ESSAYS ÆSTHETICAL

by

GEORGE H. CALVERT

1875

 CONTENTS. 

 I. THE BEAUTIFUL

 II. WHAT IS POETRY?

 III. STYLE

 IV. DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS

 V. SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC

 VI. THOMAS CARLYLE

 VII. ERRATA

 VIII. NATIONAL DRAMA

 IX. USEFULNESS OF ART

ESSAYS ÆSTHETICAL. 

I. 

THE BEAUTIFUL. 

The Beautiful is one of the immortal themes. It cannot die; it growsnot old. On the same day with the sun was beauty born, and its liferuns parallel with the path of that great beautifier. As a subject forexposition, it is at once easy and difficult: easy, from the affluenceof its resources; difficult, from the exactions which its own spiritmakes in the use of them. 

Beauty--what is it? To answer this question were to solve more thanone problem. Shall we attempt what has been so often attempted andnever fully achieved? Such attempts are profitable. What though wereach not the very heart of the mystery, we may get near enough tohearken to the throb of its power, and our minds will be nerved by theapproximation. 

To him who has the gift to feel its presence, nature teems withbeauty. Whithersoever the senses reach, whenever emotion kindles, wherever the mind seeks food for its finer appetites, there is beauty. It expects us at the dawn; it is about us, "an hourly neighbor, "through the day; at night it looks down on us from star-peopledimmensities. Glittering on green lawns, glowing in sunsets, flashingthrough storm-clouds, gilding our wakeful hours, irradiating sleep, itis ever around, within us, eager to sweeten our labors, to purify ourthoughts. Nature is a vast treasure-house of beauty, whereof the keyis in the human heart. 

But many are the hearts that have never opened far enough to disclosethe precious key enfolded in their depths. Whole peoples are at thismoment ignorant that they live amid such wealth. As with them now, soin the remote primitive times of our own race, before history was, nature was almost speechless to man. The earth was a waste, or but awide hunting ground or pasturage; and human life a round of pettyanimal circles, scarcely sweeping beyond the field of the senses;until there gradually grew up the big-eyed Greek and the deep-souledHebrew. Then, through creative thought, --that is, thought quickenedand exalted by an inward thirst for the beautiful, --one little cornerof Europe became radiant, and the valley of Tempe and the wooded glensof Parnassus shone for the first time on the vision of men; for theireyes--opened from long sleep by inward stirring--were become asmirrors, and gave back the light of nature:

 "Auxiliar light Came from their minds, which on the setting sun Bestowed new splendor. "[1]

 [1] Wordsworth. 

And man, heated by the throbs of his swelling heart, made gods afterhis own image, --forms of such life and power and harmony that thefragments of them, spared by time, are still guarded as faultlessmodels of manhood. And the vales and groves and streams were peopledwith beauteous shapes. And the high places were crowned with templeswhich, in their majestic purity, look as though they had been positedthere from above by heavenly hands. And by the teemful might ofsculptors and painters and poets the dim past was made resurgent andpresent in glorious transfiguration. And the moral law was grasped atby far-reaching philosophies. In this affluence of genial activity somuch truth was embodied in so much beauty, that by the products of theGreek mind even the newer, the deeper, the wiser Christian spirit isstill instructed, still exalted. 

In Asia, too, a chosen people early made a revelation of thebeautiful. The Hebrews were introspective. At once ardent andthoughtful, passionate and spiritual, their vigorous natures werecharged with fiery materials for inward conflicts. Out of the secretchambers of troubled souls their poets and prophets sent forth criesof despair and of exultation, of expostulation and self-reproach, thatever find an echo in the conscience-smitten, sorrow-laden bosom ofman. The power and wisdom of God they saw as no other ancient peoplehad seen them. In the grandeurs and wonders of creation they couldbehold the being and the might and the goodness of the Creator. Thestrong, rich hearts of their seers yearned for a diviner life, in thedeep, true consciousness they felt that there can be peace and joy toman only through reconcilement with God. And feeling their ownunworthiness and impurity, as well as that of their people, theyuttered their spiritual desires, and their aspirations anddisappointments and indignations and humiliations, in strains thatmake their great writings sound like one long, impassioned, rhythmicwail through the bars of a dungeon. Gloomy, wrathful, and intense, their utterances are grand and pathetic and sublime; but the beautifulplays through them, and gilds their highest points as the white crestsdo the billows of a black, tempestuous sea. 

Save these two, no other nations of antiquity, except the Hindoos, seem to have had more than a superficial susceptibility to thebeautiful. The Romans learnt the arts from the Greeks, whom theyimitated, at a wide distance, in poetry as well as in sculpture andarchitecture. The remnants of art found in the valley of the Nileprove the Egyptians to have had the germ without the vitality tounfold it. In the literature of the Hindoos there are currents of purepoetry and of biblical depth. In passing down from ancient to moderntimes the Persians and the Arabians light the long way withscintillations from the beautiful. 

The ugly semi-barbarian darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe wasfirst broken by the light that shone from the spires of Gothiccathedrals in the eleventh century. About the twelfth century theGerman mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary, titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little laterappeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers(love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, thenChaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century, poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful, --and who can haveno other parentage, --had established themselves in the modern Europeanmind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselvesamong Christian nations. To these they are now confined. In the mostadvanced of Mahometan and heathen peoples sensibility to beauty ishardly awakened, and among savages it seems scarcely to exist, sodeeply is it dormant. 

Thus to indicate when and by whom the beautiful has been recognizedwill further us in the endeavor to learn wherein consists that which, enriching the world of man so widely and plenteously, is deeplyenjoyed by so few. 

Were the beautiful, like size and shape and strength and nimbleness, cognizable by intellectual perception, even the Hottentot would get toknow something of it in the forest, along with the grosser qualitiesof trees and valleys. Were it liable to be seized by the discursiveand ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer orgeneral would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; theRoman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not havebeen so barren where the Athenian was so prolific. But beauty is_felt_, not intellectually apprehended or logically deduced. Itspresence is acknowledged by a gush from the soul, by a joyoussentimental recognition, not by a discernment of the understanding. When we exclaim, How beautiful! there is always emotion, anddelightful, expansive, purifying emotion. Whence this mysteriouscleansing thrill? Thence, that the recognition of beauty ever denotes, ever springs out of, sympathy with the creative spirit whence allthings have their being. 

The beautiful, then, is not subject to the intellect. We cannotdemonstrate or coldly discover it; we cannot weigh or measure it. Further to illustrate this position: we do not see with our outwardeye any more than we do with spectacles. The apparent ocular apparatusis but the passive, unconscious instrument to transmit images thrownthrough it upon a fine interior fibre, the optic nerve; and even thisdoes not take cognizance of the object, but is only another conductor, carrying the image still farther inward, to the intellectual nerves ofthe brain; and not until it reaches them do we see the object, notuntil then is its individuality and are its various physicalqualities, size, shape, etc. , apprehended. And now the intellectitself becomes a conductor, transmitting still deeper inward to theseat of emotion the image of the object; and not until it reaches thatdepth is its beauty recognized. 

In all her structures and arrangements Nature is definite, precise, and economical. In subdivision of labor she is minute and absolute, providing for every duty its special exclusive agent. In the mindthere is as severe a sundering of functions as in the body, and theintellect can no more encroach upon or act for the mentalsensibilities than the stomach can at need perform the office of theheart, or the liver that of the lungs. True, no ripe results in thehigher provinces of human life can be without intimate alliancebetween the mental sensibilities and the intellect; nevertheless theyare in essence as distinct from one another as are the solar heat andthe moisture of the earth, without whose constant coöperation no grainor fruit or flower can sprout or ripen. 

We live not merely in a world of material facts, and of objects andthings cognizable through the senses, but also in a spiritual world. We live not only in presence of visible creation, but in presence ofthe invisible Creator. With the creation we are in contact through theintellect. Knowledge of all objects and the qualities of objects thatare within reach of the senses; distance and other material relations;the bonds of cause and effect and of analogy, that bind all createdthings in countless multiplicity of subtle relations, --these theintellect gathers in its grasp. But with the Creator we are incommunication only through feeling. The presence, the existence of Godcannot by pure intellect be demonstrated: it must be felt in order tobe proved. The mass of objects and relations presented to us in naturethe intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life thatincessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looksout from every object and every fact, --of the range and pitch of whosepower we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake, --ofthis divine essence we should not have even an intimation through theintellect alone. Not chemists, astronomers, mechanicians have utteredthe deepest thoughts about God, but prophets and poets: not Davys, butColeridges; not Herschels, but Wordsworths. It is a common belief, indeed, that men addicted to the exact sciences are rather wantingthan otherwise in power to appreciate the invisible, a beliefpungently embodied by Wordsworth in the lines, --

 "Physician art thou? one all eyes, Philosopher! a fingering slave, One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave?"

This is as much under the mark as is above it that saying of some one, "An undevout astronomer is mad. " A man's being endowed with raremathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout. His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; andnature being seldom profuse upon one individual, --as she was uponPascal and Newton, --the presumption as to an astronomer, of whom weknow nothing, would be that what may be termed his emotiveappreciation of stars and stellar systems is probably not so full ashis intellectual. And no amount or quality of intellectual insight cansupply or compensate a want of sensibility. No matter how manyhundreds of millions of miles he may pierce into space, he has stillto do with the visible and calculable. But religion is the putting ofthe human mind in relation with the invisible, the incalculable. A mangets no nearer to God through a telescope than through a microscope, and no nearer through either than through the naked eye. Who cannotrecognize the divine spirit in the hourly phenomena of nature and ofhis own mind will not be helped by the differential calculus, or anymagnitude or arrangement of telescopic lenses. 

That we ever live not only in a material, but also in a spiritualworld, can be easily apprehended without at all entangling ourselvesin the web-work of metaphysics. The least of our acts or motions, isit not always preceded by a thought, a volition, a somethingintangible, invisible? All that we voluntarily do is, must be, anoffspring of mind. The waving of the hand is never a simple, it is acompound process: mind and body, spirit and matter, concur in it. Thevisible, corporeal movement is but the outward expression of aninward, incorporeal movement. And so in all our acts and motions, frombirth till death; they issue out of the invisible within us; they arefeelings actualized, thoughts embodied. The embodiment is perishable, the source of it imperishable. It is not a recondite, super-subtle, metaphysical or psychological postulate, it is a palpable, and may beand ought to be a familiar fact, that each one of us is ruled by theeternal and invisible within us. 

Now, just as our words and deeds and movements stand to our mind, asbeing the utterance and embodiment of that, so do we stand towardsDeity, being the utterance and embodiment of the divine thought andwill. As all our doings are but exhibitions of our minds, so ourselvesare manifestations of God. Through all things shines the eternal soul. The more perfect the embodiment, the more translucent is the soul; andwhen this is most transparent, making the body luminous with thefullness of its presence, there is beauty, which may be said to be themost intense and refined incarnation and exhibition of the divinespirit. 

Behind and within every form of being is immanent the creative power;and thence, in proportion as this power discloses itself, is object, act, or emotion beautiful. Thus is beauty always spiritual, arevelation more or less clear of the creative spirit. Hence ouremotion in presence of the truly beautiful, which calms and exalts us. Hence evil never is, cannot be, beautiful: the bad is, must be, ugly. Evil consists in the deficiency of the divine creative spirit, whosefullness gives, is, beauty. Evil is imperfection, unripeness, shapelessness, weakness in, or opposition to, the creative spirit. Evil is life that is unhealthy, short-coming. Wherever there is full, unperverted life, there is, there must be, beauty. The beautifulblossoms on every stem of unpoisoned power. The sap of sound life evermolds itself into forms of beauty. 

But however rich the exhibition of the divine soul, however glowingwith perfection the form, however noble the act and pure the feeling, the richness, the perfection, the nobleness, the purity will be loston us, unless within us there be sympathy with the spirit whence theyflow. Only by spirit can spirit be greeted. 

Thus beauty only becomes visible--I might say only becomes actual--bythe fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and aninward appetite therefor. And it is the flaming of this fire, thuskindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, theinward and the outward. This fire unlighted, and on the face of naturethere is darkness, in our own minds there is darkness. For though allnature teems with the essence and the outward mold of beauty, to theunkindled mind beauty is no more present then was Banquo's ghost tothe guests of Macbeth. Macbeth's individual conscience made him seethe ghost; nay, by a creative potency summoned it: and so is beautycreated there where, without what I may call the æsthetic conscience, it no more exists than do the glories of Titian and Claude to theaffectionate spaniel who follows his master into a picture-gallery. Tothe quadruped, by the organic limitation of his nature, dead foreveris this painted life. By the organic boundlessness of _his_ nature, man can grasp the life of creation in its highest, its finest, itsgrandest manifestations; and from these beauty is indivisible. Wherever the divine energy is most subtle and expressive, there glowsever, in its celestial freshness, the beautiful. 

Beauty is the happiest marriage between the invisible and the visible. It may be termed the joyfullest look of God. Blessed is he who canwatch and reflect this radiant look. The faculties of such a onebecome fortified by creative influx. Through the exquisite shock ofthe beautiful he reaps an accession of mental magnetism. Thus throughthe beautiful we commune the most directly with the divine; and, otherthings being equal, to the degree that men respond to, are thrilledby, this vivacity of divine presence, as announced by the beautiful, to that degree are they elevated in the scale of being. 

Nature being minute and absolute in subdivision of function, the lawof severalty and independence--than which there is no law moreimportant and instructive--pervades creation. Thence the intellectual, the religious, the true, the good, cannot interchange functions. A manmay be sincerely religious and do little for others, as is seen inanchorites, and in many one-sided people, of Christian as well as ofMahometan parentage, who are not anchorites. A man may be immenselyintellectual and not value truth. But neither a man's intellect, norhis preference for truth, nor his benevolent nor his religioussentiment, can yield its best fruit without the sunshine of thebeautiful. Sensibility to the beautiful--itself, like the others, anindependent inward power--stands to each one of them in a relationdifferent from that which they hold one to the other. The above andother faculties _indirectly_ aid one the other, and to the completeman their united action is needed; but feeling for the beautiful_directly_ aids each one, aids by stimulating it, by expanding, bypurifying. 

To the action of every other faculty this one gives vividness andgrace. It indues each with privilege of insight into the _soul_ of theobject which it is its special office to master. By help ofsensibility to the beautiful we have inklings of the essence ofthings, we sympathize with the inward life that molds the outwardform. Hence men highly gifted with this sensibility become creative, in whatever province of work they strive; and no man in any provinceis truly creative except through the subtle energy imparted to him bythis sensibility, this competence to feel the invisible in thevisible. 

The idea is the invisible; the embodiment thereof is the visible. Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces, represents, with more or less success, the idea out of which springsthe object it illuminates: it brilliantly enrobes a germinalessence. It is thus a sparkling emanation out of the Infinite, and itleads us thither whence it has come. 

Sensibility to the beautiful is thus the light of the whole mind, illuminating its labors. Without it we work in the dark, and thereforefeebly, defectively. Infer thence the immensity of its function. Hereby it becomes the chief educator of men and of man; and where itsteaching has not been conspicuous, there no elevation has beenreached. The Greeks and the Hebrews would not have been so deeply, sogreatly, so feelingly known to us, would not have been the pioneersand inspirers of European civilization, would not have lived onthrough thousands of years in the minds of the highest men, had theynot, along with their other rare endowments, possessed, in superior, in unique quality, this priceless gift of sensibility to thebeautiful. Through this gift Shakespeare is the foremost man ofEngland, and through it has done more than any other man to educateand elevate England. Because the Italians of the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries were so rich in this gift, therefore it is thatItaly is still a shrine to which the civilized world makes annualpilgrimage. 

The supreme function of this sensibility is to develop, toeducate, to chasten the highest faculties, our vast discourse ofreason, our unselfish aspiration, our deep instinct of truth, ourcapacious love. To educate these is its cardinal duty, and lackingthis they remain uneducated. But its beneficent influence is feltlikewise in the less elevated of our efforts. The man who makes shoes, as well as he who makes laws and he who makes poems; the builder ofhouses, with the builder of theologies or cosmogonies; the engineer, as well as the artist, all work under the rays of this illuminator;and, other things being equal, he excels all others on whose workthose rays shine with the most sustained and penetrative force. 

 "'T is the eternal law, That first in beauty shall be first in might. "[2]

 [2] Keats. 

In short, whatever the mental gift, in order to get from that gift itsbest fruit, the possessor must be incited, upborne, enlightened, inspired by the ideal, which burns as a transfiguring flame in hismind, and throws thence its joyful light with every blow of his hand. 

All good work is more or less creative, that is, a co-working with theeternal mind; and work is good and productive in proportion tothe intensity of this coöperation. Why is it that we so prize afragment of Phidias, a few lines traced by Raphael? Because the mindsof those workers were, more than the minds of most others, in sympathywith the Infinite mind. While at work their hands were more distinctlyguided by the Almighty hand; they felt and embodied more of the spiritwhich makes, which is, life. 

Here is a frame of canvas, a block of marble, a pile of stones, avocabulary. Of the canvas you make a screen, you build a dwelling withthe pile of stones, chisel a door-sill out of the block, with thevocabulary you write an essay. And in each case you work well andcreatively, if your work be in harmony with God's laws, if your screenbe light, sightly, and protective, your dwelling healthful andcommodious, your sill lie solid and square, your essay be judiciousand sound. But if on the canvas you have a Christ's head by Leonardo, out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block ofmarble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, youhave works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with thevivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of theworks of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so throughthe vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formativeprinciple of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators, that is, poets. And we sacredly guard their creations among our besttreasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive thatwhenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, theyspiritualize our thoughts; and this they do because the minds whencethey issued were radiant centers of ideal power, that is, power toconceive the beautiful. 

But what is ideal power? the reader may ask. He might likewise ask, What is moral power? And unless he has in his own mind some faculty ofmoral estimation, no answer will help him. That which comes to usthrough feeling cannot be intellectually defined, can only beappreciated through feeling. By describing its effects andaccompaniments we approach to a knowledge of what it is. By means of afoot-rule you can make clear to every member of a crowd what is theheight of the Apollo Belvedere, and the exact length of the statue'sface; and each one can for himself verify the accuracy of yourstatement. But not with a like distinctness and vivacity of assent canyou get the crowd to go along with you as to the Apollo's beauty. Acknowledgment of the beautiful in art implies a degree of culture anda native susceptibility not to be found in every accidental gathering. Full and sincere assent to your declaration that the statue is verybeautiful presupposes a high ideal in the mind; that is, a loftypre-attained idea of what is manly beauty. But after all, the want ofunanimity of assent to a moral or an æsthetic position, does it notcome from the difficulty and subtlety of the idea to be pre-attained?Assent even to an intellectual proposition, does not it too presupposean ideal in the mind of him who assents? When you show by visiblemeasurement that the statue is eight feet high, whoever understandswhat you mean must have already in his head the idea of what one footis; that is, he must carry within him an ideal. No tittle ofinformation, not the slightest accession of knowledge, will you derivefrom the measurement even of the area of a hall or of the cubiccontents of a block, unless you bring with you in your mind an idea, an ideal, of what is a superficial or a cubic square foot. 

Attempts to give a notion of what the beautiful is, byenumerating some of the physical conditions that are found to bepresent in artistic figures or persons distinguished for beauty, orattempts to produce what shall be beautiful, by complying with theseconditions, come no nearer to the aim than do compounded mineralwaters to the briskness and flavor of a fresh draught from theoriginal spring. In the analysis there may be no flaw; the ingredientsare chemically identical in quality and proportion; but the nameless, inimitable, inscrutable life is wanting: the mixing has been done by amechanical, not by a creative hand. Haydon says, "The curve of thecircle is excess, the straight line is deficiency, the ellipsis is thedegree between, and that curve, added to or united with proportion, regulates the form and features of a perfect woman. " Mr. D. R. Hay, ina series of books, professes to have discovered the principles ofbeauty in the law of harmonic ratio, without, however, "pretending, "as he modestly and wisely declares, "to give rules for that kind ofbeauty which genius alone can produce in high art. " The discovery ofMr. Hay is curious and fascinating, and, like the announcement ofHaydon, may give practical hints to artists and others. But nointellectual process or ingenuity can make up for the absence ofemotional warmth and refined selection. "Beauty, the foe of excess andvacuity, blooms, like genius, in the equilibrium of all the forces, "says Jean Paul. "Beauty, " says Hemsterhuis, "is the product of thegreatest number of ideas in the shortest time, " which is like theItalian definition, _il piu nel uno_, unity in multiplicity, believedby Coleridge to contain the principle of beauty. On another page ofthe "Table Talk" Coleridge is made to say, "You are wrong in resolvingbeauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed, itis opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence, between which and the beholder _nihil est_. It is always one andtranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed. "Hegel, in his "Æsthetic, " defines natural beauty to be "the idea asimmediate unity, in so far as this unity is visible in sensuousreality. " And a few pages earlier he is more brief and distinct, calling the beautiful "the sensuous shining forth of the idea. " AndSchelling, in his profound treatise on "The Relation of the PlasticArts to Nature, " says, "The beautiful is beyond form; it is substance, the universal; it is the look and expression of the spirit ofNature. " Were it not better and more precise to say that it is to usthe look and expression of the spiritual when this is peering throughchoicest embodiments? But we will stop with definitions. Afterendeavoring, by means of sentences and definitions to get a notion ofthe beautiful, one is tempted to say, as Goethe did when "the idea ofthe Divinity" was venturously mentioned to him by Eckermann, "Dearchild, what know we of the idea of the Divinity? and what can ournarrow ideas tell of the Highest Being? Should I, like a Turk, name itwith a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparisonwith the infinite attributes, have said nothing. "

We have called the beautiful the light of the mind; but there must bemind to be illuminated. If your torch be waved in a chamber set roundwith bits of granite and slate and pudding-stone, you will get noluminous reverberation. But brandish it before rubies and emeralds anddiamonds! The qualities in the mind must be precious, in order thatthe mind become radiant through beauty. To take a broad example. 

The Hindoos in their organization have a fine sense of thebeautiful, but they lack mental breadth and bottom; and hence theirlife and literature are not strong and manifold, although in boththere are exhibitions of that refinement which only comes ofsensibility to the beautiful. The Chinese, on the other hand, arewanting in this sensibility; hence their prosaic, finite civilization. But most noteworthy is the contrast between them in religiousdevelopment. In that of the Hindoos there was expansion, vastness, self-merging in infinitude; the Chinese are religiously contracted, petty, idolatrous; a contrast which I venture to ascribe, in largemeasure, to the presence in the one case, and the absence in theother, of the inspiration of the beautiful. 

To the same effect individual examples might be cited innumerable. Look at Wordsworth and Byron, both preeminent for sensibility to thebeautiful; but, from deep diverseness in other leading mental gifts, the one, through the light of this vivifying power, became a poet ofthe propensities and the understanding, a poet of passion and wit; theother, a poet of the reason, a poet of nature and meditative emotion. 

To do their best the moral feelings, too, need the light and inwardstimulus of the beautiful; but if these feelings are by natureweak, no strength or intensity of the sense of beauty will have powerto get from a mind thus deficient high moral thought or action. Ifthere be present the accomplishment of verse, we shall have a Byron;or, the other poetic gifts in full measure, with lack of thisaccomplishment, and we may get a Beckford, who builds Fonthill Abbeys, and with purity and richness of diction describes palaces, actual orfeigned, and natural scenery with picturesqueness and genial glow; or, the intellectual endowments being mediocre, we shall have merely a manof superficial taste; or, the moral regents being ineffective, anintellectual sybarite, or a refined voluptuary. Like the sun, thebeautiful shines on healthful field and poisonous fen; and her warmthwill even make flowers to bloom in the fen, but it is not in her tomake them bear refreshing odors or nourishing fruit. 

As men have body, intellect, and moral natures, so is there physical, intellectual, and spiritual beauty, and each distinct from the others. Take first a few examples from the domain of art. The body and limbsof the Gladiator in the Louvre may be cited as the exponent ofcorporeal beauty; the face of the Apollo Belvedere as that ofintellectual and physical; and the Santo Sisto Madonna of Raphael, andthe Christ of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, for spiritual. Through these radiant creations we look into the transcendent minds oftheir artists with a chastened, exalting joy, not unmingled with pridein our brotherhood with such beauty-lifted co-workers with God. 

