaves of his own. Of this kind Dante’s “Divina Commedia” is the type. Below this are the poems in which the imagination is more diffused; where the impression we receive is rather frommassthan from particulars; where single lines are not so strong in themselves as in forming integral portions of great sweeps of verse; where effects are produced by allusion and suggestion, by sonorousness, by the use of names which have a traditional poetic value. Of this kind Milton is the type.

Lastly, said Mr. Lowell, I would place in a class by themselves those poets who have properly no imagination at all, but only a pictorial power. These we may call the imaginary poets, writers who give us images of things that neither they nor we believe in or can be deceived by, like pictures from a magic lantern. Of this kind are the Oriental poems of Southey, which show a knowledge of Asiatic mythologies, but are not livingly mythologic.

Where the imagination is found in combination with great acuteness of intellect, we have its secondary or prose form. Lord Bacon is an example of it. Sir Thomas Browne is a still more remarkable one—a man who gives proof of more imagination than any other Englishman except Shakspeare.

Fancy is a frailer quality than Imagination, and cannot breathe the difficult air of the higher regions of intuition. In combination with Sentiment it produces poetry; with Experience, wit. The poetical faculty is in closer affinity with Imagination; the poetical temperament with Fancy. Contrast Milton with Herrick or Moore. In illustration Mr. Lowell quoted from Marvell, the poet of all others whose fancy hints always at something beyond itself, and whose wit seems to have been fed on the strong meat of humor.

As regardsman, Fancy takes delight in life, manners,and the result of culture, in what may be calledScenery; Imagination is that mysterious something which we call Nature—the unfathomed base on which Scenery rests and is sustained. Fancy deals with feeling; Imagination with passion. I have sometimes thought that Shakspeare, in the scene of the “Tempest,” intended to typify the isle ofMan, and in the characters, some of the leading qualities or passions which dwell in it. It is not hard to find the Imagination in Prospero, the Fancy in Ariel, and the Understanding in Caliban; and, as he himself was the poetic imagination incarnated, is it considering too nicely to think that there is a profound personal allusion in the breaking of Prospero’s wand and the burying of his book to the nature of that man who, after such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years, only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on mortgage, and leaning over the gate to chat and chaffer with his neighbors?

I think that every man is conscious at times that it is only his borders, his seaboard, that is civilized and subdued. Behind that narrow strip stretches the untamed domain, shaggy, unexplored, of the natural instincts. Is not this so? Then we can narrow our definition yet farther, and say that Fancyand Wit appear to the artificial man; Imagination and Humor to the natural man. Thus each of us in his dual capacity can at once like Chaucer and Pope, Butler and Jean Paul, and bury the hatchet of one war of tastes.

And now, finally, what is the secret of the great poet’s power over us? There is something we love better than love, something that is sweeter to us than riches, something that is more inspiring to us than success—and that is the imagination of them. No woman was ever loved enough, no miser was ever rich enough, no ambitious man ever successful enough, but in imagination. Every desire of the heart finds its gratification in the poet because he speaks always imaginatively and satisfies ideal hungers. We are the always-welcome guests of his ennobling words.

This, then, is why the poet has always been held in reverence among men. All nature is dumb, and we men have mostly but a stunted and stuttering speech. But the longing of every created thing is for utterance and expression. The Poet’s office, whether we call him Seer, Prophet, Maker, or Namer, is always this—to be the Voice of this lower world. Through him, man and nature find at last a tongue by which they can utter themselves and speak to each other. The beauties of the visibleworld, the trembling attractions of the invisible, the hopes and desires of the heart, the aspirations of the soul, the passions and the charities of men; nay, the trees, the rocks, our poor old speechless mother, the earth herself, become voice and music, and attain to that humanity, a divine instinct of which is implanted in them all.

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