LECTURE XIITHE FUNCTION OF THE POET(Friday Evening, February 16, 1855)XII
(Friday Evening, February 16, 1855)
XII
Whether, as some philosophers here assume, we possess only the fragments of a great cycle of knowledge, in whose center stood the primeval man in friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the developing theory of others, we are rising gradually and have come up from an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoöphyte at last, are questions which will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what little we can learn from History, we find tribes rising slowly out of barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also is found under one name or another, changing in certain outward respects, but essentially the same.
But however far we go back, we shall find this also—that the poet and the priest were united originally in the same person: which means thatthe poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his highest function, and hence his name of seer.
I suppose the wordepicoriginally meant nothing more than this, that the poet was the person who was the greatest master of speech. His were the ἔπεα πτερόεντα, the true winged words that could fly down the unexplored future and carry thither the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave, and wise, and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by, as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is Homer’s character of Demodocus in the eighth book of the “Odyssey,”
When the Muse loved and gave the good and ill,
When the Muse loved and gave the good and ill,
When the Muse loved and gave the good and ill,
When the Muse loved and gave the good and ill,
the gift of conferring good or evil immortality.
The first histories were in verse, and, sung as they were at the feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust, because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their ancestors, by what Bouchardon,the sculptor, said only two centuries ago: “When I read Homer I feel as if I were twenty feet high.”
Nor have poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith and Brown of some provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard III. as smooth as they can; they will never get over the wrench that Shakspeare gave them.
The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have a double meaning; that underneath its natural we find ourselves continually seeing and suspecting a supernatural meaning. Even in the older epics the characters seem to be only half-historical and half-typical. They appear as the Pilgrim Fathers do in Twenty-second of December speeches at Plymouth. The names may be historical, but the attributes are ideal. The orator draws a portrait rather of what he thinks the founders ought to have been than a likeness which contemporaries would have recognized. Thus did early poets endeavor to make reality out of appearances. For, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of thedark for a purposeless moment, and enter the dark again after they have performed the nothing they came for.
The poet’s gift, then, is that of seer. He it is that discovers the truth as it exists in types and images; that is the spiritual meaning, which abides forever under the sensual. And his instinct is to express himself also in types and images. But it was not only necessary that he himself should be delighted with his vision, but that he should interest his hearers with the faculty divine. Pure truth is not acceptable to the mental palate. It must be diluted with character and incident; it must be humanized in order to be attractive. If the bones of a mastodon be exhumed, a crowd will gather out of curiosity; but let the skeleton of a man be turned up, and what a difference in the expression of the features! Every bystander then creates his little drama, in which those whitened bones take flesh upon them and stalk as chief actor.
The poet is he who can best see or best say what is ideal; what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he celebrates the brave and good, or the gods, or the beautiful as it appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still clings to him. He may be unconscious of his mission; he may be false to it, but in proportion as heis a great poet, he rises to the level of it more often. He does not always directly rebuke what is bad or base, but indirectly, by making us feel what delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil it is with such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the mean and low and bad. It is something to be thought of, that all the great poets have been good men. He who translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual, is the reverse of a poet.
It seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late; that there has been a feast of the imagination formerly, and all that is left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs, and especially in Brother Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But, becauseheis a materialist, shall there be no poets? When we have said that we live in a materialistic age, we have said something which meant more than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a foolishthing, for probably one age is as good as another; and, at any rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakspeare seems richer than our own only because he was lucky enough to have such a pair of eyes as his to see it and such a gift as his to report it. Shakspeare did not sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his little private mill there at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more quietly about his business than any playwright in London; to have drawn off what water-power he wanted from the great prosy current of affairs that flows alike for all, and in spite of all; to have ground for the public what grist they want, coarse or fine; and it seems a mere piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink. It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakspeare received everything that came along, of what apresentman he was, that in the very same year that the mulberry tree was brought into England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.
It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for this very reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation contrives tocatch its singing larks without the sky’s falling. When the poet comes he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not to have lived in Homer’s day or Dante’s, but to be alive now. To be alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live in the past, and men yet unborn who live in the future. We are like Hans-in-Luck, forever exchanging the burthensome good we have for something else, till at last we come home empty-handed. The people who find their own age prosaic are those who see only its costume. And this is what makes it prosaic: that we have not faith enough in ourselves to think that our own clothes are good enough to be presented to Posterity in. The artists seem to think that the court dress of posterity is that of Vandyke’s time or Cæsar’s. I have seen the model of a statue of Sir Robert Peel—a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding gracefully to the present—in which the sculptor had done his best to travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of this, and we are thankful to the man who made the monument of Lord Bacon that he had genius enough to copy every button of his dress, everything down to therosettes on his shoes. These men had faith even in their own shoe-strings. Till Dante’s time the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings into but Latin (and, indeed, a dead tongue was the best for dead thoughts), but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men bargained, and scolded, and made love, good enough for him, and out of the world around him made such a poem as no Roman ever sang.
We cannot get rid of our wonder, we who have brought down the wild lightning from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven to be our errand-boy and penny postman. In this day of newspapers and electric telegraphs, in which common-sense and ridicule can magnetise a whole continent between dinner and tea, we may say that such a phenomenon as Mahomet were impossible; and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret! Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of Webster on “Witchcraft” which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, Well, that goblin is laid at last! And while I mused, the tables were dancing and the chairs beating the devil’s tattoo all over Christendom. I have a neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay-slate to a spring pointed out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son’s seventh son, and the water is sweeter to him forthe wonder that is mixed with it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin’s lamp.
It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some sort or another. If they cannot get the best, they will get at some substitute for it. But there is as much poetry as ever in the world if we can ever know how to find it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped of his material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying mountain-farm of imagination, which does not appear in the schedule of his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep alive, though he never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.
Perhaps our continent will begin to sing by and by, as the others have done. We have had the Practical forced upon us by our condition. We have had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we are descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright wrestle with Necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should be the descendants of those very Puritans. They had enough of it, orthey could not have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.
John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford many years ago, reckoned the number of whale ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that those far-shining lamps of a nation’s true glory which burn forever must be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity, but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of the imagination, that a race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces; of Carthage, whose merchant fleets once furled their sails in every port of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens or powerless Italy. They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible as the soul.
Till America has learned to love Art, not as anamusement, not as a mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what iscomme il fautfor a great nation, but for its harmonizing and ennobling energy, for its power of making men better by arousing in them the perception of their own instincts for what is beautiful and sacred and religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our little mother-island sunk beneath the sea; or worse, were she conquered by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakspeare would be an immortal England, and would conquer countries when the bones of her last sailor had kept their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched thunders of her navy.
This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair, the noble, and the true will never cease out of the world till the God from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that the sacred duty and noble office of the poet is to reveal and justify them to man; that as long as the soul endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will still send poets to find them, and bear witness of them, and to hang their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory.Godwith usis forever the mystical theme of the hour that is passing. The lives of the great poets teach us that they were men of their generation who felt most deeply the meaning of the Present.
I have been more painfully conscious than any one else could be of the inadequacy of what I have been able to say, when compared to the richness and variety of my theme. I shall endeavor to make my apology in verse, and will bid you farewell in a little poem in which I have endeavored to express the futility of alleffortto speak the loveliness of things, and also my theory of where the Muse is to be found, if ever. It is to her that I sing my hymn.
Mr. Lowell here read an original poem of considerable length, which concluded the lecture, and was received with bursts of applause.