Among the higher races, life is affluent in examples of the threekinds of beauty, two of them, and even all three, at times united inone subject. Children and youth offer the most frequent instances ofphysical beauty. Napoleon's face combined in high degree both physicaland intellectual, without a trace of moral beauty. Discoveries inscience, and the higher scientific processes, as likewise broad andintense intellectual action, exemplify often intellectual beauty. Ofmoral beauty history preserves examples which are the brightestjewels, and the most precious, in the casket of mankind's memory;among the most brilliant of which are the trust of Alexander, when hedrank the draught from the hand of his physician, though warned thatit was poisoned; the fidelity of the paroled Regulus, returning fromRome to the enemy into the jaws of a certain and cruel death;Sir Philip Sidney, wounded unto death, taking the cup of wateruntasted from his parched lips, to give it to a dying soldier; Lutherat the Diet of Worms; the public life of Washington; the life anddeath of Socrates, and especially that last act of washing his body tosave the women the trouble of washing it a few hours later, when itwould be a corpse; and, lastly, that most beautiful of lives and mostsublime of deaths, which live in the heart of Christendom as itsexemplar and ever fresh ideal. 

There is no province of honorable human endeavor, no clean inletopened by the senses or the intellect or the feelings, into which fromthat vast, deep, oceanic spring, the human soul, the beautiful doesnot send its fructifying tides. There is no height in history but isilluminated by its gleam. Only through the beautiful can truth attainits full stature; only through the beautiful can the heart beperfectly purified; only with vision purged by the beautiful cananything be seen in its totality. All other faculties it makesprolific; it is the mental generator. It helps to unveil, and thenwelds, the link between the visible and the invisible. It inspiresfeeling (which is ever the source of deepest insight) to discoverexcellence; it quickens the mind to creative activity; it isforever striving upward. Without the spiritual fervor of thebeautiful, your religion is narrow and superstitious, your sciencecramped and mortal, your life unripened. In the mind it kindles aflame that discloses the divinity there is in all things. Lightningbares to the awed vision the night-shrouded earth; more vivid thanlightning, the flash of the beautiful reveals to the soul the presenceof God. 

II. 

WHAT IS POETRY?

The better to meet the question, _What_ is poetry? we begin by puttingbefore it another, and ask, _Where_ is poetry? Poetry is in the mind. Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to thestag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, noappearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combiningintellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aughtbut the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeallife is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and inthe best and deepest part of that life. 

The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world ofhis inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another orbe started and modified by what is without them, all this--that is, all human life, in its endless forms, varieties, degrees, all that cancome within the scope of man--is the domain of poetry; only, toenjoy, to behold, to move about in, even to enter this domain, theindividual man must bear within him a light that shall transfigurewhatever it falls on, a light of such subtle quality, of suchspiritual virtue, that wherever it strikes it reveals something of thevery mystery of being. 

In many men, in whole tribes, this light is so feebly nourished thatit gives no illumination. To them the two vast worlds, the inner andthe outer, are made up of opaque facts, cognizable, available, by theunderstanding, and by it handled grossly and directly. Things, conditions, impressions, feelings, are not taken lovingly into themind, to be made there prolific through higher contacts. They are notdandled joyfully in the arms of the imagination. Imagination! Beforeproceeding a step further, --nay, in order that we be able to proceedsafely, --we must make clear to ourselves what means this great word, imagination. 

The simplest intellectual work is to perceive physical objects. Havingperceived an object several times, the intellect lifts itself to ahigher process, and knows it when it sees it again, remembers it. _Perception_ is the first, the simplest, the initiatory intellectualprocess, _memory_ is the second. Higher than they, and risingout of them, is a third process, the one whereby are modified andtransmuted the mental impressions of what is perceived or remembered. A mother, just parted from her child, recalls his form and face, summons before _her mind's eye_ an image of him; and this image ismodified by her feelings, she seeing him in attitudes and relations inwhich she had never seen him before, cheerful or sad according to hermood. This she could not do by aid of memory alone; she could not varythe impress of her boy left on the brain; she could not vividlyreproduce it in shifting, rapidly successive conditions; she could notmodify and diversify that impress; in a word, she could not liberateit. Memory could only re-give her, with single, passive fidelity, whatshe had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture ofher boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase abovememory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes achangeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights andshadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plasticpower, varying the image in position and expression, obedientto the demands of the feelings, of which it is ever the readyinstrument. This third process is _imagination_. 

Through this mode of intellectual action the materials gathered in themind are endlessly combined and modified. In all intellectualactivity, beyond bare perception and memory, imagination in somedegree is and must be present. It is in fact the mind handling itsmaterials, and in no sphere, above the simplest, can the mind movewithout this power of firmly holding and molding facts and relations, phenomena and interior promptings and suggestions. To the forensicreasoner, to the practical master-worker in whatever sphere, such apower is essential not less than to the ideal artist or to the weaverof fictions. Imagination is thus the abstract action, that is, themost intense action, of the intellect. 

When I run over in my mind, and in the order of their service, thefirst seven presidents of the United States, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, I exert only memory. Themoment I begin to compare or contrast one with another, or to give thecharacter of any of them, I put into play the higher, the imaginativeaction; for, to draw an historical character, the facts collected bymemory must be shaped and colored and organized, the detailsgathered must be combined into a whole by the intellect, which being amere tool, the success of the result (the tool being of a temper to dothe work laid on it) will depend on the quality of the powers thathandle it, that is, on the writer's gifts of sympathy. 

The degree and fullness wherewith the imaginative power shall becalled upon depending thus on faculties of feeling, thence it is thatthe word _imagination_ has come to be appropriated to the highestexercise of the power, that, namely, which is accomplished by thosefew who, having more than usual emotive capacity in combination withsensibility to the beautiful, are hereby stimulated to mold and shapeinto fresh forms the stores gathered by perception and memory, or thematerial originated within the mind through its creative fruitfulness. In strictness, this exaltation of intellectual action should be called_poetic_ imagination. 

To imagine is, etymologically speaking, _with_ the mind to form _in_the mind an image; that is, by inward power to produce an interiorform, a something substantial made out of what we term theunsubstantial. To imagine is thus always, in a certain sense, tocreate; and even men of dullest mentality have this power in_kind_. The _degree_ in which men have it makes one of the chiefdifferences among them. The power is inherent, is implied in the veryexistence of the human mind. When it is most lively the mind createsout of all it feels and hears and sees, taking a simple sight or hintor impression or incident, and working out images, making much out oflittle, a world out of an atom. Akin herein to the supreme creativemight, the man of highest imagination, the poet, unrolls out of hisbrain, through vivid energy, new worlds, peopled with thought, throbbing with humanity. 

When we imagine, therefore, we hold an image in the mind, grasping itwith spiritual fingers, just as by our corporeal fingers a physicalsubstance is grasped. Now the poetic mind in handling the image tossesit with what might be called a sportive earnest delight, and throughthis power and freedom of _play_ elicits by sympathetic fervor, fromits very core, electric rays, wherein the subject glows like thesculpture on an inwardly illuminated urn; rare insights being thusvouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision, --insights gained never butthrough sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirationsafter, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellectbeing used as an obedient cheerful servant. 

The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses, revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole mightseeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearerthan others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is everplying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing, according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholdingeverywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting natureand humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in thosericher, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetratinginsight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are thanminds less creatively endowed. 

Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, allintellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; apower without which the daily business of life even could not go on, being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, itsmaterials. In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellectstimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling;and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged byemotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation. 

Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and theintellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with theeffective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings orconditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in theproduction of poetry?

Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare'splays. What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then runover the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, howrich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when youshall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic, comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought, accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wideprovinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passionso uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the mostprecious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on themorning when the paper was moist with the ink wherewith they werefirst written? Because they have in them more fullness and finenessand fidelity than any others. The poet has more life in himthan other men, and Shakespeare has in him more life than any otherpoet, life manifested through power of intellect exalted through unionwith power of sympathy, the embodiments whereof are rounded, enlarged, refined, made translucent by that gift of _sensibility to the fair andperfect_[3] whereby, according to its degree, we are put in moreloving relation to the work of God, and gain the clearest insightsinto his doings and purposes; a gift without which in richest measureShakespeare might have been a notable historian or novelist orphilosopher, but never the supreme poet he is. 

 [3] See preceding Essay. 

When Coriolanus, having led the Volscians to Rome, encamps under itswalls, and the Romans, in their peril and terror, send to him adeputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies, --theforemost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends ofCoriolanus, --having "declared their business in a very modest andhumble manner, " he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere, answering them with "much bitterness and high resentment of theinjuries done him. " What was the temper as well as the power ofCoriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words ofPlutarch. But the task of the poet is more than this. To ourimagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathyto a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as tofill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody thatmomentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate usto the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge andwarm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeurof the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be somighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. This vast history, to befor future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about toquench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperialmetropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensionsmust he be, this Roman! Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirerof Coriolanus, depict him. Having described, in those compressedsinewy phrases which Shakespeare has at command, the change in hisnature, he adds, "When he walks, he moves like an engine, and theground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce acorselet with his eye; he talks like a knell, and his hum is abattery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What hebids be done is finished with his bidding: he wants nothing of a godbut eternity and a heaven to throne in. "

Hear how a mother's heart, about to break, from the loss of her son, utters its grief when it has the privilege of using a voice quiveringwith poetic fervor. The French king bids Lady Constance be comforted:she answers, --

 "No, I defy all counsel, all redress, But that which ends all counsel, true redress, Death, death. O amiable lovely death! Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness! Arise forth from the couch of lasting night, Thou hate and terror to prosperity, And I will kiss thy detestable bones; And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows; And ring these fingers with thy household worms; And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust, And be a carrion monster like thyself: Come, grin on me; and I will think thou smil'st: And buss thee as thy wife! Misery's love, O, come to me!"

In these two passages from "Coriolanus" and "King John" whatmagnificence of hyperbole! The imagination of the reader, swept onfrom image to image, is strained to follow that of the poet. And yet, to the capable, how the pile of amplification lifts out thenaked truth. Read these passages to a score of well-clad auditors, taken by chance from the thoroughfare of a wealthy city, or from thebenches of a popular lecture-room. To the expanded mold wherein thepassages are wrought, a few--five or six, perhaps, of thetwenty--would be able to fit their minds, zestfully climbing thepoet's climax. To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensiveextravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by, the poetically imaginative light. And to some they would be grosslyunintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming tothem unnatural or affected. 

Now, the enjoyment of the few appreciators, what is its source? Bythese passages certain feelings in them are made to vibrate and arepitched to a high key. A very comprehensive word is feelings. What isthe nature of those feelings thus wrought upon?

The elementary feelings of our nature, when in healthful function, arecapable of emitting spiritual light; and, when exalted to their purestaction, do and must emit such, the inward fire sending forth clearflame unmixed with smoke. To perceive this light, and, stillmore, to have your path illuminated thereby, implies the presentactivity of some of the higher human sensibilities; and to be soorganized as to be able to embody in words, after having imagined, personages, conditions, and conjunctions whence this light shall flashon and ignite the sensibilities of others, implies, besides vividsympathies and delight in the beautiful, a susceptibility to themanifestations of moral and intellectual life which is enjoyed only byhim in whom the nobler elements of being are present in suchintensity, proportions, and quality, and are so commingled, that hecan reproduce life itself with translucent truthfulness, he becoming, through this exalting susceptibility, poet or maker. 

What constitutes the wealth of human life? Is it not fullness andrichness of feeling? To refine this fullness, to purify this richness, to distill the essence out of this wealth, to educate the feelings byrevealing their subtle possibilities, by bringing to light thedivinity there is within and behind them, this is the poet's part; andthis, his great part, he can only do by being blest with more thancommon sympathy with the spirit of the Almighty Creator, and thenceclearer insight into his work and will. Merely to embody inverse the feelings, thoughts, deeds, scenes of human life, is not thepoet's office; but to exhibit these as having attained, or as capableof attaining, the power and beauty and spirituality possible to each. The glorifier of humanity the poet is, not its mere reporter; that isthe historian's function. The poet's business is not with facts assuch, or with inferences, but with truth of feeling, and the veryspirit of truth. His function is ideal; that is, from the prosaic, theindividual, the limited, he is to lift us up to the universal, thegeneric, the boundless. In compassing this noble end he may, if suchbe his bent, use the facts and feelings and individualities of dailylife; and, by illuminating and ennobling them he will approve hishuman insight, as well as his poetic gift. 

The generic in sentiment, the universal, the infinite, can only bereached and recognized through the higher feelings, through thosewhose activity causes emotion. The simple impulses, the elementaryloves, are in themselves bounded in their action near and direct; butgrowing round the very fountain of life, having their rootsin the core of being, they are liable to strike beyond theirindividual limits, and this they do with power when under their swaythe whole being is roused and expanded. When by their movement thebetter nature is urged to heroism and self-sacrifice, as in the storyof Damon and Pythias, the reader or beholder is lifted into theatmosphere of finest emotion; for then the impulse has reached itsacme of function, and playing in the noonday of the beautiful, thecontemplation of it purges and dilates us. We are upraised to thedisinterested mood, the poetical, in which mood there is everimaginative activity refined by spiritual necessities. It is notextravagant to affirm that when act or thought reaches the beautiful, it resounds through the whole being, tuning it like a high strain ofsweetest music. Thus in the poetical (and there is no poetry until thesphere of the beautiful is entered) there is always a reverberationfrom the emotional nature. Reverberation implies space, an ample vaultof roof or of heaven. In a tight, small chamber there can be none. Iffeeling is shut within itself, there is no reëcho. Its explosion mustrebound from the roomy dome of sentiment, in order that it becomemusical. 

The moment you enter the circle of the beautiful, into whichyou can only be ushered by a light within yourself, a light kindledthrough livelier recognition of the divine spirit, --the moment youdraw breath in this circle you find yourself enlarged, spiritualized, buoyed above the self. No matter how surrounded, or implicated, orenthralled, while you are there, be it but for a few moments, you areliberated. 

 "No more--no more--oh! never more on me The freshness of the heart can fall like dew, Which out of all the lovely things we see Extracts emotions beautiful and new, Hived in our bosoms like the bag o' the bee. Think'st thou the honey with those objects grew? Alas! 't was not in them, but in thy power To double even the sweetness of a flower. "

 "All who joy would win Must share it; happiness was born a twin. "

 "He entered in the house, --his home no more, For without hearts there is no home--and felt The solitude of passing his own door Without a welcome; _there_ he long had dwelt, There his few peaceful days Time had swept o'er, There his worn, bosom and keen eye would melt Over the innocence of that sweet child, His only shrine of feelings undefiled. "

These three passages are from a poem in which there is more wit thanpoetry, and more cynicism than either; a poem in spirit unsanctified, Mephistophelian, written by a man of the world, a terribleegotist, _blasé_ already in early manhood, in whose life, throughorganization, inherited temperament, and miseducation, humanity was socramped, distorted, envenomed, that the best of it was in the fierysway of the more urgent passions, his inmost life being, as it mustalways be with poets, inwoven into his verse. From the expiringvolcano in his bosom his genius, in this poem, casts upon the world alurid flame, making life look pale or fever-flushed. With unslumberingvivacity, human nature is exhibited in that misleading light made bythe bursting of half-truths that relate to its lower side, a light themore deceptions from the sparkling accompaniment of satire and wit. 

Above the pungent secularities, the nimble intellectualities, thespecious animalism, the derisive skepticism, the snappingpersonalities, the witty worldliness, that interlace and constitutethe successive cantos of "Don Juan, " the passages just quoted andsimilar ones (they are not many) rise, as above the desires and thediscontents, the plots and contentions, the shrewd self-seekings of aheated, noisy city rises a Gothic spire, aspiring, beautiful, drawingmost of its beauty from its aspiration, on whose pinnacle, calmlyglistening in the upper air, plays the coming and the parting day, while shadows fill the streets below, and whose beauty throws over thetown a halo that beckons men from afar. The spire, in its steadfasttranquillity and its beauty, so unlike the restless wranglingdissonance below it, grew nevertheless out of the same hearts thatmake the dissonance, and, typifying what is spiritual and eternal inthem, tends by its ideal presence to enlarge and uplift those by whoseeyes it is sought. These upshootings in "Don Juan" irradiate thecantos, giving an attractiveness which draws to them eyes thatotherwise would not have known them; and if too pure in their lightand too remote to mingle directly with the flare and flash that dazzlewithout illuminating, silently they shine and steadily, an unconsciousheavenly influence, above these coruscations of earthlythoughts, --thoughts telling from their lively numerousness, butneither grand nor deep. 

From the same solar center fall frequently single rays that make linesand stanzas glisten, and but for which this poem, lacking theirperfusive light, would soon pass into oblivion; for from thebeautiful it is that the satire, the wit, the voluptuousness get theirsparkle and their sheen. If passages morally censurable are herebymade more captivating, we are not content with saying that God's sunfructifies and beautifies poison-oak and hemlock; but we affirm thatthe beautiful, being by its nature necessarily pure, communicates ofits quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measurecounterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad, deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arrestingor the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and beingtherefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which iscompleteness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be madecaptivating through the beautiful. Iago and Edmund are poetical asparts of a whole; and when in speech they approach the upper region ofthought, it is because the details allotted to them have to be highlywrought for the sake of the general plot and effect, and further, because humanity and truth speak at times through strange organs. Besides, the ideal may be used to show more glaringly the hideousnessof evil, and thence Iago and Edmund, as ideal villains, through thevery darkness in which only poetic art could have enveloped them, helpus by indirection to see and value the lights that surround the nobleand the good. 

In healthy function all the feelings are pure and moral, those whoseaction is most earthly and animal and selfish uniting themselves attheir highest with the spiritual, for performance whose compassreaches beyond an individual, momentary good. A burglar or a murderermay exhibit courage; but here, a manly quality backing baseness andbrutality for selfish, short-sighted ends, there is an introverted andbounded action, no expansive upward tendency, and thence no poetry. But courage, when it is the servant of principle for large, unselfishends, becomes poetical, exhibiting the moral beautiful, as in thefable of Curtius and the fact (or fable) of Winkelried. In thepoetical there is always enlargement, exaltation, purification; animalfeeling, self-seeking propensity, becoming so combined with the highernature as to rise above themselves, above the self. 

The lioness, pursuing the robber of her cub, if in her rage shescarcely heed that he (to stay her steps) has dropped the cub in herpath, but, casting at it a glance of recognition, bounds with awilder howl after the robber, the incident is purely bestial, anexhibition of sheer brute fury, and as such repulsive and mostunpoetical. But let her, instantly drawing her fiery eye from therobber, stop, and for the infuriated roar utter a growl of leoninetenderness over her recovered cub, and our sympathy leaps towards her. Through the red glare of rage there shines suddenly a stream of whitelight, gushing from one of the purest fountains: wrathful fury issuddenly subdued by love. A moment before she was possessed withsavage fierceness, her blood boiling with hate and revenge; now itglows with a mother's joy. Her nature rises to the highest whereof itis capable. It is the poetry of animalism. 

In the poetical, thought is amplified and ripened, while purified, inthe calm warmth of emotion. From being emotive, poetry draws in moreof the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose. The poetical has, must have, rotundity. No poet ever had a square head. Prose, in itsnaked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving, flesh-and-spirit-endowed body. From the skeleton you can learnosteology, but neither æsthetics nor human nature. Imaginative prosepartakes of the spiritual character of poetry. When a page ischanged from poetry into prose it is flattened, deadened; when fromprose into poetry it is uplifted, enlivened. You get a something elseand a something more. Reduced to plain prose, the famous passage fromthe mouth of Viola in "Twelfth Night" would read somewhat thus: "Myfather had a daughter who loved a man and would let no one know of herlove, but concealed it, until her cheek grew pale with grief, patiently bearing within her bosom the misery of an untoldattachment. " Now hear the poet:--

 "She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought: And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. "

What has been done with the prose statement? Instead of a bare fact wehave a picture, a twofold picture; and this, in its compact, fresh, rose-tinted vividness, carries the whole into our hearts with atenfold success. Through emotional joy we apprehend, as by the lightof an instantaneous ignition, the state of the sufferer. Theprose-report is a smoldering fire on the hearth, through whose sleepysmoke there comes a partial heat; the poetic is the flame infull fervor, springing upward, illuminating, warming the heart, delighting the intellect. The imagination of the reader, quickened byillustrations so apt and original, is by their beauty tuned to itsmost melodious key, while by the rare play of intellectual vitalityhis mind is dilated. He has become mentally a richer man, enrichedthrough the refining and enlarging of his higher sensibilities, andthe activity imparted to his intellect. 

To say of a man that he is without imagination were to say he is anidiot; that is, one lacking the inward force and the inwardinstruments to grasp and handle the materials collected from withoutby perception and memory, and from within by consciousness. To say ofa poet that he is without poetic imagination were to say he is nopoet. What is poetic imagination? This, for our theme, is a vitalquestion. Can there be given to it an approximate answer?

Figure to yourself a company of men and women in presence of aSeptember sunset near the sea, the eye taking in at once ocean and avariegated landscape. The company must not be a score of tawnyAmerican aborigines, nor of European peasants, nor of individualswhose life of monotonous labor, whether for necessaries orluxuries, has no opportunity or no will for the finer mental culture;but, to give aptness to our illustration, should consist of personswhose being has been unfolded to the tissue of susceptibility to thewonders and beauties of nature, and whose intellect has been tilledsufficiently to receive and nourish any fresh seed of thought that maybe thrown upon it; in short, a score of cultivated adults. Theimpression made by such a scene on such a company is heightened by arare atmospheric calm. The heart of each gazer fills with emotion, atfirst unutterable except by indefinite exclamation; when one of thecompany says, --

 "A fairer face of evening cannot be. "

These words, making a smooth iambic line, give some utterance, andtherefore some relief, to the feeling of all. Then another adds, --

 "The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration. "

Instantly the whole scene, steeped in the beams of the sinking sun, isflooded with a light that illuminates the sunlight, a spiritual light. The scene is transfigured before their eyes: it is as if the heavenshad opened, and inundated all its features with a celestialsubtilizing aura. How has this been accomplished? The first line haslittle of the quality of poetic imagination. 

 "A fairer face of evening cannot be. "

is simple and appropriate, but in it there is no fresh glow, nomysterious throb. Above the level of this line rise suddenly the firstthree words of the second, "the holy time. " The presence of a scenewhere sky, earth, and ocean combine for the delight of the beholdersputs them in a mood which crowns the landscape with a religious halo. That the time is holy they all feel; and now, to make its tranquillityappreciable by filling the heart with it, the poet adds--"is quiet asa nun breathless with adoration. " By this master-stroke of poeticpower the atmospheric earthly calm is vivified with, is changed into, super-earthly calm. By a fresh burst of spiritual light the mind isset æsthetically aglow, as by the beams of the setting sun thelandscape is physically. By an exceptionally empowered hand the soulis strung to a high key. Fullness and range of sensibility open to thepoet[4] a wide field of illustration; its exacting fineness revealsthe one that carries his thought into the depths of thereader's mind, bringing him that exquisite joy caused by keenintellectual power in the service of pure emotion. 

 [4] Wordsworth. 

Take now other samples from the treasury of choicest poetry. Here isone from Coleridge:--

 "And winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring. "

Here again the intellect is urged to its highest action, the abstractor imaginative action, to do the hests of a sensibility so finelywrought by the inward impulsion to seek for the most exquisite thatnature can furnish, that it yields similitudes most delicate, mostapt, most expressive. 

Milton thus opens the fifth book of "Paradise Lost:"--

 "Now morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl. "

Shakespeare makes Romeo describe daybreak:--

 "And jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops. "

Keats begins "Hyperion" with these lines:

 "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn. "

In the Monody on Keats, Shelley, describing the lamentation ofnature at his death, concludes a stanza as follows:--

 "Morning sought Her eastern watch-tower, and, her hair unbound, Wet with the tears that should adorn the ground, Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day; Afar the melancholy thunder moaned, Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay. "

Such passages are the very flower of poetry, thought exquisitely dyedin sentiment, laying suddenly bare a picture with so much light in itthat each passage irradiates its page and the reader's mind. By theirhappiness the similitudes emphasize and enforce the thought; and theydo a higher service than this; for, being a breath from the inner lifeof genius, they blow power into the reader. To translate thesepassages into prose were like trying to translate a lily into the moldout of which it springs, or a bar of Beethoven into the sounds of theforum, or the sparkle of stars into the warmth of a coal fire. 

The best poetry has a far background; it comes out of deeps within thepoet, unfathomed by himself, unfathomable. He feels more than he canexpress. Hence the imaginative poet always suggests, revealing enoughto inspirit the reader's higher faculties to strive for more;not because, with artistic design, he leaves much untold, which heoften does, but because through imaginative susceptibility he at timesgrasps at and partly apprehends much that cannot be embodied. He feelshis subject more largely and deeply than he can see or represent it. To you his work is suggestive because to him the subject suggestedmore than he could give utterance to. Every subject, especially everysubject of poetic capability, having infinite relations, he who mostapprehends this boundlessness--and indeed because he does apprehendit--can do or say what will open it to you or me; and the degree ofhis genius is measured by the extent to which he can present or exposeit. The unimaginative gives surface-work, and, suggesting nothing, isat once exhausted. 

The poetic imagination shows itself in the epithets the poet has athis command, creative insight drawing an epithet out of the heart ofan object; whence, there is beneath such an epithet a depth that keepsfeeding it with significance, bringing out its aptness the longer welook. Sometimes epithets are brighter than their object; theunimaginative thus futilely striving to impart power instead ofderiving it. To be lasting, the light of the epithet must be struck bythe imagination out of its object. The inspired poet finds a word sosympathetic with the thought that it caresses and hugs it. 

Depth and breadth of nature are implied in the full poeticimagination. The love of the beautiful, wielding a keen intellect, needs furthermore rich material to mold, and only out of the poet'sindividual resources can this be drawn. To make a high artist, youmust have very much of a man. Behind "Paradise Lost" and "SamsonAgonistes" is a big Miltonic man. The poet has to put a great deal ofhimself, and the best of him, into his work; thence, for high poetry, there must be a great deal of high self to put in. He must coin hissoul, and have a large soul to coin; the best work cannot be made outof materials gathered by memory and fancy. His stream of thought mustflow from springs, not from reservoirs. Hence the universalbiographical interest in such men; they have necessarily a richpersonality. 

The passages I have cited are all pictures of outward nature, naturalscenes mirrored on the mind, or rather refracted through it, and inthe act transfigured, spiritualized; for such scenes, havingthe fortune to fall on the minds of poets, are reproduced with joyfulrevelation of their inmost being, as sunbeams are through a crystalprism. Exhibiting material nature spiritualized, well do thesepassages show the uplifting character of poetic imagination. But thisdisplays a higher, and its highest power when, striking like athunderbolt into the core of things, it lays bare mysteries of God andof the heart which mere prosaic reason cannot solve or approach, cannot indeed alone even dimly apprehend. 

I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet areopened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated insingle or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamondare condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres offossil carbon. 

When, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost, " Milton narrates thearrival on the battle-field of the Son, --

 "Attended by ten thousand thousand saints, "

and then adds:--

 "Far off his coming shone, "

in these five short words is a sudden glare of grandeur that dilatesthe capable mind with light, and, as the sublime always does, withawe. 

When Ferdinand, in "The Tempest, " leaps "with hair up-staring"into the sea, crying, --

 "Hell is empty, And all the devils are here, "

the mind is suddenly filled with an image of the tumult and flamingrage of a thunder-storm at sea, such as words have never elsewherecarried. What a reach in the imaginative stroke! In the first scene of"Faust, " the earth-spirit, whom Faust has evoked, concludes thewhirling, dazzling, brief, but gigantic sketch of his function withthese words, the majesty of which translation cannot entirelysubdue:--

 "I ply the resounding great loom of old Time, And work at the Godhead's live vesture sublime. "

How ennobling is the idea the mind harbors of humanity, after takingin these lines from Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations ofImmortality:"--

 "But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home. "

With a single epithet, coined for the occasion, Keats flashes upon ourimagination the dethroned Saturn and the immensity of his fall:

 "Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptered; and his _realmless_ eyes were closed. "

The "Hyperion" of this transcendent genius, written in histwenty-fourth year, the year before he died, is as great poetry as hasever been treasured in words. In it he lavishes poetic wealth asthough gold were with him as plenty as silver; and so on the next pagehe exceeds, if possible, the sublimity of the above lines, making Theawrite in the catalogue of Saturn's colossal deprivations, --

 "And all the air Is emptied of thine hoary majesty. "

These passages vividly exemplify poetic imagination, which is theillumining of a capable material by a spiritual light, a light throwninto it from the glow kindled in the poet's mind with richestsensibilities, that are refined and sublimated by an exacting, subtleinward demand for the best they can render. A single flash of newthrilling light irradiates a continent of thought. This is the work ofgenius, and genius is ever marked by a deeper sympathy with andrecognition of the creative spirit and the divine action, a sympathyand recognition so sensitive that the spirit and action of the writerare permeated by the divine effluence, he becoming thereby theinterpreter of divine law, the exhibitor of divine beauty. 

In these passages the thought of the poet is thrust up throughthe overlaying crust of the common, by a warming, expanding, inwardmotion, which is sped by a vitality so urgent and irresistible that, to make passage for the new thought, lightly is lifted a load which, but for this spiritual efficacy, could not be stirred, just as heavystones are raised by delicate growing plants. To exert this power thepoet is always moved at the instance of feeling. Poetry having itsbirth in feeling, no man can enjoy or value it but through feeling. But what moves him to embody and shape his feeling is that ravishingsentiment which will have the best there is in the feeling, thesentiment which seeks satisfaction through contemplation orentertainment of the most divine and most perfect, and ever rises tothe top of the refined joy which such contemplation educes. 

The poetic imagination is the Ariel of the poet, --his spiritualmessenger and Mercury. A clear look into the above passages would showthat the source of their power is in the farther scope or exquisiterange the imagination opens to us, often by a word. For furtherillustration I will take a few other examples, scrutinizing them moreminutely. Had Lorenzo opened the famous passage in "TheMerchant of Venice" thus, --

 "How _calm_ the moonlight _lies_ upon this bank, "

and continued to the end of the dozen lines in the same key, saying, --

 "There's not the _tiniest star_ that _can be seen_ But in its _revolution_ it doth _hum_, Aye _chanting_ to the _heavenly_ cherubins, "

his words would not have become celebrated and quotable. But Lorenzohas the privilege of being one of the mouth-pieces of Shakespeare, andso he begins, --

 "How _sweet_ the moonlight _sleeps_ upon this bank. "

Two words, _sweet_ and _sleep_, put in the place of _calm_ and _lies_, lift the line out of prose into poetry. A log _lies_ on a bank; sodoes a dead dog, and the more dead a thing is the more it lies; butonly what is alive _sleeps_, and thus the word, besides an image ofextreme stillness, brings with it what strengthens the image, the ideaof change from liveliness to quiet; for that which was awake nowsleeps; and the more full the picture of stillness, the more awake isthe mind of the reader, awakened by the fitness and felicity of theimage. The substitution of _sweet_ for _calm_ is, in a less degree, similarly enlivening; for, used in such conjunction, _sweet_ is moreindividual and subtle, and imports more life, and thus helps thedistinctness and vividness of the picture. How does the poetic Lorenzoword the other three lines?

 "There's not the _smallest orb_ which _thou behold'st_, But in _his motion like an angel sings_, Still _quiring_ to the _young-eyed_ cherubins. "

The words or phrases italicized carry a larger, or a deeper or a finermeaning than the corresponding ones in the substituted lines. To_behold_ is more than to _see_: it is to see contemplatively. Thefigure _prosopopoeia_ is often but an impotent straining to impartpoetic life; but the personification in _in his motion_ is apt andeffective. _Quiring_ is an amplification of the immediately preceding_sings_, and, signifying to sing in company with others, enlarges, while making more specific, the thought. And what an image of thefreshness of heaven and of youthful immortality is conveyed by theepithet _young-eyed_! At every step the thought is expanded andbeautiful, reaching at the end of the third line a climax on which thepoetically excited mind is left poised in delight. 

But the passage transformed, and, as we might say, degraded, is stillpoetical. There is so much poetry in the thought that the flatteningof the phraseology cannot smother it, the lines still remainingpoetically alive, their poetry shining through the plainer and lessfigurative words. And the thought is poetical because it is the resultof a flight of intellect made by aid of imagination's wings, thesebeing moved by the soaring demands of the beautiful, and beating anatmosphere exhaled from sensibility. As Joubert says, --herein utteringa cardinal æsthetic principle, --"It is, above all, in the spiritualityof ideas that poetry consists. " Thought that is poetic will glistenthrough the plainest words; whereas, if the thought be prosaic ortrite, all the gilded epithets in the dictionary will not give it thepoetic sheen. Perdita wishes for

 "Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty. "

Note the poetic potency in the simple word _dares_; how much itcarries: the cold which the swallow has not the courage to confront; amental action, I might almost call it, in the swallow, who, aftermaking a recognizance of the season, determines that it would be rashto venture so far north: all this is in the single word. For _dares_write _does_, and the effect would be like that of cutting agash in a rising balloon: you would let the line suddenly down, because you take the life out of the thought. 

 "And take The winds of March with beauty. "

Every one is taken at some time or other with the beauty of person orthing, and the thought is common; but that the winds of March be takenwith the beauty of daffodils, this was a delicate secret which thosewinds would confide only to one so sympathetic as Shakespeare. This ispoetic imagination, the intellect sent on far errands by a sensibilitywhich is at once generous and bold, and fastidious through thepromptings and the exactions of the beautiful. 

In the opening of "Il Penseroso" Milton describes the shapes that insprightly moods possess the fancy, "As thick and numberless As the gay motes that _people_ the sunbeams. "

Put _shine in_ the sunbeams, for _people_, and, notwithstanding theluminousness of the word substituted, you take the sparkle out of theline, which sparkle is imparted by mental activity, and the poeticdash that has the delightful audacity to personify such atomies. 

The poetical is the flush on the face of things in theunconscious triumph of their purest life, cognizable by being beheldat the moment when the higher faculties are at their fullest flood, buoyed up on the joy of being and emotional sympathy. The most and thehighest of this joy is possessed by him whose imagination is mostcapable of being poetically agitated; for by such agitation light isengendered within him, whereby objects and sensations that before weredim and opaque grow luminous and pellucid, like great statuary intwilight or moonlight, standing vague and unvalued until a torch iswaved over it. 

When we begin to speak of poetry, the higher qualities of the mindcome up for judgment. No genuine poet is without one or more of these, and a great poet must have most of them. Thence the thought of thepoet is pitched on a high key, and even in poets of power the poetryof a page is sometimes shown merely by the sustained tone of thesentiment, giving out no jets of fire, having no passages salient withgolden embossings. Through sympathy and sense of beauty, the poet getsnearer to the absolute nature of things; and thence, with little ofimagery, or coloring, or passion, through this holy influencehe becomes poetic, depicting by re-creating the object or feeling orcondition, and rising naturally into rhythmic lines and sentences, thebest substance asking for, and readily obtaining, the most suitableform of words. Yet a poet of inward resources can seldom write a pagewithout there being heard a note or bar or passage of the finermelody. 

But men wanting this inward wealth, that is, wanting depth and breadthof emotional capacity, have not, whatever their other gifts, the soilneeded for highly imaginative poetry. With broad emphasis thisæsthetic law is exemplified in the verse of Voltaire, especially inhis dramas, and in the verse of one who was deeper and higher than heas thinker and critic, of Lessing. Skillful versifiers, by help offancy and a certain plastic aptitude and laborious culture, areenabled to give to smooth verse a flavor of poetry and to achieve atemporary reputation. But of such uninspired workmanship the gildingafter a while wears off, the externally imparted perfume surelyevaporates. 

Often the most suitable form of words is made of plainest, commonestparts of speech, and the fewest of them. The more intense and deepthe feeling, the greater is the need of briefest, simplestutterance. When in one of those pauses of frantic wrath, --like thesudden rifts that momentarily let the calm stars through a whirlingcanopy of storm, --Lear utters imploringly that appeal to Heaven, thewords are the familiar words of hourly use; but what divine tendernessand what sweep of power in three lines!

 "O heavens, If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause; send down and take my part!"

The thirty-third canto of the "Inferno" supremely exemplifies thesustaining energy of poetic imagination, that by its sublimating lightit can forever hold before the mind, in tearful, irresistible beauty, one of the most woful forms of human suffering, death by starvation. In that terrific picture, in front of which all the generations of menthat come after Dante are to weep purifying tears, the most exquisitestroke is given in five monosyllables; but in those five little wordswhat depth of pathos, what concentration of meaning! On the fourth dayone of Ugolino's dying sons throws himself at his father's feet, crying, --

 "Father, why dost not help me?"

Here let me remark that it is not by witnessing, throughpoetically imaginative representation, scenes of suffering and agony, as in this case and the tragic drama, that the sensibilities are"purged, " according to the famous saying of Aristotle; but it isbecause such scenes are witnessed by the light of the beautiful. Thebeautiful always purifies and exalts. 

In either of these two passages any piling up of words, any hyperboleof phrase, or boldness or even grandeur of figurative speech, wouldhave proved a hindrance instead of a conductor to the feeling, smothering and not facilitating expression. But when, turned out ofdoors in "a wild night, " by those "unnatural hags, " his daughters, Lear, baring his brow to the storm, invokes the thunder to

 "Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world, "

there is no tenderness, no folding of the sore heart upon itself;there is the expansion of defiance, outburst of the mighty wrath of anoutraged father and wronged and crownless king: and so we have a gushof the grandest diction, of the most tempestuous rhythm, the storm inLear's mind marrying itself with a ghastly joy to the storm of theelements, the sublime tumult above echoed in the crashing splendor ofthe verse:--

 "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving-thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, all germins spill at once, That make ingrateful man!"

I know of no other single passage that exhibits so clearly thecolossal dimensions of Shakespeare. Here is attained, with almostunique effect, what according to Schiller is the aim of poetry, "noother than to give to humanity its fullest possible expression, itsmost complete utterance. "

The best poetry, like the best music, soars towards the upper light. The genuinely poetical always lifts up the thought on the swell ofemotion. The thought moves free and strong because there is a deep, bubbling head of feeling behind it. Feeling, at its best, has anascending movement, reaching up towards that high sphere where, through their conjunction, the earthly and the spiritual play infreedom in the sunshine of the beautiful. The surest test of thepresence of poetry is buoyancy, springiness, which comes from theunion, the divine union, of the spiritual and the beautiful. Howeverweighty it may be with thought, the poetical passage floats, thus giving certain sign of life, of a soul irrepressible. 

But as in the forest there cannot be height of stem without strengthand breadth of root, the highest poetry is the most solid, the firmestset in reality, in truth. The higher a poet is, the closer hold he hasof the roots of his subject. He looks at it with a peering, deeplysympathetic insight. The roots, in fact, are in himself; they are inthe depths of his soul. Hence a cardinal question about a poem is, Howmuch of it does the poet draw out of himself? Is it his by projectionfrom his inward resources, by injection with his own juices; or is ithis only by adoption and adaptation, by dress and adjustment?

Flight of poetic imagination there cannot be unless the wings havebeen feathered in the heart. Loftiness or grandeur of imaginationthere cannot be, except there be first innate richness and breadth offeeling. Imagination being simply the tensest action of intellect, isever, like intellect in all its phases, an instrument of feeling, amere tool. Height implies inward depth. The gift to touch the vitalsof a subject is the test-gift of literary faculty; it is thesoul-gift, the gift of fuller, livelier sympathy. Compare Wordsworthwith Southey to learn the difference between inward and outward gifts. 

Poetry being in the mind, the man who has little poetry within himwill find little in nature or in the world or in Shakespeare. The manwho has no music in his soul will hear none at the Conservatoire inParis. Wordsworth sees with the inward eye, Southey too exclusivelywith the outward. The true poet projects visions and rhythms out fromhis brain, and gazes at and hearkens to them. The degree of thetruthfulness to nature and the vividness of these projections is themeasure of his poetic genius and capacity. Only through this intenseinwardness can he attain to great visions and rhythmic raptures, andmake you see and hear them. What illimitable inward sight must Keatshave dwelt in ere, to depict the effect on him of looking intoChapman's Homer, he could write, --

 "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien. "

Here is a brilliant example of poetic imagination, theintellect urged to its finest action to satisfy the feeling whichdelights in the grand, the select, the beautiful. 

 "Silent, upon a peak in Darien. "

What an outlook! What a solemn, mysterious, elevating inward moment itcreates in us! To ascend to that peak, to carry the reader thitherwith him, that is the flight of a great poet, of one who has been--asin that choice poem, "The Prelude, " Wordsworth, with an electricstroke of poetic imagination, says of Newton--

 "Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. "

This vigor of flight in the poet, bearing on his wing the reader, whomhe ushers to new, sudden vistas, is a test of poetic genius. Somepoets never carry you to heights, but rather make you feel whilereading them as if you were moving through shut-in valleys: theirverse wants sky. They are not poetically imaginative, are not strungfor those leaps which the great poet at times finds it impossible notto make. They have more poetic fancy than poetic imagination. Poeticfancy is a thin flame kindled deliberately with gathered materials;poetic imagination is an intense flash born unexpectedly ofinternal collisions. Fancy is superficial and comparativelyshort-sighted; imagination is penetrative and far-sighted, bringingtogether things widely sundered, apparently diverse and opposite. Fancy divides, individualizes; imagination compounds, builds, globes. Fancy is not so broad or so keen or so warm or so bounding asimagination; is comparatively tame and cold and quiet. Imagination issynthetical. Large exhibitions of poetic imagination are rare even inthe greatest poets. At its best it strikes deep into the nature ofthings, has a celestial quality which invests it with awe. Spensershows great resources of fancy, but little imagination. The arc ofimagination is in him too near its center. Hence there is no reach inhis thoughts. He has no exhaustless depths within. He is not, as Coleridge says Shakespeare is, an example of "endlessself-reproduction. " Cowley, says the same great critic, "is a fancifulwriter, Milton an imaginative poet. "

As I have already said, the power of imagining, of forming in the mindimages, conceptions, is a purely intellectual power, and imaginationbecomes poetical only when this intellectual power is an agentobeying that emotional power which ardently seeks, intensely longsfor, the better, the more perfect, the purer, in one word, thebeautiful in each province of multiform life. The willing agent, intellect, is sent out on excursions of discovery, and unexpectedlyfalls in with and captures all kinds of sparkling booty. 

Writers weak in poetic imagination are not visited by those beamingthoughts that come unsummoned out of the invisible, like new starswhich, out of the unfathomable deeps of the sky, dart suddenly uponthe vision of the heaven-watcher. Such writers deal with the known, with the best commonplace, not the common merely; and under the glanceof genius the common grows strange and profound. 

Some poets, not weak in poetic imagination, yet use it chiefly forsecondary purposes, that is, for beautifying the dress, the externalsof poetry. Minds with some breadth but with little depth are notthoroughly original. Their sense of the beautiful busies itselfnecessarily with that for which they have the readiest gifts; andtheir readiest gifts being words more than ideas, versification morethan thought, form more than substance, they turn out verse, chiefly narrative, which captivates through its easy flow, its smoothsensuousness of diction, its gloss. Take a poet so celebrated, in somerespects so admirable, as Tennyson. Tennyson's verse is apt to be toorichly dressed, too perfumed. The clothing is costlier than thethoughts can pay for. Hence at every re-reading of him he parts withsome of his strength, so that after three or four repetitions he haslittle left for you. From a similar cause this is the case too withByron, through whose pen to common sentiment and opinion a glow isimparted by the animal heat of the man, heightened by poetic tintsfrom a keen sense of the beautiful. But this is not the case withKeats or Shelley or Coleridge or Wordsworth, and of course thereforenot with Milton or Shakespeare. All these keep fresh, at every contactgiving you strength and losing none. As freely and freshly as thesun's beams through a transparent, upspringing Gothic spire, intellectand feeling play, ever undimmed, through Shelley's "Sky-Lark. " Not sothrough Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women. " After a time thesemellifluous stanzas droop, and cling to the paper: they have notenough flame-like motion. The nicest word-choosing will notsupply the place of choice in thought, a choice prompted by freshfeeling; nor, where there is no new impulse from the heart, will themost gorgeous diction give to a line the poetic carnation. There canbe no freshness of expression without freshness of thought; thesparkle on the skin comes from new blood in the heart. 

Tennyson's poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches, and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots. There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion tokeep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant. Wordsworth's poetry has forthe most part roots deeply hidden. 

Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to abody. This is the method with even some writers of good gifts anddeserved name. Compared with Goethe, who, sensuous as he is, buthealthily sensuous, writes always from within outward, Schiller ischargeable with this kind of externality. To try to make the fancy dothe work of feeling is a vain effort. And so much verse is of thememory and fancy more than of the heart and imagination. Inwardimpulse not being dominant, the words, however shiny, are touched withcoldness. Under the inward dominance (supposing always that theintellectual tool be of due temper and sharpness) the poet mountsspringily on a ladder self-wrought out of the brain as he ascends; andthus there is a prompt continuity and progressiveness, a forward andupward movement towards the climax which ever awaits you in a subjectthat has a poem in it. In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration andnot mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbingover phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links ofassociation. This gives sure note of the presence of the matrix out ofwhich poetry molds itself, that is, sensibility warm and deep, penetrating sympathy. Where evolution and upward movement are not, itis a sign that the spring lacks depth and is too much fed by surfacestreams from without. 

Through a poem should run a thread of emotional thought, strong enoughto bind the parts together so vividly as to hold attention close tothe substance. Many a so-called poem is but a string of elaboratestanzas, mostly of four lines each, too slightly connected tocooperate as members of an organic whole. There is not heat enough inthe originating impulse to fuse the parts into unity. There istoo much manufacture and not enough growth. Coleridge says, "Thedifference between manufactured poems and works of genius is not lessthan between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both lookalike. "

Men without depth of sensibility or breadth of nature, but with enoughsense of beauty to modulate their thoughts, using with skill thefloating capital of sentiment and the current diction and molds ofverse, for a generation are esteemed poets of more genius than theyhave, their pages being elaborate verse flavored with poetry, ratherthan poems. In much verse are found old thoughts re-dressed in thescoured garments of an ambitious fancy. The remark being made toGoethe in his latter days, that scarce one of the younger German poetshad given an example of good prose, he rejoined, "That is verynatural; he who would write prose must have something to say; but hewho has nothing to say can make verses and rhymes; for one word givesthe other, till at last you have before you what in fact is nothing, yet looks as though it were something. " There is much good-lookingverse which does not fulfill any one of Milton's primary conditionsfor poetry, being artificial instead of "simple, " and havingneither soul enough to be "passionate, " nor body enough to be"sensuous. " By passionate Milton means imbued with feeling. 

The poetical mood is always a visionary mood; so much so, that evenwhen the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see itwith the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward. Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold, presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent imagethereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of alake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castleand its glistening counterpart. In the best poetry there is vividpicture-making: reality is made more visible by being presented as abeautiful show. It is the power to present the beautiful show whichconstitutes the poet. To conceive a scene or person with suchliveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception topaper with a distinctness and palpitation that shall make the readerbehold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual--this implies asubtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test of poeticfaculty. To stand this test there must be an inward sea of thought andsensibility, dipping into which the poet is enabled to hold up hisconception or invention all adrip with sparkling freshness. The poeticmind, with a firm, and at the same time free, easy hold, holds asubject at arm's length, where it can be turned round in the light;the prosaic mind grasps and hugs what it handles so close that thereis no room for play of light or motion. 

Contemplating synthetically the highest and choicest and purest, andat the same time actively endeavoring to embody it, the genuine poethas in his best work joy as exalted as the mind can here attain to;and in the reader who can attune himself to the high pitch, heenkindles the same kind of joyful exaltation. There is current adetestable phrase or definition, which even Coleridge allows himselfto countenance, namely, that poetry is something which gives pleasure. Pleasure! Do we speak of the pleasure of beholding the sun rise out ofthe Atlantic or from the top of Mount Washington, or the pleasure ofstanding beside Niagara, or of reading about the self-sacrifice ofRegulus or Winkelried? Pleasure is a word limited to the animal or tothe lighter feelings. "Let me have the pleasure of taking winewith you. " A good dinner gives great pleasure to a circle of gourmets. Even enjoyment, a higher word than pleasure, should, when applied topoetry, be conjoined with some elevating qualification; for all thefeelings impart enjoyment through their simple healthy function, andthere are people who enjoy a cock-pit, or a bull-fight, or anexecution. But poetry causes that refined, super-sensuous delightwhich follows the apprehension of any thought, sentiment, act, orscene, which rises towards the best and purest possible in the rangeof that thought, sentiment, act, or scene. In the poetical therealways is exaltation, a reaching towards perfection, a subtle, blooming spirituality. The end of poetry is not pleasure, --this wereto speak too grossly, --but refined enjoyment through emotion. 

To him who has the finer sensibility to become aware of its presence, the poetical is everywhere. The beautiful is a kiss which man gives toNature, who returns it; to get the kiss from her he must first giveit. Wordsworth says, "Poetry is the breath and fine spirit of allknowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in thecountenance of all science. " It might be called the aromaticessence of all life. 

A poem is the incarnation of this aroma, the condensation of it intoform. A drop of dew symbolizes a poem; for a true poem should be oval, without angles, transparent, compact, complete in itself, gracefulfrom inward quality and fullness. It may be of a few lines, or ofhundreds or thousands; but there must be no superfluous line or word. A poem drops out of the brain a fragrant distillation. A poem must bea spiritual whole; that is, not only with the parts organized intoproportioned unity, but with the whole and the parts springing out ofthe idea, the sentiment, form obedient to substance, body to soul, thesensuous life to the inward. For enduring, ruddy incarnation, thesubject, whether it be incident, scene, sentiment, or action, musthave within its core this essential aroma. The poet (and the test ofhis poetic capacity is his gift to draw the fragrance out of such acore) keeps his conception distinctly and vividly before him. Theconception or ideal prefigurement of his theme precedes him, like thepillar of fire in the night, drawing him onward surely and rapidly. Otherwise he lags and flags and stumbles. The spring into poetry is ona flash, which not only lights up the thought on which it springs, butrenews, recreates it. 

A man's chief aim in life should be to better himself, to keepbettering himself; and in this high duty the poet helps him. Poetry isthe great educator of the feelings. By seizing and holding up to viewthe noblest and cleanest and best there is in human life, poetryelevates and refines the feelings. It reveals and strengthens thespirituality of our nature. Poetry tunes the mind. Faculty ofadmiration is one of our super-animal privileges. Poetry purges andguides admiration; and the sounder and higher our admirations, themore admirable ourselves become. 

The best poetry turns the mind inward upon itself, and sweetens itsimaginations. Our imaginations, that is, our inward thoughts, plans, shaping our silent, interior doings, these are the chief part of us;for out of these come most of our outward acts, and all of theircolor. As is the preponderance of the man, will be this inward brood. The timid man will imagine dangers, the anxious man troubles, thehopeful man successes, the avaricious man accumulations, the ambitiouspossession of power; and the poetic man will imagine all sortsof perfections, be ever yearning for a better and higher, be everbuilding beautiful air-castles, earthy or moral, material or ethereal, according as the sensuous or the spiritual predominates in his nature. Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vastwealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzledhis contemporaries with Fonthill Abbey. Not only are Fonthill Abbeysand all beautiful buildings achieved through the warm action of thepoetic faculty, but all improvements are brought about by its virtue. Out of this deep, inward, creative power issue all theories andpractice for the bettering of human conditions. All original foundersand discoverers are poets: the most poetic French mind I know is thatof Fourier. 

When a mind, having the texture and expansibility to become surchargedwith magnetic effluence, has moreover that æsthetic gift of rhythmicexpression which involves a sense of the beautiful, that is, of thehigh and exquisite possibilities of created things, --when such a mind, under the pressure of inward needs, betakes it to embodying in verseits imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. _Poetry isthought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow inmusical cadence. _ And when we consider that thought is the gatheringof loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creativesensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of itstumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence isheard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch somesound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuinepoem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind, and involves in its production a beatific visionariness. 

III. 

STYLE. 

Thought, act, and speech are of one substance. Where the best thingshave been done, the best things have been said. The history of Atticais richer and more significant than that of her sister-states of oldGreece, and among them her literature is supreme. So of England inmodern Europe. And where good thoughts have been uttered the form ofthose will be finest which carry the choicest life. The tree gets itstexture from the quality of its sap. Were I asked what author is themost profitable to the student of English on account of style, Ishould answer, study Shakespeare. 

Have something to say, and say it in the best and fewest words, were agood recipe for style. In this brief precept there are moreingredients than at first view appear. To have something to sayimplies that a man must write out of himself, and not chiefly out ofhis memory; and so to write involves much more than many peopleare aware of; in order that his style have freshness, which is aprimary need of a good style, the writer's thought must be fresh. Then, to say his thought in the best and fewest words implies facultyof choice in words, and faculty of getting rid of all verbalsuperfluity; and these two faculties betoken proficiencies and some ofthe finer æsthetic forces. 

Style itself is a gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts), not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to onewith inharmonious or defective natural powers, you might as wellattempt to teach a thrush to sing the songs of the nightingale. To besure, like the poetical, or the scientific, or any mental gift, itrequires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most, as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get fromothers--whether through study of the best masters or through directrhetorical instruction--is in the mechanical portion of the art; thatis, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses, how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity andawkwardness, and thus make most presentable and accessible what he hasto give out. Even in these superficial lessons success importssomething more than a superficial capacity. These lessons learnt, andyou have still to go behind them for style, whose cradle is withinyou. _Le style c'est l'homme même_ (a man's style is his very self), is the oft-quoted profound sentence of Buffon. Style comes out of theinterior: beneath a genuinely good style are secret springs which giveto the surface its movement and sparkle. Mostly when people talk ofstyle 't is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath. Inpopularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springsbeneath; in Tom Moore's, for example, or Southey's. 

Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than othersin presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shapingtheir utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plasticfaculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style. Tactand craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some otherwriters of more substance; still, they are only capable of so doing bymeans of qualities which, however secondary, are interior and fervent, and the skill imparted by which cannot be acquired except through thepresence of these qualities. This superiority of skill in formis illustrated by the literature of France in comparison with theliterature of Germany, and even with that of England. The Frenchfollow a precept thus embodied by Béranger: "Perfection of styleshould be sought by all those who believe themselves called to diffuseuseful thoughts. Style, which is only the form appropriated to asubject by art and reflection, is the passport of which every thoughthas need in order to circulate, expand, and lodge itself in people'sbrains. To neglect style is not to show sufficient love for the ideasone wishes to make others adopt. " And so effective is the following ofsuch a precept that, through careful devices and manipulatingcleverness, a brilliant success, though transitory is achieved by somewriters who range lightly over surfaces, their thoughts dipping nodeeper than a flat stone thrown to skim along the water, which itkeeps ruffling, making a momentary sprightly splash at each contact, until, its force being soon spent, it disappears and is seen no more. 

The possession of certain mental gifts constitutes a talent forwriting, gifts which, with reference to the great primary powers ofthe mind, are secondary. Sainte-Beuve says of the Abbé Gerbetthat he "had naturally the flowers of speech, movement and rhythm ofphrase, measure and choice of expression, even figurative language, what, in short, makes a talent for writing. " The possessor of thesequalifications may, nevertheless, rise only a little above mediocrity. Of the styles of many, even clever, accomplished writers, one gets aclear notion from the remark made of a certain polished actress, thatshe always played well, never better. 

When Sainte-Beuve says _Rien ne vit que par le style_, he asserts infact the exclusive privilege of original thought to give permanence toliterary work; for nothing but an interior source can give life toexpression. The inward flow will shape itself adequately andharmoniously in proportion as it has at full command the auxiliary, what I have called the plastic literary qualities; but shape itself itwill, effectively and with living force, without the fullest command, while the readiest mastery over these qualities can never givevitality to style when are wanting primary resources. Literarysubstance which does not shape itself successfully (it may not be withthe fullest success) is internally defective, is insufficient;for if it throb with life, it will mold a form for its embodiment, albeit that form, from lack of complete command of the secondaryagents, will not be so graceful or rich as with such command it wouldhave been. Wordsworth has made to English literature a permanentaddition which is of the highest worth, in spite of notable plasticdeficiencies. A conception that has a soul in it will find itself abody, and if not a literary body, one furnished by some other of thefine arts; or, wanting that, in practical enterprise or invention. Andthe body or form will be stamped with the inward lineaments of theman. Style issues from within, and if it does not, it is not style, but manner. Words get all their force from the thoughts and feelingsbehind them. They are necessary media, created, molded, and combinedby mental wants. Picking and polishing words and phrases isineffectual without the picking and polishing of the thoughts: belowthe surface of words lies that which controls and vivifies style. Andthen between the substance, the mental material, and the executivefaculties there must be lively harmony. The executive power is apurely intellectual composite instrument; the force thatwields it is feeling. For the best style the wielding force must befine as well as rich and strong, and the shaping, harmonizinginstrument of superfine temper and smiling willingness. 

Style, in writing, is the art of putting into words what you think orfeel, in such a way as to make the best of it--presupposed, that whatyou think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are menwho, without being original or inventive, have still, through strongunderstanding and culture, much to say that will profit theircontemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity, will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and inmost cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to astyle which for their purposes is effective. Of this class Jeffrey, Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not wingedminds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt intoan upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent, illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finerinsight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even whenmost vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, byimaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not byfreshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius, creativeness. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers hadappeared in the "Edinburgh Review, " Brougham, one of its founders andcontrollers, protested that if that man were permitted to write anymore he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of theReview were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitraryproceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying theinstinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius. 

Not less than men of talent men of genius need to cultivate style;nay, from the copiousness and variousness of their material, and fromits very inwardness, the molds into which it is to be thrown need thefinest care. Coleridge, rich and incomparable as he is, would havemade many of his prose pages still more effective by a studioussupervision; and De Quincey tells us what labor his periods sometimescost him. The following advice, given in a letter from Maurice deGuérin to his sister, may be addressed to all literary aspirants:"Form for yourself a style which shall be the expression ofyourself. Study our French language by attentive reading, making ityour care to mark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies ofstyle, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In theworks of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use iteach in our own fashion. "

One of the first constituents of a good style is what Coleridge calls"progressive transition, " which implies a dynamic force, a propulsivemovement, behind the pen. Hazlitt, for example, somewhat lacked thisforce, and hence De Quincey is justified to speak of his solitaryflashes of thought, his "brilliancy, seen chiefly in separatesplinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreousscintillation for a moment. " One of the charms, in a high sense, ofColeridge's page is that in him this dynamic force was present inliveliest action. His intellect, ever enkindled by his emotions, exacted logical sequence, and thus a rapid forward movement isoverspread by a glow of generous feeling, which, being refined by hispoetic sensibility made his style luminous and flowing. 

De Quincey, treating of aphoristic writing, says, "Any man [he ofcourse means any man with good things in him] as he walksthrough the streets may contrive to jot down an independent thought, ashort-hand memorandum of a great truth; but the labor of compositionbegins when you have to put your separate threads of thought into aloom; to weave them into a continuous whole; to connect, to introducethem; to blow them out or expand them; to carry them to a close. "Buffon attached the greatest importance to sequence, to closedependence, to continuous enchainment. He detested a chopped, jerkystyle, that into which the French are prone to fall. Certain it is, and from obvious causes, that much of the secret of style lies inaptness of sequence, thought and word, through an irresistibleimpulsion and pertinence, leaping forth nimbly, each taking its placepromptly, because naturally and necessarily. Through fusion and closecoherency and dependence, the flow is at once smooth and lively. Thegrace as well as the strength of the living physical body dependsmuch, nay primarily, on the joints. So with the body of a goodwriter's thoughts, that is, his mode of utterance. To the linking ofsentences and paragraphs (the links being self-wrought out of inwardsap) is due much of the buoyancy and force of style. Thespringiness of the joints depends, in the body, on the quality of itsnervous life; in style, much on the marrow and validity of thethoughts. By a sprightly stream of thought, fed from a full spring offeeling, the current of words is kept lively and graceful. Words, sentences, paragraphs, cannot be held closely, symmetrically, attractively together, without the unction invisibly distilled frombrisk mental movement, movement starting from sentiment fresh andtrue. Soul is the source of style. Not sensibility alone is aprerequisite for style: the sensibility must be _active_, made activeby the fine aspiring urgency which ever demands the best. A good stylewill have the sheen communicated by lubrication from within, not thegloss of outward rubbing. 

That style varies in pitch and tone according to the subject treatedought to be self-evident. In every page of "The Merry Wives ofWindsor" we recognize Shakespeare not less palpably than in "KingLear. " In his "Recollections of Charles Lamb" De Quincey writes, "Farbe it from me to say one word in praise of those--people of how narrowa sensibility--who imagine that a simple (that is, according to manytastes, an unelevated and _unrhythmical_) style--take, forinstance, an Addisonian or a Swiftian style--is _unconditionally_good. Not so: all depends upon the subject; and there is a style, transcending these and all other modes of simplicity, by infinitedegrees, and, in the same proportion, impossible to most men, therhythmical, the continuous--what in French is called the_soutenu_--which, to humbler styles stands in the relation of an organto a shepherd's pipe. This also finds its justification in itssubject; and the subject which _can_ justify it must be of acorresponding quality--loftier--and therefore, rare. "

I quote De Quincey because he has written more, and more profoundly aswell as more copiously, on style than any writer I know. To thispoint, --the adaption of style to subject, --he returns, laying downwith clearness and truth the law which should here govern. In a paperon Schlosser's "Literary History of the Eighteenth Century" hereaffirms--what cannot be too strongly insisted on--the falsity of thecommon opinion that Swift's style is, for all writers, a model ofexcellence, showing how it is only fitted to the kind of subjects onwhich Swift wrote, and concluding with this characteristic passage:"That nearly all the blockheads with whom I have at any time had thepleasure of conversing upon the subject of style (and pardon me forsaying that men of the most sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz. , poetry and style, to talk _most_ like blockheads) have invariablyregarded Swift's style not as if _relatively_, (i. E. , _given_ a propersubject), but as if _absolutely_ good--good unconditionally, no matterwhat the subject. Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the dean hadbeen required to write a pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh's immortalapostrophe to Death, or to many passages in Sir Thomas Brown's'Religio Medici' and his 'Urn-Burial, ' or to Jeremy Taylor's inauguralsections of his 'Holy Living and Dying, ' do you know what would havehappened? Are you aware what sort of a ridiculous figure your poorbald Jonathan would have cut? About the same that would be cut by aforlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, ifsuddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival ofBelshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords. "

That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of highexcellence ought to be a truism. Through a certain equilibrium amonghis faculties, and assiduous literary culture, such a one mayexcel colleagues who move on the same bounded plane; but that is all. From the shallowest utterance, where, thoughts and feelings lying justbelow the surface, there can be no strong lights and shadows, nosplendid play in the exposition, styles range, with the men who makethem, through all degrees of liveliness and significance and power, upto that simple grandeur which conceals a vast volume of thought, andimplies a divine ruling of multiplicity. 

In a good style, on whatever degree it stands, there must be a fullmarriage between word and thought, so clean an adjustment ofexpression to material as to leave no rough edges or nodes. The wordsmust not be too big or too shiny for the thought; they must not standout from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter. A style canhardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, wassometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting. 

A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer beone; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a freesympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; hissubject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject. That he besincere is not enough; he must be cordial; then he will be magnetic, attractive. You must love your work to do it well. 

A good style is a stream, and a lively stream: it flows ever onwardactively. The worst vice a style can have is languor. With somewriters a full stop is a double full stop: the reader does not getforward. Much writing consists of little more than sluggish eddies. Inmany minds there is not leap enough for a style. Excellence in styledemands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve asomewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy andpoetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolablesequence. 

Writers there are who get to be partially self-enslaved by a routineof phrases and words under the repetition of which thought is hardenedby its molds. Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness, even when there is a current of intellectual activity. Writers mostliable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves toset opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow, --a sadcondition for man or writer. 

Hypocrites in writing, as in talking and doing, end badly. Awriter who through his style aims to seem better or other than himselfis soon found out. The desire so to seem argues a literary incapacity;it looks as though the very self--which will shine through thestyle--lacked confidence in its own substance. And after all, inwriting as in doing and talking, a man must be himself, will behimself in spite of himself. One cannot put on his neighbor's styleany more than he can put on his neighbor's limbs. 

Not only has prose its melody as well as verse, but there is no_style_ unless sentences are pervaded, I might say animated, byrhythm; lacking appropriate movement, they are inelastic, inert, drowsy. Rhythm implies a soul behind it and in it. The best style willhave a certain rotundity imparted by the ceaseless rocking of thoughtin the deep ocean of sentiment. Without some music in them sentenceswere torpid, impracticable. To put thoughts and words so together thatthere shall be a charm in the presentation of them, there needs alively harmony among certain faculties, a rhythm in the mind. HenceCicero said that to write prose well, one must be able to write verse. The utterance of music in song or tune, in artful melody or choralharmony, is but the consummation of a power which is ever a sweetenerin life's healthily active exhibitions, the power of sound. Nature isalive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life. On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comesin great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under abroad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and sprayclad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur ofbees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony fromunseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing, unseen, and ever rhythmical. 

The heartier and deeper the thought, the more melody will there be inits fit expression, and thence the higher range of style is onlyreached by poets, or by men who, though poetically minded, yet lack"the accomplishment of verse. " The sudden electric injection of lightinto a thought or object or sentiment--in this consists the giftpoetical, a gift which implies a sensibility so keen and select as tokindle the light, and an intellect fine and firm enough to hold andtransmit it. A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardlyrise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe willunderstand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he isutterly devoid of the faculty of style (_dénué de la faculté dustyle_). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the greatMolière. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written inprose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy andaudacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too, some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers, have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities, with those riches and that pomp which until then had been theexclusive property of the poetic idiom. "

A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to thebetter, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy inpresence of the defective or the incomplete. This endowment implies amind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements ofthought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes thewriter exacting towards himself. Hence only he attains to a genuinecorrectness; he was correct by instinct before he was so bydiscipline. In the whole as well as the parts he requires finish andproportion. Within him there is a momentum which fills out his thoughtand its worded envelope to warm convexity. Only he has the fine tactand discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses. Thebest style is organic in its details as well as its structure; itshows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy andplastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor. Goethe says thatonly poets and artists have method, because they require to see athing before them in a completed, rounded form. Writing is a fine art, and one of the finest; and he who would be a master in this art mustunite genial gifts with conscientious culture. 

Of style the highest examples, therefore, are to be found in the verseof the great poets, of the deep rhythmic souls who make a sure, agileintellect their willing Ariel; and no prose writer gets to be a masterin style but through kindred endowment. The compact, symmetricalcombination of gifts and acquirements, of genius with talent, demandedfor the putting forth of a fresh, priceless poem, this he need nothave; but his perceptions must be brightened by the lightwhose fountain is the inward enjoyment of the more perfect in form, deed, and sentiment, and his best thoughts suffused with thatfragrance whose only source is the ravishment of the beautiful. 

IV. 

DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS. [5]

 [5] Putnam's Magazine, 1868. 

"Ghosts and witches are the best machinery for a modern epic. " So saidCharles Fox, who fed his imagination on verse of this aspiring class. Fox was no literary oracle, and his opinion is here cited only asevidence that the superearthly is an acknowledged element in theepopee. The term "machinery" implies ignorance of the import of thesuper-earthly in epic poetry, an ignorance attendant on materialismand a virtual unbelief. No poet who should accept the term could writean epic, with or without the "machinery. " Such acceptance wouldbetoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a wantof faith in the invisible supervisive energies. 

A genuine epic, of the first class, is a world-poem, a poem of depthand height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation ofa race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare themethod of the divine intervention in the momentous work. The epicpoet, worthy of the lofty task, has such large sympathies, togetherwith such consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpretand incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some ofthem even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind thesenses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They arewhat, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls--

 "Light half-believers in our casual creeds. "

Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, activepresence on the earth of the god Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Hadthey not, there would have been no "Iliad, " no "Paradise Lost. "

Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, andan imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divinejudgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired visionthrough hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, helodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wroughtthem into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations ofChristendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics ofItaly, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy ofhis time, fantastic, unfashioned--all this was his material. But allthis, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame. The true material of a poem is the poet's own nature and thoughts, hissentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations, his veriest self, the whole of him, especially the best of him. 

Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, whichwere so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day, --andliterature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious, --no morebroad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as allpoets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed, moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes forits play. The present teeming world to be transfigured into the worldto come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to amanly, powerful nature, passionate, creative, descriptive, to astirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the Italianscene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads ofItalian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict;and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy, while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled totune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, passionate, and baffled, the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directlywoven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times, contemporaneous history tyrannized over him. 

Dante's high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noblecharacter and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of hispersonal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of thetheology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force asmolder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurousinitiator, the august father of modern poetry--all this has combinedto keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through sixcenturies. But even all this would not have made him one of the threeor four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath ofuniversal European translation. What gave his rare qualities theirmost advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiarsuperiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was thathe is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven--of the world tocome such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been picturedmore or less ever since--the word-painter of that visionary, awfulhereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell. 

Those imaginations as to future being--to the Middle Ages so vivid asto become soul-realities--Dante, with his transcendent pictorialmastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine ofpopular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperialsuperscription. Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future, the reverse of poetical. Hunger will give you tormenting imaginationsof breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with picturesof gains that are to be. But imaginations of the life beyond thegrave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality. The having themwith any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritualprepossessions: men must be self-possessed with their higher self, with their spirit. The very attempt to figure your disembodied stateis an attempt poetical. To succeed with any distinctness denotes somepower of creative projection: without wings, this domain cannot beentered. In Dante's time these attempts were common. Through hispreëminent qualifications, crowned with the poetic faculty, thefaculty of sympathy with ideal excellence, his attempt was a great, aunique success. 

To accompany Dante through his vast triple trans-terrestrial world, would seem to demand in the reader a sustained effort of imagination. But Dante is so graphic, and, we might add, corporeal in his pictures, puts such a pulse into his figures, that the artistic illusionwherewith we set out is exchanged for, or rather overborne by, anillusion of the reality of what is represented. Yet from the openingof the first canto he is ever in the super-earthly world, and everyline of the fourteen thousand has the benefit of a super-earthly, thatis, a poetic atmosphere, which lightens it, transfigures it, floatsit. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that everyscene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene ispresented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness, which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the readerfinds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle ismortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the spiritualimagination. 

Dante had it in him, --this hell, purgatory, and heaven--so full andwarm and large was his nature. Within his own breast he had felt, withthe keen intensity of the poetic temperament, the loves and hates, thegriefs and delights of life. Through his wealth of heart he had afellow-feeling for all the joys and sorrows of his brother-men, and, added to this, an artist's will and want to reproduce them, and _to_reproduce them a clear, outwelling, intellectual vivacity. He needscarcely have told us that his poem, though treating of spirits, relates to the passions and doings of men in the flesh. He chose atheme that at once seized the attention of his readers, and gave tohimself a boundless scope. His field was all past history, around thealtitudes of which are clustered biographical traits and sketches offamous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and, along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, withits tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, itswraths and triumphs. 

Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but, besides that many of them were ready to his hand, this kind ofinventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is thenecessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility andabundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; andyet the "Vicar of Wakefield" (not to go so high as "Tristram Shandy"and "Don Quixote") is worth all their hundred volumes of tales puttogether. What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement, and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception, does the framework of incident support and display? That is theæsthetic question. The novels of every day bristle with this materialinventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event andsensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build. The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditionsof the "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso, " is not admirable fortheir mere exuberance and diversity, --for that might have come from acomparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds thenwere, with the passionate mediaeval beliefs, --but for the heart thereis in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, andthence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount giftpoetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, asregards the epic quality of Dante's poem, an important consequence, isthat there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the readerare not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting andreacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention. Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, eachone awakening a new interest. Hereby the mind is distracted, theattention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figureor group. We pass through a gallery of pictures and portraits, classed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, andseparated by the projection of as many different frames. We are on aweird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, howeverattractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet. We go from person toperson, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey, although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression haseffaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its everylimb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturallyreared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a greatunity, the "Divina Commedia, " as an organic, artistic whole, isinferior to the "Iliad" and "Paradise Lost, " and to the Grecian andShakespearean tragedies. 

The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and, with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to hispage--fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination. Amongthe many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, mostactive is that of form. Goethe says of him, "The great intellectualand moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shallbe furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view thatjust in his life-time--Giotto being his contemporary--was the re-birthof plastic art in all its natural strength. By this sensuous, form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante, too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seizedobjects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline. Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as itwere, after nature. " In recognition of the same characteristic, Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets, ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of anyother. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page ofthe 'Divina Commedia. '"

Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is hisstrongest side: he is preëminently a poet of form. In his mind and inhis work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poetof thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, butmore a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still hisintellect is more specific than generic. His subject--chosen by theconcurrence of his æsthetic, moral, and intellectual needs--admitsof, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnecteddelineations. The personages of his poem are independent one of theother, and are thence the more easily drawn. Nor does Dante abound intransferable passages, sentences of universal application, from beingsaturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it withdiffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance, more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom andprofound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider:he rivets us through distant grand association, by great suggestion. Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says, --

 "As when the sun new risen Looks through the horizontal misty air, Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, "

Setting aside the epithets "horizontal" and "disastrous, " which arepoetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen througha mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids usto see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate, --notinvolving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merelybetween physical, not between subtle, relations, --that Dante chieflydeals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet, but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination. The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when theintellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance withaspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to theutmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought orimage which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to thereader a new delight. Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, thereis a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes thepassage--

 "and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs. "

This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire;this gives its greatness to the passage. 

Dante, by the distinctness of his outline, addresses himself more tothe reader's senses and perception; Milton rouses his higherimaginative capacity. In the whole "Inferno, " is there a sentence soaglow as this line and a half of "Paradise Lost"?

 "And the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire. "

Or is there in Dante any sound so loud and terrible as that shout ofMilton's demon-host--

 "That tore Hell's concave, and beyond Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night"?

Here the unity of his theme stands Milton in stead for grandeur andbreadth. 

Dante is copious in similes. Such copiousness by no means provespoetic genius; and a superior poet may have less command of similesthan one inferior to him. Wordsworth has much less of this commandthan Moore. But when a poet does use similes, he will be likely oftento put of his best into them, for they are captivating instruments andfacilities for poetic expansion. When a poet is in warm sympathy withthe divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in hissimilitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition. In citing some of the most prominent in the "Divina Commedia, " we atonce give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latesttranslators, using the version of Dr. Parsons for extracts from the"Inferno, " that of Mr. Dayman for those from the "Purgatorio, " andthat of Mr. Longfellow for those from the "Paradiso. "

 "As well-filled sails, which in the tempest swell, Drop, with folds flapping, if the mast be rent; So to the earth that cruel monster fell, And straightway down to Hell's Fourth Pit he went. " _Inferno_: Canto VII. 

 "Swept now amain those turbid waters o'er A tumult of a dread portentous kind, Which rocked with sudden spasms each trembling shore, Like the mad rushing of a rapid wind; As when, made furious by opposing heats, Wild through the wood the unbridled tempest scours, Dusty and proud, the cringing forest beats, And scatters far the broken limbs and flowers; Then fly the herds, --the swains to shelter scud. Freeing mine eyes, 'Thy sight, ' he said, 'direct O'er the long-standing scum of yonder flood, Where, most condense, its acrid streams collect. '" _Inferno_: Canto IX. 

 "When, lo! there met us, close beside our track, A troop of spirits. Each amid the band Eyed us, as men at eve a passer-by 'Neath a new moon; as closely us they scanned, As an old tailor doth a needle's eye. " _Inferno_: Canto XV. 

 "And just as frogs that stand, with noses out On a pool's margin, but beneath it hide Their feet and all their bodies but the snout, So stood the sinners there on every side. " _Inferno_: Canto XXII. 

 "A cooper's vessel, that by chance hath been Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft, Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin I noticed lengthwise through his carcass cleft. " _Inferno_: Canto XXVIII. 

 "We tarried yet the ocean's brink upon, Like unto people musing of their way, Whose body lingers when the heart hath gone; And lo! as near the dawning of the day, Down in the west, upon the watery floor, The vapor-fogs do Mars in red array, Even such appeared to me a light that o'er The sea so quickly came, no wing could match Its moving. Be that vision mine once more. " _Purgatorio_: Canto II. 

 "And thou, remembering well, with eye that sees The light, wilt know thee like the sickly one That on her bed of down can find no ease, But turns and turns again her ache to shun, " _Purgatorio_: Canto VI. 

 "'T was now the hour the longing heart that bends In voyagers, and meltingly doth sway, Who bade farewell at morn to gentle friends; And wounds the pilgrim newly bound his way With poignant love, to hear some distant bell That seems to mourn the dying of the day; When I began to slight the sounds that fell Upon my ear, one risen soul to view, Whose beckoning hand our audience would compel. " _Purgatorio_: Canto VIII. 

 "There I the shades see hurrying up to kiss Each with his mate from every part, nor stay, Contenting them with momentary bliss. So one with other, all their swart array Along, do ants encounter snout with snout, So haply probe their fortune and their way. " _Purgatorio_: Canto XXVI. 

 "Between two viands, equally removed And tempting, a free man would die of hunger Ere either he could bring unto his teeth. So would a lamb between the ravenings Of two fierce wolves stand fearing both alike; And so would stand a dog between two does. Hence, if I held my peace, myself I blame not, Impelled in equal measure by my doubts, Since it must be so, nor do I commend. " _Paradiso_: Canto IV. 

 "And as a lute and harp, accordant strung With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make To him by whom the notes are not distinguished, So from the lights that there to me appeared Upgathered through the cross a melody, Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn. " _Paradiso_: Canto XIV. 

 "As through the pure and tranquil evening air There shoots from time to time a sudden fire, Moving the eyes that steadfast were before, And seems to be a star that changeth place, Except that in the part where it is kindled Nothing is missed, and this endureth little; So from the horn that to the right extends Unto that cross's foot there ran a star Out of the constellation shining there. " _Paradiso_: Canto XV. 

 "Even as remaineth splendid and serene The hemisphere of air, when Boreas Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest, Because is purified and resolved the rack That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs With all the beauties of its pageantry; Thus did I likewise, after that my lady Had me provided with a clear response, And like a star in Heaven the truth was seen. " _Paradiso_: Canto XXVIII. 

The first question to ask in regard to a simile found in verse is, Isit poetical? Is there, as effect of its introduction, any heighteningof the reader's mood, any cleansing of his vision, any clarificationof the medium through which he is looking? Is there a sudden play oflight that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates theobject before him? Few of those just quoted, put to such test, couldbe called more than conventionally poetical--if this be not asolecism. To illustrate one sensuous object by another does notanimate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions. Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there isthrough them no steeping of intellectual perception in emotion. Theymay help to make the object ocularly more apparent, but they do notmake the feeling a party to the movement. When this is done, --as inthe examples from Canto XV. Of the "Inferno, " and Canto VIII. Of the"Purgatorio, "--what an instantaneous vivification of the picture!

But in the best of them the poetic gleam is not so unlooked-for brightas in the best of Shakespeare's. As one instance out of many: towardsthe end of the great soliloquy of Henry V. , after enumerating theemblems and accompaniments of royalty, the king continues, --

 "No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave; Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind, Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of hell; But, like a lackey, from the rise to set, Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn, Doth rise _and help Hyperion to his horse_"

What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, sofresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beautyand healthfulness! Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination, that, in a twinkle, transmutes into the squire of Hyperion a stolidrustic, making him suddenly radiant with the glory of morning. It isby this union of unexpectedness with fitness, of solidity withbrilliancy, of remoteness with instantaneous presence, in his figures, denoting overflow of resources, a divine plenitude, so that we feelafter Shakespeare has said his best things, that he could go on sayingmore and better, --it is especially by this lustrous, ever-teemingfullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare throws afarther and whiter and a broader light than Dante. Nor does Dante'spage glisten, as Shakespeare's so often does, with metaphor, orcompressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritualsphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with theweb of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on thesurface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see acircuit of shining ripple, caused by schools of fish that have come upfrom the wealth in the depths below to help the sun to glisten, --asign of life, power, and abundance. 

Like his great compeer, Milton, Dante fails of universality from wantof humor. Neither had any fun in him. This was the only fault(liberally to interpret Can's conduct) that Dante's host, Can Grandeof Verona, had to find with him. The subjects of both poets(unconsciously chosen perhaps from this very defect of humor) werepredominantly religious, and their theology, which was that of theirtimes, was crude and cruel. The deep, sympathetic earnestness, whichis the basis of the best humor, they had, but, to use an illustrationof Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down, --a great feat, only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highestmanifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throwssuch rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom, and, with the fool in "Lear, " forces you, like a child, to smilethrough warmest tears of sympathy. Humor imparts breadth and buoyancyto tolerance, enabling it to dandle lovingly the faults andfollies of men; through humor the spiritual is calm and clear enoughto sport with and toss the sensual; it is a compassionate, tearfuldelight; in its finest mood, an angelic laughter. 

Of pathos Dante has given examples unsurpassed in literature. By thestory of Ugolino the chords of the heart are so thrilled that pity andawe possess us wholly; and by that of Francesca they are touched totenderest sympathy. But Ugolino is to Lear what a singlefire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes isto a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape with ahundred flashes. 

All the personages of Dante's poem (unless we regard himself as one)are spirits. Shakespeare, throughout his many works, gives only a fewglimpses into the world beyond the grave; but how grandly by these fewis the imagination expanded. Clarence's dream, "lengthened afterlife, " in which he passes "the melancholy flood, " is almostsuper-Dantesque, concentrating in a few ejaculative lines a fearfulforetaste of trans-earthly torment for a bad life on earth. And thegreat ghost in "Hamlet, " when you read of him, how shadowy real!Dante's representation of disembodied humanity is too pagan, toopalpable, not ghostly enough, not spiritualized with hope and awe. 

Profound, awakening, far-stretching, much enfolding, thought-breedingthoughts, that can only grow in the soil of pure, large sensibilities, and by them are cast up in the heave and glow of inward motion, to bewrought by intellect and shaped in the light of the beautiful, --ofthese, which are the test of poetic greatness, Dante, if we mayventure to say so, has not more or brighter examples than Milton, andnot so many as Goethe; while of such passages, compactly embodying asthey do the finer insights of a poetic mind, there are more in asingle one of the greater tragedies of Shakespeare, than in all thethree books of the "Divina Commedia. "

Juxtaposition beside Shakespeare, even if it bring out thesuperiorities of the English bard, is the highest honor paid to anyother great poet. Glory enough is it if admiration can lift Dante sohigh as to take him into the same look that beholds Shakespeare; whatthough the summit of the mighty Englishman shine alone in the sky, andthe taller giant carry up towards heaven a larger bulk and more varieddomains. The traveler, even if he come directly from wonderingat Mont Blanc in its sublime presence, will yet stand with earnestdelight before the majesty of the Yungfrau and the Eigher. 

But it is time to speak of Dante in English. 

"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible, that you mightdiscover the formal principle of its color and odor, as to seek totransfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. "Thus writes a great poet, Shelley, in his beautiful "Defense ofPoetry. " But have we not in modern tongues the creations of Homer, andof Plato, who Shelley, on the same page, says is essentially a poet?And can we estimate the loss the modern mind would suffer bydeprivation of them in translated form? Pope's Homer--still Homerthough so Popish--has been a not insignificant chapter in the cultureof thousands, who without it would have known no more of Hector andAchilles and the golden glowing cloud of passion and action throughwhich they are seen superbly shining, than what a few of them wouldincidently have learnt from Lempriere. Lord Derby's Iliad has gonethrough many editions already. And Job and the Psalms: what should wehave done without them in English? Translations are thetelegraphic conductors that bring us great messages from those inother lands and times, whose souls were so rich and deep that fromtheir words their fellow-men, in all parts of the globe, draw truthand wisdom forever. The flash on which the message was first launchedhas lost some of its vividness by the way; but the purport of themessage we have distinctly, and the joy or grief wherewith it isfreighted, and even much of its beauty. Shall we not eat oranges, because on being translated from Cuba to our palates they have lostsomewhat of their flavor? In reading a translated poem we wish to haveas much of the essence of the original, that is, as much of thepoetry, as possible. A poem it is we sit down to read, not a relationof facts, or an historical or critical or philosophical or theologicalexposition, --a poem, only in another dress. Thence a work in verse, that has poetic quality enough to be worth translating, must be madeto lose by the process as little as may be of its worth; and its worthevery poem owes entirely to its poetic quality and the degree of that. A prose translation of a poem is an æsthetic impertinence, Shakespeare was at first opened to the people of the Continentin prose, because there was not then culture enough to reproduce himin verse. And in Shakespeare there is so much practical sense, so muchtelling comment on life, so much wit, such animal spirits, suchtouching stories so well told, that the great gain of having him evenin prose concealed the loss sustained by the absence of rhythmicsound, and by the discoloration (impallidation, we should say, werethe word already there) of hundreds of liveliest tinted flowers, thedeflowering of many delicate stems. Forty years ago, Mr. Hay wardtranslated the "Faust" of Goethe into prose; but let any one comparethe Hymn of the Archangels and other of the more highly-wroughtpassages, as rendered by him, with any of the better translations inverse, --with that of Mr. Brooks for example, --to perceive at once theinsufficiency, the flatness and meagreness of even so verballyfaithful a prose version. The effect on "Faust, " or on any highpassionate poem, of attempting to put it into prose, is akin to whatwould be the effect on an exquisite _bas-relief_ of reducing itsprojection one half by a persevering application of pumice. In allgenuine verse (that is, in all poetic verse) the substance is soinwrought into the form and sound, that if in translating you entirelydisregard these, rejecting both rhyme and measure, you subject theverse to a second depletion right upon that which it has to suffer bythe transplanting of it into another soil. 

The translator of a poem has a much higher and subtler duty than justto take the words and through them attempt passively to render thepage into his own language. He must brace himself into an activestate, a creative mood, the most creative he can command, thentransport himself into the mind and mental attitude of the poet hewould translate, feeling and seeing as the poet saw and felt. To getinto the mood out of which the words sprang, he should go behind thewords, embracing them from within, not merely seizing them fromwithout. Having imbued himself with the thought and sentiment of theoriginal, let him, if he can, utter them in a still higher key. Suchsurpassing excellence would be the truest fidelity to the original, and any cordial poet would especially rejoice in such elevation of hisverse; for the aspiring writer will often fall short of his ideal, andto see it more nearly approached by a translator who has been kindledby himself, to find some delicate new flower revealed in a nook whichhe had opened, could not but give him a delight akin to thatof his own first inspirations. 

A poem, a genuine poem, assumes its form by an inward necessity. "Paradise Lost, " conceived in Milton's brain, could not utter itselfin any other mode than the unrhymed harmonies that have given to ourlanguage a new music. It could not have been written in the Spenserianstanza. What would the "Fairy Queen" be in blank verse? For his themeand mood Dante felt the need of the delicate bond of rhyme, whichenlivens musical cadence with sweet reiteration. Rhyme was then a newelement in verse, a modern æsthetic creation; and it is a help and anadded beauty, if it be not obtrusive and too self-conscious, and if itbe not a target at which the line aims; for then it becomes a clog tofreedom of movement, and the pivot of factitious pauses, that areoffensive both to sense and to ear. Like buds that lie half-hidden inleaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the coverof words, falling on the ear as though they were the irrepressiblestrokes of a melodious pulse at the heart of the verse. 

The _terza rima_--already in use--Dante adopted as suitable tocontinuous narrative. With his feeling and æsthetic wantrhymed verse harmonized, the triple repetition offering no obstacle, Italian being copious in endings of like sound. His measure is iambic, free iambic, and every line consists, not of ten syllables, but ofeleven, his native tongue having none other than feminine rhymes. Andthis weakness is so inherent in Italian speech, that every line evenof the blank verse in all the twenty-two tragedies of Alfieri endsfemininely, that is, with an unaccented eleventh syllable. In allItalian rhyme there is thus always a double rhyme, the final syllable, moreover, invariably ending with a vowel. This, besides being too muchrhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect, the eleventh syllable being a superfluous syllable. 

In these two prominent features English verse is different fromItalian: it has feminine rhymes, but the larger part of its rhymes aremasculine; and it has fewer than Italian. This second characteristic, the comparative fewness of rhymes, is likewise one of its sources ofstrength: it denotes musical richness and not poverty, as at firstaspect it seems to do, the paucity of like-sounding syllables implyingvariety in its sounds. It has all the vocalic syllables andendings it needs for softness, and incloses them mostly in consonantsfor condensation, vigor, and emphasis. 

Primarily the translator has to consider the resources andindividualities of his own tongue. In the case of Dante the rhythmicalbasis is the same in both languages; for the iambic measure is ourchief poetic vehicle, wrought to perfection by Shakespeare and Milton. There only remains, then, rhyme and the division into stanzas. Can the_terza rima_, as used by Dante, be called a stanza? The lines are notseparated into trios, but run into one another, clinging very properlyto the rhymes, which, interlinking all the stanzas by carrying theecho still onward, bind each canto into one whole, just as ourSpenserian form does each stanza into a whole of nine lines. Whetherstanzas, strictly speaking, or not, shall we say our mind franklyabout the _terza rima_? To us it seems not deserving of admiration_for its own sake_; and we surmise that had it not been consecrated byDante, neither Byron nor Shelley would have used it for originalpoems. We are not aware that Dante's example has been followed by anypoet of note in Italy. _Terza rima_ keeps the attention suspended toolong, keeps it ever on the stretch for something that is tocome, and never does come, until at the end of the canto, namely, thelast rhyme. The rhymes cannot be held down, but are ever escaping andrunning ahead. It looks somewhat like an artificial contrivance of thefirst rhymers of an uncultivated age. But Dante used it for his greatsong; and there it stands forever, holding in its folds the "DivinaCommedia. "

Now, in rendering into English the poem of Dante, is it essential, --inorder to fulfill the conditions of successful poetic translation, --topreserve the triple rhyme? Not having in English a correspondingnumber of rhymes, will not the translator have to resort totranspositions, substitutions, forcings, indirections, in order tocompass the meaning and the poetry? Place the passages already citedfrom Mr. Dayman beside the original, and the reader will be surprisedto see how direct and literal, how faithful at once to the Italianthought and to English idiom in expressing it, Mr. Dayman is. Hisharness of triplets seems hardly to constrain his movement, soskillfully does he wear it. If we confront him with the spiritedversion in quatrains of Dr. Parsons, in the passages citedfrom the "Inferno, " or with those from the "Paradiso, " in Mr. Longfellow's less free unrhymed version, the resources and flexibilityof Mr. Dayman in handling the difficult measure will be againmanifest. To enable our readers to compare the translations with theoriginal and with one another, we will give the Italian, and then thethree versions, of the latter part of the Francesca story, from CantoV. Of the "Inferno:"--

 "Poi mi rivolsi a loro, e parlai io, E cominciai: Francesca, i tuoi martiri A lagrimar mi fanno tristo, e pio. Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri, A che, e come concedette Amore Che conosceste i dubbiosi desiri? Ed ella a me: nessun maggior dolore, Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria, e ciò sa 'l tuo dottore. Ma se a conoscer la prima radice Del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, Farò come colui che piange, e dice. Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto Di Lancilotto, come Amor lo strinse. Soli eravamo, e senza alcun sospetto. Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse Quella lettura, e scolorocci 'l viso: Ma solo un punto fu quel, che ci vinse. Qando leggemmo il disiato riso Esser baciato da cotanto amante, Questi, che mai da me non sia diviso, La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse: Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante. Mentre che l'uno spirito queste disse, L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade Io venni meno come s'io morisse, E caddi, come corpo morto cade. "

Mr. Dayman:--

 "Then toward them turned again: 'Thy racking woe, ' I said, 'Francesca, wrings from out mine eyes The pious drops that sadden as they flow. But tell me, in your hour of honeyed sighs, By whom and how love pitying broke the spell, And in your doubtful longings made too wise. ' And she to me: 'No keener pang hath hell, Than to recall, amid some deep distress, Our happier time: thy teacher knows it well. Yet if desire so strong thy soul possess To trace the root from whence our love was bred, His part be mine, who tells and weeps no less. 'T was on a day when we for pastime read Of Lancillot, how love snared him to ruin: We were alone, nor knew suspicious dread. Oft on that reading paused our eyes, renewing Their glance; and from our cheeks the color started; But one sole moment wrought for our undoing: When that we read of lover so kind-hearted Kissing the smile so coveted before, He that from me shall never more be parted Kissed me with lip to lip, trembling all o'er. The broker of our vows, it was the lay, And he who wrote--that day we read no more. ' The other spirit, while the first did say These words, so moanèd, that with soft remorse As death had stricken me, I swooned away, And down I fell, heavily as falls a corse. "

Mr. Longfellow:--

 "Then unto them I turned me, and I spake, And I began: 'Thine agonies, Francesca, Sad and compassionate to weeping make me. But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs, By what and in what manner Love conceded That you should know your dubious desires?' And she to me: 'There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery, and that thy Teacher knows. But if to recognize the earliest root Of love in us thou hast so great desire, I will do even as he who weeps and speaks. One day we reading were for our delight Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthrall. Alone we were, and without any fear. Full many a time our eyes together drew That reading, and drove the color from our faces; But one point was it that o'ercame us. Whenas we read of the much-longed-for smile Being by such a noble lover kissed, This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided, Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating. Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it. That day no farther did we read therein. ' And all the while one spirit uttered this, The other one did weep so, that, for pity, I swooned away as if I had been dying, And fell even as a dead body falls. "

Dr. Parsons:--

 "Then, turning round to them, I thus began: 'Francesca! tears must overflow mine eyes: My pitying soul thy martyr-throes unman; But tell me, --in the time of happy sighs, Your vague desires how gave Love utterance first?" And she to me: "The mightiest of all woes Is, in the midst of misery, to be cursed With bliss remembered, --this thy teacher knows. Yet, wouldst thou learn our passion's root and head, As one may speak whose eyes with tears are dim, So will I speak. Together once we read The tale of Lancelot, --how Love bound him. Alone we were without suspecting aught: Oft in perusal paled our cheeks their hue, And oft our eyes each other's glances caught; But one sole passage 't was which both o'erthrew. At reading of the longed-for smile, --to be By such a lover's kissing so much blest, This dearest--never shalt thou part from me! His lips to mine, to mine, all trembling, pressed. The writer was our Galeot with his book:-- That day we read no further on. " She stopped: Meanwhile he moaned so that compassion took My sense away, and like a corse I dropped. 

Observe that Dr. Parsons has put Dante's twenty-eight lines of elevensyllables into twenty-four lines of ten syllables; and this withoutlosing a drop of the precious stream he undertakes to pour. But whydoes he make Francesca address her companion personally, instead ofsaying, "who shall never part from me?" And why does Mr. Dayman say, "pious drops, " instead of piteous? Mr. Dayman and Mr. Longfellow fillup the twenty-eight lines. In neither of the three is thereany strain or wresting of the sense. But all three, and before themLord Byron and Carey, mistranslate this passage, --

 "Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse Quella lettura. "

All these translators interpret it to mean, that while they read, their eyes often met; whereas Dante says, they read that passage overmore than once; or, literally rendered, several times that reading orpassage drew to it their eyes. To restore the meaning of the originaladds to the refinement of the scene. 

Why does Mr. Longfellow use such long words as _compassionate_ insteadof _pitiful_ or _piteous_, _recognize_ for _know_, _palpitating_ for_trembling_, _conceded that you should know_ for _gave you to know_?By the resolution to translate line for line, Mr. Longfellow ties hispoetic hands. The first effect of this self-binding is, to oblige himto use often long Latin-English instead of short Saxon-English words, that is, words that in most cases lend themselves less readily topoetic expression. Mr. Dayman, not translating line for line, is freefrom this prosaic incumbrance; but as he makes it a rule to himselfthat every English canto shall contain the same number of lines as itsoriginal, he is obliged, much more often than Mr. Longfellow, to throw in epithets or words not in the Italian. And Dr. Parsons, who, happily freeing himself from either verbal or numerical bond, inseveral instances compresses a canto into two or three lines less thanthe Italian, and the XXXI. Into nine lines less, might with advantagehave curtailed each canto ten or twelve lines. 

Do what we will, poetic translation is brought about more from withoutthan from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, alack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in goodoriginal work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in sofar as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, thetranslator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with fullswing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr. Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on thewords; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetrywith a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give abillowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choicepassages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity, this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness inthe endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on somepages, have--contrary to all good usage--the superfluous eleventhsyllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennysonin epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King. " Nor dogood blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in hisIliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth bookof the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times indramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as aweakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more closeto the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect isstill farther to weaken his translation. These loose poeticendings--and on most pages one third of the lines have elevensyllables and on some pages more than a third--do a part in causingMr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, thechiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as wouldsound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings arerelaxed. 

Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volumewhere opposite each English page is the corresponding page ofthe original, as in Mr. Dayman's, one cannot fail to be struck withthe comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of thecomparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as thestrongest exemplification, the ever-recurring _and_, and theoften-repeated _is_, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter, _e_. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In linesof thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants tofourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators haveabout twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one. From thiscomparative rejection of consonants, Italian cannot, as English can, bind into one syllable words of seven or eight letters, like _friends_and _straight_, nor even words of six letters, like _chimed_, _shoots_, _thwart_, _spring_; nor does Italian abound as English doesin monosyllables, and the few it has are mostly of but two or threeletters. In combination its syllables sometimes get to four letters, as in _fronte_ and _braccia_. As a consequence hereof, Dante's lines, although always of eleven syllables, average about twenty-nineletters, while those of the three translators about thirty-three. Hence, the poem in their versions carries more weight than theoriginal; its soul is more cumbered with body. 

In order to the faithful reproduction of Dante, to the giving the besttranscript, possible in English, of his thought and feeling, shouldnot regard be had to the essential difference between the syllabicconstitutions of the two languages, what may be called the physicalbasis of the two mediums of utterance? Here is the Francesca story, translated in the spirit of this suggestion:--

 I turned to them, and then I spake: "Francesca! tears o'erfill mine eyes, Such pity thy keen pangs awake. But say: in th' hour of sweetest sighs, By what and how found Love relief And broke thy doubtful longing's spell?" And she: "There is no greater grief Than joy in sorrow to retell. But if so urgently one seeks To know our Love's first root, I will Do as he does who weeps and speaks. One day of Lancelot we still Read o'er, how love held him enchained. Without mistrust we were alone. Our cheeks oft were of color drained: One passage vanquished us, but one. When we read of lips longed for pressed By such a lover with a kiss, This one whom naught from me shall wrest, All trembling kissed my mouth. To this That book and writer brought us. We No farther read that day. " While she Thus spake, the other spirit wept So bitterly, with pity I Fell motionless, my senses swept By swoon, as one about to die. 

In the very first line two Italian trisyllables, _rivolsi_ and_parlai_, are given in English with literal fidelity by twomonosyllables, _turned_ and _spake_. In the fourth observe how, in aword-for-word rendering, the eleven Italian syllables become, withoutany forcing, eight English:

 "Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri:" "But tell me: in th' hour of sweet sighs. "

For the sake of a more musical cadence, this line is slightlymodified. Again, in the line, --

 "Than joy in sorrow to retell, "

_joy_ represents, and represents faithfully, three words containingsix syllables, _del tempo felice_: _retell_ stands for _ricordarsi_, and _in sorrow_ for _nella miseria_, or, three syllables for six; sothat, by means of eight syllables, is given a full and completetranslation of what in Italian takes up seventeen. English the mostsimple, direct, idiomatic, is needed in order that a translation ofDante be faithful to his simplicity and naturalness; and this is thefirst fidelity his translator should feel himself bound to. Owing tothe fundamental difference between the syllabic structures ofthe two languages, we are enabled to put into English lines of eightsyllables the whole meaning of Dante's lines of eleven. In the aboveexperiment even more has been done. The twenty-eight lines of Danteare given in twenty-six lines of eight syllables each, and thiswithout any sacrifice of the thought or feeling; for the "this thyteacher knows, " which is omitted, besides that the commentators cannotagree on its meaning, is parenthetical in sense, and with reverence beit said, in so far a defect in such a relation. As to the form ofDante, what is essential in that has been preserved, namely, theiambic measure and the rhyme. 

Let us try if this curtailment of syllables will be successful whenapplied to the terrible words, written in blackest color, over thegate of Hell, at the beginning of the third canto of the "Inferno":--

 Through me the path to place of wail: Through me the path to endless sigh: Through me the path to souls in bale. 'Twas Justice moved my Maker high: Wisdom supreme, and Might divine, And primal Love established me. Created birth was none ere mine, And I endure eternally: Ye who pass in, all hope resign. 

Has anything been lost in the transit from Italian words to English?English speech being organically more concentrated than Italian, doesnot the reduction of eleven syllables to eight especially subservewhat ought to be the twofold aim of all poetic translation, namely, along with fidelity to the thought and spirit of the original, fidelity to the idiom, and cast and play of the translator's owntongue?

Here is another short passage in a different key, --the opening of thelast canto of the "Paradiso":--

 Maid-mother, daughter of thy Son, Meek, yet above all things create, Fair aim of the Eternal one, 'Tis thou who so our human state Ennobledst, that its Maker deigned Himself his creature's son to be. This flower, in th' endless peace, was gained Through kindling of God's love in thee. 

In this passage nine Italian lines of eleven syllables are convertedinto eight lines of eight syllables each. We submit it to the candidreader of Italian to say, whether aught of the original has beensacrificed to brevity. 

The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity towhich the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate forthe partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabicverse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante doesnot feel the want. 

One more short passage of four lines, --the famous figure of the larkin the twentieth Canto of the "Paradiso":--

 Like lark that through the air careers, First singing, then, silent his heart, Feeds on the sweetness in his ears, Such joy to th' image did impart Th' eternal will. 

This paper has exceeded the length we designed to give it; but, nevertheless, we beg the reader's indulgence for a few moments longer, while we conclude with an octosyllabic version of the last thirtylines of the celebrated Ugolino story. It is unrhymed; for thatterrible tale can dispense, in English, with soft echoes at the end oflines. 

 When locked I heard the nether door Of the dread tower, I without speech Into my children's faces looked: Nor wept, so inly turned to stone. They wept: and my dear Anselm said, "Thou look'st so, father, what hast thou?" Still I nor wept nor answer made That whole day through, nor the next night, Till a new sun rose on the world. As in our doleful prison came A little glimmer, and I saw On faces four my own pale stare, Both of my hands for grief I bit; And they, thinking it was from wish To eat, rose suddenly and said: "Father, less shall we feel of pain If them wilt eat of us: from thee Came this poor flesh: take it again. " I calmed me then, not to grieve them. The next two days we spake no word. Oh! obdurate earth, why didst not ope? When we had come to the fourth day Gaddo threw him stretched at my feet, Saying, "Father, why dost not help me?" There died he; and, as thou seest me, I saw the three fall one by one The fifth and sixth day; then I groped, Now blind, o'er each; and two whole days I called them after they were dead: Then hunger did what grief could not. 

V. 

SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC. 

A literary critic, a genuine one, should carry in his brain an arsenalof opposites. He should combine common sense with tact, integrity withindulgence, breadth with keenness, vigor with delicacy, largeness withsubtlety, knowledge with geniality, inflexibility with sinuousness, severity with suavity; and, that all these counter qualities beeffective, he will need constant culture and vigilance, besides theunion of reason with warmth, of enthusiasm with self-control, of witwith philosophy, --but hold: at this rate, in order to fit out thecritic, human nature will have to set apart its highest and best. Dr. Johnson declared, the poet ought to know everything and to have seeneverything, and the ancients required the like of an orator. Truly, the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued asgenerously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped bythe light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of theGreeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and thecritic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect hisbirthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape andsharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to besusceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of thecritic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, tomeasure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individualand its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbingaggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue linesthat run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he whois to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should beable swiftly to follow these lines. 

Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip averitable sure critic, we have yet to add two cardinal qualifications, which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberalallotment. The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M. Sainte-Beuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but amellow, radiant geniality. The other, which is of still deeperaccount, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue--for so it deservesto be called--born directly of the nobler sensibilities, thosein whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and theprofound, the beautiful and the true. He who is not well endowed withthese higher senses is not a bad critic; he is no critic at all. Notonly can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he canas little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implyingfailures to reach a certain fullness, implying a falling short of thecomplete, to say where and what are deficiencies, involves the havingin the mind an idea of the full and complete. The man so meagrelyfurnished as to hold no such idea is but a carper, not a critic. Toknow the bad denotes knowledge of the good; in criticism as in morals, a righteous indignation can only flash from a shock to pure feelings. 

In a notice of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on thecampaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letterssmiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of thesefamous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed witha work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not acampaign of a great captain equally a work of genius? Napoleon is herethe high sovereign critic, the Goethe in this department, as theFeuquières, the Jominis, the St. Cyrs are the La Harpes or theFontanes, the Lessings or the Schlegels, all good and expert critics;but he is the first of all, nor, if you reflect on it, could it havebeen otherwise. And who then would say better things of Homer thanMilton?"--Goethe supreme in literary criticism, Milton on Homer; thistouches the root of the matter; sympathy with the writer and his workthe critic must have, --sympathy as one of the sources of goodjudgment, and even of knowledge. You cannot know, and therefore notjudge of a man or book or thing, unless you have some fellow-feelingwith him or it; and to judge well you must have much fellow-feeling. The critic must, moreover, be a thinker; reason is the critic's sun. Scott and Byron could say just and fresh things about poets andpoetry; but neither could command the whole field, nor dig deep intothe soil. Witness Byron's deliberate exaltation of Pope. WhereasWordsworth and Coleridge were among the soundest of critics, because, besides being poets, they were both profound thinkers. 

For the perfecting of the literary critic the especialsympathy needed is that with excellence; for high literature is theoutcome of the best there is in humanity, the finished expression ofhealthiest aspirations, of choicest thoughts, the ripened fruit ofnoble, of refined growths, the perfected fruit, with all the perfumeand beauty of the flower upon it. Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve, throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in additionto that primary proof of having himself written good poems. Besidesthe love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct drawshim to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love isthe more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined. Through variety of knowledge, with intellectual keenness, he enjoysexcellence in the diversified forms that literature assumes. His pagesabound in illustrations of his versatility, which is nowhere morestrikingly exhibited than in the contrast between two successivepapers (both equally admirable) in the very first volume of the"Causeries du Lundi, " the one on Madame Récamier, the other onNapoleon. Read especially the series of paragraphs beginning, "Somenatures are born pure, and have received _quand même_ the giftof innocence, " to see how gracefully, subtly, delicately, with what afeminine tenderness, he draws the portrait of this most fascinating ofwomen, this beautiful creature, for whom grace and sweetness did evenstill more than beauty, this fairy-queen of France, this refinedcoquette, who drew to her hundreds of hearts, this kindly magician, who turned all her lovers into friends. Then pass directly to the nextpaper, on the terrible Corsican, "who weakened his greatness by thegigantic--who loved to astonish--who delighted too much in what washis forte, war, --who was too much a bold adventurer. " And further on, the account of Napoleon's conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in whichaccount M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness andtruthfulness and penetration of the great German. The impression thusmade on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve's power isdeepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot andhis historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincinglyagainst those historians "who strain humanity, who make the lesson thathistory teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the placeof Providence, " which, as is said in another place (vol. V. P. 150), "is often but a deification of our own thought. "

In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve--who had then, for morethan thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the functionof critic--describes what is a fundamental feature of his method inarriving at a judgment on books and authors. "Literature, literaryproduction, is in my eyes not distinct, or at least not separable, from the rest of the man and his organization. I can enjoy a work, butit is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of theman himself; and I readily say, _as is the tree so is the fruit_. Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study. " This, ofcourse, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with themoderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know theman who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interiorbeginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best meansis, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, hispredecessors. "You are sure to recognize the superior man, in part atleast, in his parents, especially in his mother, the most direct andcertain of his parents; also in his sisters and his brothers, even in his children. In these one discovers important features which, from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminentindividual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the _fond_, is found inothers of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state. "

Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professionalconscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic. Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part thecause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact indelineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence allliving parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes ismore captivating than his "Portraits de Femmes, " a translation ofwhich we are glad to see announced. 

Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume ofthe "Nouveaux Lundis, " an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deepis his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. Forthe London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testamentwas prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes theoccasion to write a paper on "Les saints Evangiles, " especially theSermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beatitudes, he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world suchaccents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger andthirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed ofmen in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestialrecompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgivenessbut a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, whopersecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiaraddress to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anythinglike to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and theprecepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst ofhuman morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separatedfrom it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and thatpredication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have wenot a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectlyheroic, ' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set beforeall coming generations?

"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or lessinstinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflectingitself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardlyexisted. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating, bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently ofwhat belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behindsuch words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truthof the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on theMount?"

Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines ofChristianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, MarcusAurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity towardthe human race, " declares that all these examples and precepts, allthat makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is notChristianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "Whatcharacterizes, " he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the othersayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates toequity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and uprightspirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and tosimple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freedfrom rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a strangerto all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant onHim who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting onthe coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:--

 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 

 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. . . . 

 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. . . . 

 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. 

 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?. . . 

"Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists, not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece any more than in Confucius. It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any morethan in the modern Franklin. The principle of inspiration isdifferent, if indeed it be not opposite: the paths may come togetherfor a moment, but they cross one another. And it is this delicateideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncementand self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the personand life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well asthe sublimity of Christianity taken at its source. "

Of M. Sainte-Beuve's delight in what is the most excellent product ofliterature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging overthe whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page. "Poetry, " says he, "is the essence of things, and we should be carefulnot to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods ofcolor. The task of poetry is not to say everything, but to make usdream everything. " And he cites a similar judgment of Fénélon: "Thepoet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch butwhat can be beautified. " In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaksof the youthful poems of Milton: "'Il Penseroso' is the masterpiece ofmeditative and contemplative poetry; it is like a magnificent oratorioin which prayer ascends slowly toward the Eternal. I make nocomparison; let us never take august names from their sphere. All thatis beautiful in Milton stands by itself; one feels the tranquil habitof the upper regions, and continuity in power. " In a paper onthe letters of Ducis, he proves that he apprehends the proportions ofShakespeare. He asks: "Have we then got him at last? Is our stomach upto him? Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (_cettemoelle de lion_)?" And again, in an article on the men of theeighteenth century, he writes: "One may be born a sailor, but there isnothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing abattle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that, and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare. "

Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formedhimself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highestclass, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof ofhis breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasuresin the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, howcatholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takespleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency. Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Molière, his wordsflame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust inhis own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by thefeelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His nativefavorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does notoverrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls "theFrenchman par excellence, " and of whom he is proud as the literarysovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devotedto Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, helauds this spiritually-minded thinker as one of the best of critics. And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: "Voltaire issometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces evenare impudent. --There are defects difficult to perceive, that have notbeen classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them. "

In a paper on Louise Labé, a poetess of the sixteenth century, hereproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and thenadds: "These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that, at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry. " No Germanor English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature, and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not anexaltation of French prose, it is a depression of Frenchpoetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of whichpossibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts toan acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are notcapable of producing and embodying the highest poetry. 

Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always mentions with deference. On Eckerman's"Conversations with Goethe" he has a series of three papers, whereinhe deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honestpride Goethe's admiration of some of the chief French writers, and hisacknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to theFrench translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the followingnote, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a hightribute to our distinguished countrywoman: "The English translation isby Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished sounhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes thistranslation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of thesubject and for justness of appreciation it leaves our preface farbehind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was aperson of true merit and of great intellectual vigor. " A sympatheticstudent of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him;and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature ofGoethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that shewould have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe "literature, " hadshe lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friendshad nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of thisgifted, generous, noble-hearted woman. 

One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift themultifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have ahand that can shake hard, --and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteenyears M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of"Causeries du Lundi, " a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; notshort, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eightpages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thusever in the thick of the literary _mêlée_. Attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate;the æsthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferencesand friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris, if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinousmutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betraysome of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the criticalpen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, iswielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personalityis seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader will no doubt oftenperceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or asubduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so welltrace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. Hisperfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustriousdead who are embalmed in their own excellence. Besides devoting manypapers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates ofliterature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them, --asign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness. 

Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly takenby the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition ofvirtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes. In the general tonethere is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness. Of thehumane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take thefollowing as one of many instances. In the correspondence of Lamennaisthere is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and hislater sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thusfeelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure: "Let us casta look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, fromyouth to our latter years, there are none of these boundlessdistances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which, for being hidden, are none the less real and profound. "

Writing weekly for the _feuilleton_ of a Paris daily journal, M. Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness isalways animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished, he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When theoccasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of aprinciple or of a comprehensive thought. "Admiration is a much finertest of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than allthe art of satire. " By the side of this may be placed a sentence hecites from Grimm: "People who so easily admire bad things arenot in a state to enjoy good. " How true and cheering is this: "Thereis in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought withher finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up, smothers, or corrupts. " Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says:"What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean andperfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful. " When, togive a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammaticpoint, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where toborrow just what is wanted. Speaking of embellished oratoricaldiction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that wasdiscussed in his presence: "It is not enough to have fine sentences:you must have something to put into them. " Commenting on thehyper-spirituality of M. Laprade, he says: "M. Laprade starts from the_absolute notion of being_. For him the following is the principle ofArt, --'to manifest what we feel of the Absolute Being, of theInfinite, of God, to make him known and felt by other men, such in itsgenerality is the end of Art. ' Is this true, is it false? I know not:at this elevation one always gets into the clouds. Like the most ofthose who pride themselves on metaphysics, he contents himselfwith words (_il se paye de mots_). " Here is a grand thought, thatflashes out of the upper air of poetry: "Humanity, that eternal childthat has never done growing. "

M. Sainte-Beuve's irony, keen and delicate, is a sprightly medium oftruth: witness this passage on a new volume of M. Michelet:"Narrative, properly so called, which never was his forte, is almostentirely sacrificed. Seek here no historical highway, well laid, solid, and continuous; the method adopted is absolute points of view;you run with him on summits, peaks, on needles of granite, which heselects at his pleasure to gets views from. The reader leaps fromsteeple to steeple. M. Michelet seems to have proposed to himself animpossible wager, which, however, he has won, --to write history with aseries of flashes. " Could there be a more subtle, covert way of sayingof a man that he is hardened by self-esteem than the following on M. Guizot: "The consciousness that he has of himself, and a naturalprinciple of pride, place him easily above the little susceptibilitiesof self-love. " M. Sainte-Beuve is not an admirer of Louis Philippe, and among other sly hits gives him the following: "LouisPhilippe was too much like a _bourgeois_ himself to be long respectedby the _bourgeoisie_. Just as in former times the King of France wasonly the first gentleman of the kingdom, he was nothing but the first_bourgeois_ of the country. " What witty satire on Lamartine heintroduces, with a recognition of popularity that, with one who takesso much joy in applause as Lamartine does, is enough to take thepoison out of the sting: "Those who knew his verses by heart (and thenumber who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not withoutregret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, inhis prose. This prose is, in 'Les Confidences, ' too often but theparaphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward thelast, paraphrases of his feelings. " Amends are made to Lamartine onanother occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says:"Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and theeagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings. That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude ofwing. " This is better as modesty than as criticism. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as ofmore gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyedgetting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of theirstrongest as well as sweetest notes. 

A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, justas a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image ofherself. His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy inthings French. Through means of it he knows them through and through:they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, hisintellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other sidethe shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more orless the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows. Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV. , neither Voltaire nor Béranger, isspared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity andbroad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever hisindividual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy, that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M. Michelet, to Madame de Staël and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe, to Fénélon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau. 

Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will beimpatient to ask, nothing but praise? Not much else. Commencing hisliterary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from thatdate to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits, fill several thousand pages. Between his forty-fifth to his sixtiethyear he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousandpages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects. This isthe period of his critical maturity, the period of the "Causeries duLundi, " followed by the "Nouveaux Lundis. " Many men writevoluminously, but most of these only write _about_ a subject, not_into_ it. Only the few who can write into their subject add somethingto literature. One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve. In his mind thereis vitality to animate his large acquirement, to make his manychapters buoyant and stimulant. All through his writings is thesparkle of original life. 

But let us now cheer the reader who is impatient of much praise, andat the same time perform the negative part of our task. 

Well, then, to be bold, as befits a critic of the critic, we beard thelion in his very den. We challenge a definition he gives of thecritic. In the seventh volume of the "Causeries, " article"Grimm, " he says: "When Nature has endowed some one with this vivacityof feeling, with this susceptibility to impression, and that thecreative imagination be wanting, this some one is a born critic, thatis to say, a lover and judge of the creations of others. " Why did M. Sainte-Beuve make Goethe sovereign in criticism? Why did he thinkMilton peculiarly qualified to interpret Homer? From the deepprinciple of like unto like; only spirit can know spirit. What werethe worth of a comment of John Locke on "Paradise Lost, " except toreveal the mental composition of John Locke? The critic should be whatLocke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form ofliterature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, someshare of that whereby poetry is fledged, "creative imagination. " Hemay "want the accomplishment of verse, " or the constructive faculty, but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful hemust have. But do not the presence of "vivacity of feeling withsusceptibility to impression" imply the imaginative temperament? Ifnot, then we confidently assure M. Sainte-Beuve that had hisdefinition fitted himself, his "Causeries du Lundi" would never havebeen rescued from the quick oblivion of the _feuilleton. _

Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness, which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue, --the love ofglory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon's passion for glory saved him inhis latter years from ennui, from "that languor of the soul whichfollows the age of the passions. " Where are to be found men more thevictims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not moredistinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success thanfor insatiable greed of glory, --Byron and Chateaubriand? No form ofself-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving, which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyondits sway, on praise and admiration. These stimulants--withdrawn moreor less even from the most successful in latter years--leave a voidwhich becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust. Instead of glory being "the potent motive-power in all great souls, "as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moralinstinct, called by Milton, --

 "That last infirmity of noble mind. "

In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it ashardly to be traceable in their careers. Love of glory was not thespring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more thanShakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington. 

The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the Frenchnation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animalvigor of the conqueror's mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that hedoes not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon's moral nature, andthe consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor theunmanning effects of his despotism. The words used to describe themoral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be thestrokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset. In thepaper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the "rare goodsense" of Napoleon, of "his instinct of justice. " But was it not acompact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct ofjustice, backed by a Titan's will, wielding a mighty intellect, thatenabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despotand the merciless devastator? Again, can it be said of Napoleon thathe possessed good sense in a rare degree? Good sense is an instinctiveinsight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitivediscernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, asoundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, andequilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. Themoral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon's moral endowment wasbut fractional. Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basisof all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical, or in its action one-sided; and even in such its presence must befelt. In whatever reaches general human interests, whether aspractical act or imaginative creation, good sense must be, for theirprosperity, a primary ingredient. "The Tempest" and "Don Quixote"shoot up into shining, imperishable beauty because their roots drawtheir first nourishment from this hearty, inexhaustible substratum. And let us say, that in M. Sainte-Beuve himself good sense is thefoundation of his eminent critical ability. He has been led, weconceive, to attribute more of it to Napoleon than is his due by theblinding splendor of Napoleon's military genius, through which, withsuch swiftness and cumulative effect, he adapted means to ends on thepurely material plane. 

When Murray applied to Lord Byron to write a book about thelife and manners of the upper class in Italy, Byron declined theproposal from personal regards, and then added, that were he to writesuch a book it would be misjudged in England; for, said he, "theirmoral is not your moral. " Such international misinterpretations andexaggerations are instinctive and involuntary. A nation from its beinga nation, has a certain one-sidedness. To the Italian (even to one whocarries a stiletto) the English practice of boxing is a sheerbrutality; while to an Englishman (himself perhaps not a Joseph) the_cavaliere servente_ is looked upon with reprobation tempered byscorn. To this misjudgment from the foreign side and over-estimationon the domestic, books, too, are liable; but to books as being moreabstract than usages, more ideal than manners, an absolute moralstandard can with less difficulty be applied. Applying it to Gil Blas, is not M. Sainte-Beuve subject to arraignment when he speaks of thisand the other writings of Le Sage as being "the mirror of the world?"Molière, too, is a satirist, and from his breadth a great one; andsurely the world he holds a mirror before is a much purer world thanthat of Le Sage; and what of the Shakespearean world? The world of LeSage is a nether world. "Of Gil Blas it has been well said that thebook is moral like experience. " The experience one may get in brothelsand "hells, " in consorting with pimps and knaves, has in it lessons ofvirtue and morality, --for those who can extract them; but even forthese few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannotread so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, theexperience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of thepaper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so highas some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgmentof Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem tohave been written in a _café_, by a player of dominoes, on coming outof the comic theatre. "

Without being over-diffident, we may feel our footing not perfectlysecure on French ground when we differ from a Frenchman; we aretherefore not sorry to catch M. Sainte-Beuve tripping on Englishground. In a review of the translation of the celebrated Letters ofLord Chesterfield--whom he calls the La Rochefoucauld of England--herefers to, and in part quotes, the passages in which Chesterfieldgives his son advice as to his _liaisons_; and he adds: "AllChesterfield's morality, on this head, is resumed in a line ofVoltaire, --

 "Il n'est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie. "

It is these passages that make the grave Dr. Johnson blush: we onlysmile at them. " For ourselves, we blush with Johnson, not that the manof the world should give to his youthful son, living at a corruptContinental court, counsel as to relations which were regarded asinevitable in such a circle; but that the heart of the father shouldnot have poured (were it but parenthetically) through the pen of theworldling some single sentence like this: "Writing to you, my son, asan experienced man of the world to one inexperienced, I recommend thegood taste in such matters and the delicacy which become a gentleman;but to his dear boy, your father says, avoid, if possible, such_liaisons_; preserve your purity; nothing will give you such a returnthroughout the whole of the future. " But, a single sentence like thiswould _vitiate_ the entire Chesterfieldian correspondence. 

How fully and warmly M. Sainte-Beuve prizes moral worth may be learntfrom many passages. Not the least animated and cordial of hispapers is one on the Abbé Gerbet, in the sixth volume, a paper whichshows, as Gustave Planche said of him, that "he studies with hisheart, as women do;" and one in the second volume on Malesherbes, whomhe describes as being "separated, on the moral side, from theMirabeaus and the Condorcets not by a shade, but by an abyss, " andwhom he sums up as "great magistrate, minister too sensitive and tooeasily discouraged, heroic advocate, and sublime victim. " Of thisnoble, deeply dutiful, self-sacrificing Frenchman, this exemplar ofmoral greatness, Lord Lansdowne wrote many years before the FrenchRevolution: "I have seen for the first time in my life what I did notbelieve could exist, that is, a man _who is exempt from fear and fromhope_, and who nevertheless is full of life and warmth. Nothing candisturb his peace; nothing is necessary to him, and he takes a livelyinterest in all that is good. "

In a paper on a volume of miscellaneous prose essays by M. Laprade, M. Sainte-Beuve has this sentence: "What strikes me above all andeverywhere is, that the author, whether he reasons or whether headdresses himself to literary history, only understands his own modeof being and his own individuality. Hereby he reveals to usthat he is not a critic. " The first paragraph of a keen critique on M. De Pontmartin ends thus: "To say of even those writers who are opposedto us nothing which their judicious friends do not already think andare obliged to admit, this is my highest ambition. " Discussing theproper method of dealing with the past, he writes: "For myself Irespect tradition and I like novelty: I am never happier than when Ican succeed in reconciling them together. " Of Hoffman he says, in apaper on literary criticism: "He has many of the qualities of a truecritic, conscientiousness, independence, ideas, an opinion of hisown. " These sentences, with others of like import, are keys to thecharacter of the volumes from which they are taken. The office of thecritic M. Sainte-Beuve administers, not for temporary or personalends, but with a disinterested sense of its elevation and itsresponsibilities. Through healthy sympathies and knowledge ample andripe, through firm sense with artistic flexibility, through largenessof view and subtlety of insight, he enters upon it more thanordinarily empowered for its due discharge. He is at once what theFrench call _fin_ and what the English call "sound. " Inliterary work, in biographical work, in work æsthetical and critical, he delights, and he has a wide capacity of appropriation. The spiritof a book, a man, an age, he seizes quickly. With a nice perception ofshades he catches the individual color of a mind or a production; andby the same faculty he grasps the determining principles in acharacter. Delicately, strongly, variously endowed, there is a steadyequilibrium among his fine powers. Considering the bulk and vastvariety and general excellence of his critical work, is it too much tosay of him, that he is not only, as he has been called, the foremostof living critics, but that he deserves to hold the first place amongall critics? No other has done so much so well. Goethe and Coleridgeare something more; they are critics incidentally; but M. Sainte-Beuve, with poetical and philosophical qualities that lift himto a high vantage-ground, has made criticism his life-work, andthrough conscientious and symmetrical use of these qualities has donehis work well. Besides much else in his many and many-sided volumes, there is to be read in them a full, spirited history of Frenchliterature. 

Our attempt to make M. Sainte-Beuve better known on this sidethe Atlantic we cannot more fitly conclude than with a sketch ofhim--a literary sketch--by himself. This we find in the fifth volumeof the "Nouveaux Lundis, " in a paper on Molière, published in July, 1863. A man who, in the autumnal ripeness of his powers, thus franklytells us his likes and dislikes, tells us what he is. While byreflected action the passage becomes a self-portraiture, it is asample of finest criticism. 

"To make Molière loved by more people is in my judgment to do a publicservice. 

"Indeed, to love Molière--I mean to love him sincerely and with allone's heart--it is, do you know? to have within one's self a guaranteeagainst many defects, much wrong-headedness. It is, in the firstplace, to dislike what is incompatible with Molière, all that wascounter to him in his day, and that would have been insupportable tohim in ours. 

"To love Molière is to be forever cured--do not say of base andinfamous hypocrisy, but of fanaticism, of intolerance, and of thatkind of hardness which makes one anathematize and curse; it is tocarry a corrective to admiration even of Bossuet, and for all who, after his example, exult, were it only in words, over theirenemy dead or dying; who usurp I know not what holy speech, andinvoluntarily believe themselves to be, with the thunderbolt in theirhand, in the region and place of the Most High. Men eloquent andsublime, you are far too much so for me!

"To love Molière, is to be sheltered against, and a thousand leaguesaway from, that other fanaticism, the political, which is cold, dry, cruel, which never laughs, which smells of the sectary, which, underpretext of Puritanism, finds means to mix and knead all that isbitter, and to combine in one sour doctrine the hates, the spites, andthe Jacobinism of all times. It is to be not less removed, on theother hand, from those tame, dull souls who, in the very presence ofevil, cannot be roused to either indignation or hatred. 

"To love Molière, is to be secured against giving in to that pious andboundless admiration for a humanity which worships itself, and whichforgets of what stuff it is made, and that, do what it will, it isalways poor human nature. It is, not to despise it too much, however, this common humanity, at which one laughs, of which one is, and intowhich we throw ourselves through a healthful hilarity whenever we arewith Molière. 

"To love and cherish Molière, is to detest all mannerism inlanguage and expression; it is, not to take pleasure in, or to bearrested by, petty graces, elaborate subtlety, superfine finish, excessive refinement of any kind, a tricky or artificial style. 

"To love Molière, it is to be disposed to like neither false wit norpedantic science; it is to know how to recognize at first sight our_Trissotins_[6] and our _Vadius_ even under their rejuvenated jauntyairs; it is, not to let one's self be captivated at present any morethan formerly by the everlasting _Philaminte_, that affected pretenderof all times, whose form only changes and whose plumage is incessantlyrenewed; it is, to like soundness and directness of mind in others aswell as in ourselves. I only give the first movement and the pitch; onthis key one may continue, with variations. 

 [6] Trissotin, Vadius, and Philaminte, are personages in Molière's comedy of _Les Femmes Savantes_ (The Blue-Stockings). 

"To love and openly to prefer Corneille, as certain minds do, is nodoubt a fine thing, and, in one sense, a very legitimate thing; it is, to dwell in, and to mark one's rank in, the world of great souls: butis it not to run the risk of loving together with the grandand sublime, false glory a little, to go so far as not to detestinflation and magniloquence, an air of heroism on all occasions? Hewho passionately loves Corneille cannot be an enemy to a littleboasting. 

"On the other hand, to love and prefer Racine, ah! that is, no doubt, to love above all things, elegance, grace, what is natural and true(at least relatively), sensibility, touching and charming passion; butat the same time is it not also, to allow your taste and your mind tobe too much taken with certain conventional and over-smooth beauties, a certain tameness and petted languidness, with certain excessive andexclusive refinements? In a word, to love Racine so much, it is to runthe risk of having too much of what in France is called taste, andwhich brings so much distaste. 

"To love Boileau--but no, one does not love Boileau, one esteems him, one respects him; we admire his uprightness, his understanding, attimes his animation, and if we are tempted to love him, it is solelyfor that sovereign equity which made him do such unshaken justice tothe great poets his contemporaries, and especially to him whom heproclaims the first of all, Molière. 

"To love La Fontaine, is almost the same thing as to loveMolière; it is, to love nature, the whole of nature, humanityingenuously depicted, a representation of the grand comedy "of ahundred different acts, " unrolling itself, cutting itself up beforeour eyes into a thousand little scenes with the graces and freedomsthat are so becoming, with weaknesses also, and liberties which arenever found in the simple, manly genius of the master of masters. Butwhy separate them? La Fontaine and Molière--we must not part them, welove them united. "

 * * * * *

The number of "Putnam's Magazine, " containing this paper, was sent toM. Sainte-Beuve accompanied by a note. In due time I received ananswer to the note, saying that the Magazine had not reached him. Hereupon I sent the article by itself. On receiving it he wrote thefollowing acknowledgment. 

In my note I referred to a rumor of his illness. His disease was, by_post-mortem_ examination, discovered to be as the newspapers hadreported, the stone. But a consultation of physicians declared that itwas what he states it to be in his letter. Had they not made so grossa mistake, his life might have been prolonged. 

"PARIS, 6 _Decembre_, 1868, No. 11 Rue Mont Parnasse. 

"CHER MONSIEUR:--

"Oh! Cette fois je reçois bien décidément le très aimable et si bienetudié portrait du _critique_. Comment exprimer comme je lesens ma gratitude pour tant de soin, d'attention pénétrante, de désird'être agréable tout en restant juste? Il y avait certes moyend'insister bien plus sur les variations, les disparates et lesdéfaillances momentanées de la pensée et du jugement à travers cettesuite de volumes. C'est toujours un sujet d'étonnement pour moi, etcette fois autant que jamais, de voir comment un lecteur ami et unjuge de goût parvient à tirer une figure une et consistante de ce quine me parait à moi même dans mon souvenir que le cours d'un longfleuve qui va s'épandant un pen au hazard des pentes et désertantcontinuellement ses rives. De tels portraits comme celui que vousvoulez bien m'offrir me rendent un point d'appui et me feraientvéritablement croire à moi-même. Et quand je songe a l'immensequantité d'esprits auxquels vous me présentez sous un aspect sifavorable et si magistral dans ce nouveau monde de tant de jeunesse etd'avenir, je me prends d'une sorte de fierté et de courageuseconfiance comme en présence déjà de la postérité. 

"Le mal auquel vous voulez bien vous intéresser est tout simplementune hypertrophie de la prostate. Les souffrances ne sont pas vives, mais l'incommodité est grande, ne pouvant supporter à aucun degré lemouvement de la voiture, ce qui restreint ma vie sociale à un biencourt rayon. 

"Veuillez agreéer, cher Monsieur, l'assurance de ma cordialegratitude, et de mes sentiments les plus distingués. 

SAINTE-BEUVE. "

VI. 

THOMAS CARLYLE. 

A brain ever aglow with self-kindled fire--a cerebral batterybristling with magnetic life--such is Thomas Carlyle. Exceptionalfervor of temperament, rare intellectual vivacity, manfulearnestness--these are the primary qualifications of the man. He hasan uncommon soul-power. Hence his attractiveness, hence his influence. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, throbs with his ownbeing. Themselves all authors put, of course, more or less, into whatthey write: few, very few, can make their sentences quiver withthemselves. This Mr. Carlyle does by the intenseness of a warmindividuality, by the nimble vigor of his mental life, and, be itadded, by the rapture of his spirituality. The self, in his case, is alarge, deep self, and it sends an audible pulse through his pen intohis page. 

To all sane men is allotted a complete endowment of mental faculties, of capacities of intellect and feeling; the degree to whichthese are energized, are injected with nervous flame, makes thedifference between a genius and a blockhead. There being high vitalpressure at a full, rich, interior source, and thence, strong mentalcurrents, through what channels the currents shall flow depends onindividual aptitudes, these aptitudes shaping, in the one case, aDante, in another, a Newton, in another, a Mirabeau. And Nature, withall her generosity, being jealous of her rights, allows no interchangeof gifts. Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force ofwill and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven. Inhis dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than manyother intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity andambition have at times led him into paths where great deficienciesdisclose themselves by the side of great superiorities. His mind isbiographical, not historical; stronger in details than ingeneralization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, notconstructive; literary, not philosophical. Mr. Carlyle is great at apicture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction. Wealthof thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire, irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem withpassages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his "Cromwell" and his"Frederick. " Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr. Carlyle, in writing their lives with duteous particularity, hasembraced the full story of the epoch in which each was the leader. Tohim they are more than leaders. Herein he and Mr. Buckle stand atopposite poles; Mr. Buckle underrating the protagonists of history, them and their share of agency; Mr. Carlyle overrating them, --aprejudicial one-sidedness in both cases. Leader and led are thecomplements the one of the other. 

History is a growth, and a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sowthe seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and stillmore the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient, calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful, nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. Onehealthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betakinghim to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntinglythrow into the face of contemporaries an Abbot Sampson of the twelfthcentury as a model. A judicial expounder would not cite onesingle example as a characteristic of that age in contrast with this. A patient, impartial elucidator, would not deride "ballot-boxes, reform bills, winnowing machines:" he would make the best of these andother tools within reach; or, if his part be to write and not to act, would animate, not dishearten, those who are earnestly doing, and who, by boldly striking at abuses, by steadily striving for more justice, by aiming to lift up the down-trodden, prepare, through such means asare at hand, a better ground for the next generation. If to suchworkers, instead of God-speed, a writer of force and influence givesjeers and gibes, and ever-repeated shrieks about "semblance andquackery, and cant and speciosity, and dilettantism, " and deemshimself profound and original, as well as hopeful, when he exclaims:"Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning ofhuman worth and truth, we shall never by all the machinery inBirmingham discover the true and worthy:" in that case, does he notexpose him to the taunt of being himself very like a mouthing quack, and his words, which should be cordial, brotherly, do they not partakeof the hollow quality of what Mr. Carlyle holds in such abhorrence, namely, of cant? The sick lion crouches growling in his lair;he cannot eat, and he will not let others eat. 

Many grateful and admiring readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with hisever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven's name, what areall the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans, --worldlybishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallowsway-wielding dukes, --what are all these, and much else, but so manyexemplications of might that is not right? When might shall cease tobully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia. Utopia may beat infinite distance, not attainable by finite men; but as surely asour hearts beat, we are gradually getting further from its opposite, the coarse rule of force and brutality, such rule as in the twelfthcentury was rife all around "Abbot Sampson. "

Like unto this moral fallacy is an æsthetic fallacy which, throughbright pages of criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment. "I confess, " says Mr. Carlyle, "I have no notion of a truly great manthat could not be all sorts of men. " Could Newton have written the"Fairy Queen?" Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation?Could Columbus have given birth to "Don Quixote?" One of Mr. Carlyle's military heroes tried hard to be a poet. Over Frederick'sverses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned. "I cannotunderstand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with thefire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, couldnot have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts inthat way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward. "Thus Mr. Carlyle writes in "Heroes and Hero-Worship. " If Mirabeau, whynot Savonarola, or Marcus Aurelius. In that case a "Twelfth Night, " oran "Othello, " might have come from Luther. Nature does not work soloosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she isprofuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence herineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency. Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of herbeauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications areendless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonestmen does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at oncegrandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. "Petrarch and Boccacciodid diplomatic messages, " says Mr. Carlyle. We hope they did, or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that. WeAmericans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may bedone. 

On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages, pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, andexecuted with the scholar's care and the critic's culture. His earlypapers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, madesomething like an epoch in English criticism. Seizing the value andsignificance of genuine poetry, he exclaims in "Past andPresent, "--"Genius, Poet! do we know what these words mean? Aninspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own greatfire-heart, to see the truth, and speak it and do it. " On the samepage he thus taunts his countrymen: "We English find a poet, as bravea man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under thesun; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods? Not at all. We, takingdue counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh ofDumfries, and pique ourselves on our 'patronage of genius. '" "Georgethe Third is Defender of something we call 'the Faith' inthose years. George the Third is head charioteer of the destinies ofEngland, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions, American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale inDumfries. " Poor George the Third! One needs not be a craniologist toknow that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreatingpyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men andthings before them. How could they see a Robert Burns? To be sure, hadDundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of themany sinecures of two or three hundred pounds a year that were wastedon idle scions of titled families, an aureole of glory would now shinethrough the darkness that environs the memory of George III. So muchfor George Guelf. Now for Thomas Carlyle. 

If, for not recognizing Burns, _poor_ George is to be blamed, what terms of stricture will be too harsh for _rich_ Thomas, thatby him were not recognized poets greater than Burns, at a time whenfor England's good, full, sympathetic recognition of them was justwhat was literarily most wanted? Here was a man, for the fine functionof poetic criticism how rarely gifted is visible in thosethorough papers on Burns and Goethe, written so early as 1828, wherein, besides a masterly setting forth of their great subjects, arenotable passages on other poets. On Byron is passed the followingsentence, which will, we think, be ever confirmed by sound criticism. "Generally speaking, we should say that Byron's poetry is not true. Herefreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgarstrong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending indislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real men; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do notthese characters, does not the character of their author, which moreor less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for theoccasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intendedto look much grander than nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which isto last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business oflife, which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of this sort, something which we should calltheatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise sopowerful pieces. "

In the same paper, that on Burns, Mr. Carlyle thus opened the ears ofthat generation, --partially opened, for the general æsthetic ear isnot fully opened yet, --to a hollowness which was musical to the many:"Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if _in vacuo_;the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so muchfor Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable resultof this, for certain generalizations which philosophy termed men. " Andin the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray's poetry, "a laborious mosaic, through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true gracecould be expected to look. " Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle tobe, what is the critic's noblest office, an interpreter between newpoets and the public. Such an interpreter England grievously needed, to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize thetreasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, andShelley, and Keats. The interpreter was there, but he spoke not. Better than any man in England Mr. Carlyle could, if he would, have taught the generation that was growing up with him, whose ear hehad already gained, what truth and fresh beauty and deep humanitythere was in the strains of this composite chorus of superlativesingers. Of such teaching, that generation stood in especial need, todisabuse its ear of the hollowness which had been mistaken forharmony; to refresh, with clear streams from "the divine fountain, "hearts that were fevered by the stimulus of Byronic "strong waters;"to wave before half-awakened eyes the torch which lights the way tothat higher plane where breathe great poets, whose incomparablefunction it is, to impart to their fellow-men some of the enlargementand the purification of consciousness in which themselves exultthrough the influx of fresh ideas and the upspringing of prolificsentiment. The gifted interpreter was dumb. Nay, he made diversionsinto Scotland and Germany, to bring Burns and Scott more distinctlybefore Englishmen, and to make Schiller and Goethe and Richter betterknown to them. And it pleased him to write about "Corn-law rhymes. "That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done, by the side of them, the then more urgent task. In 1828, Mr. Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of"Goethe's Helena, " which is a kind of episode in the second part of"Faust, " and was first published as a fragment. This takes up morethan sixty pages in the first volume of the "Miscellanies, " about thehalf being translations from "Helena, " which by no means stands in thefront rank of Goethe's poetic creations, which is indeed rather a highartistic composition than a creation. At that time there lay, almostuncalled for, on the publisher's shelf, where it had lain for fiveyears, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than anyin English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out ofShakespeare, --a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender, deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards offeeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, aregathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue withexcess of light, --or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanzarising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bedof Nature's most precious perfumes, each shedding a new anda richer fragrance; I mean the "Adonais" of Shelley. For thisglittering masterpiece, --a congenial commentary on which would haveilluminated the literary atmosphere of England, --Mr. Carlyle had noword; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word forWordsworth. For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here itis: "Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the wholeconsists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague, random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty. " A parenthesis, short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has beentruly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is thepoetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and ofwhom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology inthe youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power, variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the firstclass of the poetry of the world. Is not Thomas Carlyle justlychargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor? Nay, considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistentignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warmsolicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, hisoffense may be termed a literary crime. He knew better. 

Mr. Carlyle somewhere contrasts his age with that of Elizabeth, afterthis fashion; "For Raleighs and Shakespeares we have Beau Brummell andSheridan Knowles. " Only on the surmise that Mr. Carlyle owed poorKnowles some desperate grudge, can such an outburst be accounted for. Otherwise it is sheer fatuity, or an impotent explosion of literaryspite. For the breadth and brilliancy of the poetic day shed upon it, no period in the history of any nation, not that of Pericles or ofElizabeth, is more resplendent than that which had not yet faded forEngland when Mr. Carlyle began his career; nor in the field of publicaction can the most prolific era of Greece or of England hold up, forthe admiration of the world and the pride of fellow-countrymen, twoagents more deservedly crowned with honor and gratitude than Nelsonand Wellington. Here are two leaders, who, besides exhibiting rarepersonal prowess and quick-eyed military genius on fields of vastbreadth, and in performances of unwonted magnitude and momentousness, were, moreover, by their great, brave deeds, most palpablysaving England, saving Europe, from the grasp of an inexorable despot. Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmostthe reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper. On the tenthousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place. Not onlyare their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarceacknowledged. 

Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousyis not a noble form of

 "The last infirmity of noble mind. "

Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chillhim with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, oreven notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness ofByron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, andWellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a penwhich, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things, should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men ofgenius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one isdriven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive. In such a case itis impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion animaginative man will not rise. 

Writing of Thomas Carlyle, the last words must not be censoriouscomments on a weakness; we all owe too much to his strength; he is toolarge a benefactor. Despite over-fondness for Frederick and the like, and what may be termed a pathological drift towards politicaldespotism, how many quickening chapters has he not added to the"gospel of freedom"? Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses, with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities stepforth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon;what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; whatbursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped theenfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirstwherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly "Frazer, "to drink of the spiritual waters of "Sartor Resartus. " Here was a newspring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, purifying draughts, didit bubble and sparkle! That picture, in the beginning, of the "doingand driving (_Thun und Treiben_)" of a city as beheld byProfessor Teufelsdroeckh from his attic--would one have been surprisedto read that on a page of Shakespeare?

A marvelous faculty of speech has Mr. Carlyle; a gift of saying whathe has to say with a ring in the words that makes the thought tinglethrough your ears. His diction surrounds itself with a magnetic_aura_, which seems to float it, to part it from the paper, itstands out in such transparent chiar-oscuro. Common phrases herefreshes by making them the vehicle for new meanings, and in theordering of words he has command of a magical logic. The marrowy vigorin his mind it is that lends such expressiveness, such nimbleness, such accent to his sentences, to his style. 

Mr. Carlyle's power comes mainly from his sensibilities. Through themhe is poetical; through them there is so much light in his pages. Moreoften from his than from any others, except those of the major poets, breaks the sudden, joyful beam that flames around a thought when itknows itself embraced by a feeling. Of humor and of wit, what an addedfund does our language now possess through his pen. The body ofcriticism, inclosed in the five volumes of Miscellanies, wereenough to give their author a lasting name. When one of these papersappeared in the Edinburgh, or other review, it shone, amid thecontributions of the Jeffreys and Broughams, like a guinea in ahandful of shillings. 

The masterpiece of Mr. Carlyle, and the masterpiece of English proseliterature, is his "French Revolution, " a rhythmic Epic without verse. To write those three volumes a man needs have in him a big, glowingheart, thus to flood with passionate life all the men and scenes of amomentous volcanic epoch; a lively, strong, intellectual vision hemust have, to grasp in their full reality the multitudinous anddiverse facts and incidents so swiftly begotten under the pulsation ofmillions of contentious brains; he needs a literary faculty finelyartistic, creatively imaginative, to enrank the figures of such vasttumultuous scenes, to depict the actors in each, to present vividly inclear relief the rapid succession of eventful convulsions. Outside ofthe choice achievements of verse, is there a literary task of breadthand difficulty that has been done so well? A theme of unusual grandeurand significance is here greatly treated. 

The foremost literary gift, --nay, the test whereby to trywhether there be any genuine literary gift, --is the power in a writerto impart so much of himself, that his subject shall stand invested, or rather, imbued, with a life which renews it; it becomes warmed witha fire from the writer's soul. Of this, the most perfect exhibition isin poetry, wherein, by the intensity and fullness of inflammation, ofpassion, is born a something new, which, through the strongcreativeness of the poet, has henceforth a rounded being of its own. With this power Mr. Carlyle is highly endowed. Not only, as alreadysaid, does his page quiver with himself; through the warmth andhealthiness of his sympathies, and his intellectual mastery, he makeseach scene and person in his gorgeous representation of the FrenchRevolution to shine with its own life, the more brilliantly and trulythat this life has been lighted up by his. Where in history is there apicture greater than that of the execution of Louis XVI. ? With a fewstrokes how many a vivid portrait does he paint, and each one vividchiefly from its faithfulness to personality and to history. And thenhis full-length, more elaborated likenesses, of the king, of thequeen, of the Duke of Orleans, of Lafayette, of CamilleDesmoulins, of Danton, of Robespierre: it seems now that only on histhrobbing page do these personages live and move and have their truebeing. The giant Mirabeau, 'twas thought at first he had drawn toogigantic. But intimate documents, historical and biographical, thathave come to light since, confirm the insight of Mr. Carlyle, andswell his hero out to the large proportions he has given him. 

For a conclusion we will let Mr. Carlyle depict himself. Makingallowance for some humorous play in describing a fellow-man soeccentric as his friend, Professor Teufelsdroeckh, this we think hedoes consciously and designedly in the fourth chapter of "SartorResartus, " wherein, under the head of "Characteristics, " he commentson the professor's Work on Clothes, and its effect on himself. Fromthis chapter we extract some of the most pertinent sentences. It opensthus:--

"It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothesentirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, likethe very sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work ofgenius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amidits effulgence, --a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness'double-vision, and even utter blindness. 

"Without committing ourselves to those enthusiastic praises andprophesyings of the "Weissnichtwo'sche Anzeiger, " we admitted that thebook had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is thebest effect of any book; that it had even operated changes in our wayof thought; nay, that it promised to prove, as it were, the opening ofa new mine-shaft, wherein the whole world of _Speculation_ mighthenceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially it may now bedeclared that Professor Teufelsdroeckh's acquirements, patience ofresearch, philosophic, and even poetic vigor, are here madeindisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity andtortuosity and manifold inaptitude. . . . 

"Many a deep glance, and often with unspeakable precision, has he castinto mysterious Nature, and the still more mysterious Life of man. Wonderful it is with what cutting words, now and then, he seversasunder the confusion; sheers down, were it furlongs deep, into thetrue center of the matter; and there not only hits the nail on thehead, but with crushing force smites it home and buries it. . . . 

"Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigor, atrue inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burningwords, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame andsplendor from Jove's head; a rich idiomatic diction, picturesqueallusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy twins; all thegraces and terrors of a wild imagination, wedded to the clearestintellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheersleeping and soporific passages, circumlocutions, repetitions, toucheseven of pure doting jargon so often intervene. . . . A wild tone pervadesthe whole utterance of the man, like its key-note and regulator; nowscrewing itself aloft as into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrillmockery of fiends; now sinking in cadences, not without melodiousheartiness, though sometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch, when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum the truecharacter is extremely difficult to fix. . . . 

"Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse, do we still lie with regard to the professor's moral feeling. Gleamsof an ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinitepity; he could clasp the whole universe into his bosom, andkeep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt avery seraph. Then, again, he is so sly, and still so imperturbablysaturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness, towards all thatmen strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter, sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness, --that youlook on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnateMephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish whirligig, where kings andbeggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, werechaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest. "

VII. 

ERRATA. [7]

 [7] From Lippincott's Magazine, 1870. 

Words are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of thesoul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thenceit behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words awatch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over hispupils. A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lestlanguage fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements intowhich all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence orabuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness. Stylemay be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkersout of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind;and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with itsbeauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, thetransparency and directness of its threads, which are words. 

A humble freeman of the guild of scholars would here use hisprivilege to call attention to some abuses in words andphrases, --abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken andwritten speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, thepages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or leadto general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race ismany centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to showsigns of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moraland intellectual energies of a people, soon spots its speech. 

Nevertheless, as inaccuracies, laxities, vulgarisms--transgressionsmore or less superficial--such errors take from the correctness, fromthe efficacy, from the force as well as the grace, of written orspoken speech. 

The high level of strength, suppleness and beauty occupied by ourEnglish tongue has been reached, and can only be maintained, bystrenuous, varied, and continuous mental action. Offenses against thelaws and proprieties of language--like so many other of ourlapses--are in most cases effects of the tendency in human nature torelax its tone. None save the most resolute and rigorous but havetheir moods of unwatchfulness, of indolence. Moreover, men areprone to resist mental refinement and intellectual subdivisions. Discrimination requires close attention and sustained effort; andwithout habitual discrimination there can be no linguistic precisionor excellence. In this, as in other provinces, people like to takethings easily. Now, every capable man of business knows that to takethings easily is an easy way to ruin. Language is in a certain senseevery one's business; but it is especially the business, as theirappellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of theirhigh vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddlingwith, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous toolswherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and areever a-building. Culture, demanding and creating diversity andsubtlety of mental processes, is at once a cause and an effect ofinfinite multiplication in the relations the mind is capable ofestablishing between itself and the objects of its action, and betweenits own processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture, has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands, Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness ofits modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness, any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complextissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought bythe exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitatinginfluence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr. Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it isalso the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere onwhich thought lives--a medium essential to the activity of ourspeculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in itsoperation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, thegrowth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds. "

Our enumeration of _errata_ being made alphabetically, the first to becited is one of the chief of sinners--the particle. 

As. The misuse of _as_ for _so_ is, in certain cases, almostuniversal. If authority could justify error and convert the faultyinto the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justificationof which can be cited most of the best names in recent Englishliterature. 

 "_As_ far as doth concern my single self, "

is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude, " p. 70) which, by a changeof the first _as_ into _so_, would gain not only in sound (which isnot our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar. The seventh lineof the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and mostbeautiful of poems, Shelley's "Adonais, " begins, "_As_ long as skiesare blue, " where also there would be a double gain by writing "_So_long as skies are blue. " On page 242 of the first volume of DeQuincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by _as_philosophic a politician _as_ Edmund Burke, " in which the criticalblunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excusefor the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules, from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, Iconceive, that the double _as_ should only be employed when there isdirect comparison. In the first part of the following sentence thereis no direct comparative relation--in the second, the negativedestroys it; "_So_ far as geographical measurement goes, Philadelphiais not _so_ far from New York as from Baltimore. " Five writers out ofsix would commit the error of using _as_ in both members of thesentence. The most prevalent misuse of _as_ is in connection with_soon_; and this general misuse, having moreover the countenance ofgood writers, is so inwoven into our speech that it will be hard tounravel it. But principle is higher than the authority derived fromcustom. Judges are bound to give sentence according to the statute;and if the highest writers, whose influence is deservedly judicial, violate the laws of language, their decisions ought to be, and willbe, reversed, or language will be undermined, and, slipping intoshallow, illogical habits, into anarchical conditions, will forfeitmuch of its manliness, of its subtlety, of its truthfulness. Languageis a living organism, and to substitute authority, or even long usage, for its innate genius and wisdom, and the requirements and practicesthat result from these, were to strike at its life, and to expose itto become subject to upstart usurpation, to deadening despotism. Worcester quotes from the Psalms the phrase, "They go astray _as_ soonas they be born. " We ask, Were not the translators of the Bible asliable to err in grammar as De Quincey, or Wordsworth, or Shelley? Awriter in the English "National Review" for January, 1862, in anadmirable paper on the "Italian Clergy and the Pope, " begins asentence with the same phrase: "_As_ soon as the law was passed. " Andwe ourselves, sure though we be that the use of _as_ in this and everysimilar position is an error, need to brace both pen and tongueagainst running into it, so strong to overcome principle andconviction is the habit of the senses, accustomed daily to see and tohear the wrong. 

AT THAT. We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not thepen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers intobound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not beitalicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against aphrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, ofAmerican mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods, when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicksup and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels. 

ANOTHER. Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, wewill call up a minor criminal in A, viz. _another_, often incorrectlyused for _other_; as in "on one ground or another, " "from onecause or another. " Now, _another_, the prefix _an_ making itsingular, --embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contraryto the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there arebut two grounds or causes. Write "on one ground or other, " and thewords are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word _other_implying several or many grounds. 

BOQUET. The sensibility that gives the desire to preserve a presentsparkling so long as is possible with all the qualities that made itmaterially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something soprecious as a word; and when we receive one from another people, gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself, should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath ofignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices. We therefore protestagainst a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, theword _bouquet_, being maimed into _boquet_, a corruption as dissonantto the ear as were to the eye plucking a rose from a variegatednosegay, and leaving only its thorny stem. _Boquet_ is heard at timesin well-upholstered drawing-rooms, and may even be seen in print. Offensive in its mutilated shape, it smells sweet again when restoredto its native orthography. 

BY NO MANNER OF MEANS. The most vigorous writers are liable, inunguarded moments, to lapse into verbal weakness, and so youmeet with this vulgar pleonasm in Ruskin. 

BY REASON OF. An ill-assorted, ugly phrase, used by accomplishedreviewers and others, who ought to set a purer example. 

COME OFF. Were a harp to give out the nasal whine of the bagpipe, orthe throat of a nightingale to emit the caw of a raven, the æstheticsense would not be more startled and offended than to hear fromfeminine lips, rosily wreathed by beauty and youth, issue the words, "The concert will _come off_ on Wednesday. " This vulgarism shouldnever be heard beyond the "ring" and the cock-pit, and should bebanished from resorts so respectable as an oyster-cellar. 

CONSIDER. Neither weight of authority nor universality of use canpurify or justify a linguistic corruption, and make the intrinsicallywrong in language right; and therefore such phrases as, "I considerhim an honest man, " "Do you consider the dispute settled?" will everbe bad English, however generally sanctioned. In his dedication of the"Diversions of Purley" to the University of Cambridge, Horne Tookeuses it wrongly when he says, "who always _considers_ acts ofvoluntary justice toward himself as favors. " The originalsignification and only proper use of _consider_ are in phrases likethese: "If you consider the matter carefully;" "Consider the lilies ofthe field. "

CONDUCT. It seems to us that it were as allowable to say of a man, "Hecarries well, " as "He conducts well. " We say of a gun that it carrieswell, and we might say of a pipe that it conducts well. The gun andpipe are passive instruments, not living organisms, and thence theverbs are used properly in the neuter form. Perhaps, strictlyspeaking, even here _its charge_ and _water_ are understood. 

CONTEMPLATE. "Do you contemplate going to Washington to-morrow?" "No:I contemplate moving into the country. " This is more than exaggerationand inflation: it is desecration of a noble word, born of man's higherbeing; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties, a calm collecting of them for silent meditation--an act, or rather amood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, andinvolves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment. An able lawyer hasto reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it;but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflictsand wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on thepurposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects--he islifted into a contemplative mood. Archbishop Trench, in his valuablevolume on the "Study of Words, " opens a paragraph with this sentence:"Let us now proceed to _contemplate_ some of the attestations forGod's truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil'sfalsehood, which may be found to lurk in words. " Here we suggest thatthe proper word were _consider_; for there is activity, and aprogressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters, which disqualifies the verb _contemplate_. 

Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lackof discipline or lack of refinement. Our American magniloquence--thetendency to which is getting more and more subdued--comes partly fromnational youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty, and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more theprospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridgesomewhere says is to be "England in glorious magnification. "

I AM FREE TO CONFESS. An irredeemable vulgarism. 

IN THIS CONNECTION. Another. 

INDEBTEDNESS. "The amount of my _engagedness_" sounds as welland is as proper as "the amount of my _indebtedness_. " We have already_hard-heartedness_, _wickedness_, _composedness_, and others. Nevertheless, this making of nouns out of adjectives with theparticipial form is an irruption over the boundaries of the parts ofspeech which should not be encouraged. 

Archbishop Whately, in a passage of his shortcoming comments onBacon's "Essays, " uses _preparedness_. Albeit that brevity is acardinal virtue in writing, a circumlocution would, we think, bebetter than a gawky word like this, so unsteady on its long legs. Infavor of _indebtedness_ over others of like coinage, this is to besaid--that it imports that which in one form or other comes home tothe bosom of all humanity. 

INTELLECTS. That man's intellectual power is not one and indivisible, but consists of many separate, independent faculties, is a momentoustruth, revealed by the insight of Gall. One of the results of thisgreat discovery may at times underlie the plural use of the importantword _intellect_ when applied to one individual. If so, it were stillindefensible. It has, we suspect, a much less philosophic origin, andproceeds from the unsafe practice of overcharging the verbalgun in order to make more noise in the ear of the listener. The pluralis correctly used when we speak of two or more different men. 

LEFT. "I left at ten o'clock. " This use of _leave_ as a neuter verb, however attractive from its brevity, is not defensible. _To leave off_is the only proper neuter form. "We left off at six, and left (thehall) at a quarter past six. " The place should be inserted after thesecond _left_. Even the first is essentially active, some form ofaction being understood after _off_: we left off _work_ or _play_. 

MIDST. "In our midst" is a common but incorrect phrase. 

OUR AUTHOR. A vulgarism, which, by its seeming convenience, gets thecountenance of critical writers. We say _seeming_ convenience; for inthis seeming lies the vulgarity, the writer expressing, unconsciouslyoften, by the _our_, a feeling of patronage. With his _our_ he patsthe author on the back. 

PERIODICAL is an adjective, and its use as a substantive is anunwarrantable gain of brevity at the expense of grammar. 

PROPOSE. Hardly any word that we have cited is so frequentlymisused, and by so many good writers, as _propose_, when the meaningis to design, to intend to propose. It should always be followed by apersonal accusative--I propose to you, to him, to myself. In thepreface to Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" occurs the following sentence;"The author _proposed_ to himself merely to write a fanciful story, evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not _purpose_ attempting aportraiture of Italian manners and character"--a sentence than which afitter could not be written to illustrate the proper use of _propose_and _purpose_. 

PREDICATED UPON. This abomination is paraded by persons who lose nochance of uttering "dictionary words, " hit or miss; and is sometimesheard from others from whom the educated world has a right to look formore correctness. 

RELIABLE. A counterfeit, which no stamping by good writers oruniversality of circulation will ever be able to introduce into thefamily circle of honest English as a substitute for the robust Saxonword whose place it would usurp--_trustworthy_. _Reliable_ is, however, good English when used to signify that one is liable again. When you have lost a receipt, and cannot otherwise prove thata bill rendered has been paid, you are _re-liable_ for the amount. 

RELIGION. Even by scholars this word is often used with looseness. Instrictness it expresses exclusively our relation to the Infinite, the_bond_ between man and God. You will sometimes read that he is thetruly religious man who most faithfully performs his duties ofneighbor, father, son, husband, citizen. However much a religious manmay find himself strengthened by his faith and inspirited for theperformance of all his duties, this strength is an indirect, and not auniform or necessary, effect of religious convictions. Some men whoare sincere in such convictions fail in these duties conspicuously;while, on the other hand, they are performed, at times, with more thancommon fidelity by men who do not carry within them any very livelyreligious belief or impressions. "And now abideth faith, hope, andcharity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. " Nor canthe greatest do the work of the others any more than faith that ofhope or charity. Each one of "these three" is different from andindependent of the other, however each one be aided by cooperationfrom the others. The deep, unique feeling which lifts up andbinds the creature to the Creator is elementarily one in the humanmind, and the word used to denote it should be kept solely for thishigh office, and not weakened or perverted by other uses. Worcesterquotes from Dr. Watts the following sound definition: "In a propersense, _virtue_ signifies duty toward men, and _religion_ duty toGod. "

SALOON. That eminent pioneer of American sculpture, brilliant talker, and accomplished gentleman, the lamented Horatio Greenough, wasindignantly eloquent against the American abuse of this gracefulimportation from France, applied as it is in the United States topublic billiard-rooms, oyster-cellars and grog-shops. 

SUBJECT-MATTER. A tautological humpback. 

TO VENTILATE, applied to a subject or person. The scholar who shoulduse this vilest of vulgarisms deserves to have his right thumb takenoff. 

We have here noted a score of the errors prevalent in written andspoken speech--some of them perversions or corruptions, countenancedeven by eminent writers; some, misapplications that weaken anddisfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downrightvulgarisms--that is, phrases that come from below, and arethrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. Theselast are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against suchabuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience ofsome of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech as not to bereadily distinguishable from their healthy neighbors, clinging forgenerations to tongues and pens. Of this tenacity there is a notableexemplification in a passage of Boswell, written nearly a hundredyears ago. Dr. Johnson found fault with Boswell for using the phraseto _make_ money: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To _make_ moneyis to _coin_ it: you should say _get_ money. " Johnson, adds Boswell, "was jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, andprompt to repress colloquial barbarisms; such as _pledging_ myself, for _undertaking_; _line_ for _department_ or _branch_, as the _civilline_, the _banking line_. He was particularly indignant against thealmost universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or_opinion_, when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something ofwhich an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an _idea_ or_image_ of a mountain, a tree, a building, but we surely cannot havean idea or image of an _argument_ or _proposition_. Yet wehear the sages of the law 'delivering their _ideas_ upon the questionunder consideration;' and the first speakers of Parliament 'entirelycoinciding in the _idea_ which has been ably stated by an honorablemember. '"

Whether or not the word _idea_ may be properly used in a deeper orgrander sense than that stated by Dr. Johnson, there is no doubt thathe justly condemned its use in the cases cited by him, and in similarones. All the four phrases _make money_, _pledge_, _line_, and _idea_, whereupon sentence of guilty was passed by the great lexicographer, are still at large, and, if it be not a bull to say so, more at largeto-day than in the last century, since the area of their currency hasbeen extended to America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. 

VIII. 

A NATIONAL DRAMA. [8]

 [8] From _Putnam's Monthly_, 1857. 

We are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows, processions, and organized spectacles; we are so much more imitativethan our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to themimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descentfor man might find support in the features of our general life. Tocomplete the large compound of qualities that are required, in orderthat an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; butthat one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one whichlifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask anynumber of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poeticalpeople. A loud, unanimous, derisive _no_ would be the answer. Andyet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forwardto Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has therichest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matterare appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical. From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures, lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables inAnglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment. Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth, are of our stock;and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, whileyet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddling-clothes, is an earnest of acreative future. We are to have a national literature and a nationaldrama. What is a national drama? Premising that as little in theirdepth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with thedimensions of this great theme, we would say a few words. 

A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in theheart of a people. Good books are the crystallization of thoughts andfeelings. To have a literature--that is, a body of enduringbooks--implies vigor and depth. Such books are the measure of themental vitality in a people. Those peoples that have the best bookswill be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those thathave none, at the bottom. Good books, once brought forth, exhale ever after both fragrance and nourishment. They educate whilethey delight many generations. 

Good books are the best thoughts of the best men. They issue out ofdeep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts andstrong heads such books are sure to come to life. The mind, like thebody, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative, transmitting itself to a remote posterity. 

The best books are the highest products of human effort. Themselvesthe evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power. Consider what a spring of life to European people have been the booksof the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?

To be good, books must be generic. They may be, in subject, in tone, and in color, national; but in substance they must be so universallyhuman, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them. Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to bea conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is aproof of their breadth and depth--of their high humanity. 

The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which isneeded to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarilysang and wrote merely of itself. Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks. But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes aTrojan for his hero. This appropriation of foreign material shows thatthe aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas andfeelings that are independent of time and place. Thence, when, bymultiplication of Christian nations our mental world had become vastlyenlarged, embracing in one bond of culture, not only all moderncivilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, thepoets--especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presentlystated--looked abroad and afar for the frame-work and corporeal stuffof their writings. 

The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is mostgeneric in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendentconceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare'sfourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England; and thatone, "The Merry Wives of Windsor"--the only one not written chiefly orlargely in verse--is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies(except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, "Lear" and"Macbeth, " stand on British ground. Is "Hamlet" on that score lessEnglish than "Lear, " or "Othello" than "Macbeth"? Does Italy countJuliet among her trophies, or Desdemona?

Of Milton's two dramas---to confine myself here to the dramaticdomain--the tragedy ("Samson Agonistes, ") like his epics, is Biblical;the comedy ("Comus") has its home in a sphere

 "Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth. "

Of the numerous athletic corps of dramatists, contemporary withShakespeare and Milton, few have left works pithy enough and sopoetically complete as to withstand the wear of time and keep fresh toeach successive generation. But if you inspect the long list fromwhich Charles Lamb took his "Specimens, " you will find few Britishnames. 

Casting our eyes on the dramatic efforts of the recent English poeticcelebrities, we perceive that Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, allabandoned, in every instance, native ground. The only dramatic work ofa great modern, the scene of which is laid within the British limits, is "The Borderers, " of Wordsworth, which, though having thepoetic advantage of remoteness in time--being thrown back to the reignof Henry III. --is, in strictness, neither a drama nor a poem, Wordsworth's deficiency in dramatic gifts being so signal as to cause, by the impotent struggle in an uncongenial element, a partialparalysis even of his high poetic genius. 

Glance now across the Channel. French poetic tragedy is in itssubjects almost exclusively ancient--Greek, Roman, and Biblical. Inthe works of the great comic genius of France, Molière, we have asalient exception to the practice of all other eminent dramatists. Thescene of his plays is Paris; the time is the year in which each waswritten. 

Let us look for the cause of this remarkable isolation. 

Molière was the manager of a theatrical company in the reign of LouisXIV. , and he wrote, as he himself declares, to please the king andamuse the Parisians. But deeper than this; Molière was by nature agreat satirist. I call him a _great_ satirist, because of theaffluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite--namely, aclear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from thefalse, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense, shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of thecomic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage wasthe best field, and for Molière especially, gifted as he was withhistrionic genius. The vices and abuses, the follies and absurdities, the hypocrisies and superficialities of civilized life, these were thegame for his faculties. The interior of Paris households hetransferred to the stage with biting wit, doubling the attractivenessof his pictures by comic hyperbole. His portraits are caricatures, notbecause they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloatout a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him alop-sided deformity. Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made apersonage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not amiser; he is Avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; heis Misanthropy personified. 

This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature ofrelations and juxtapositions. With laughable unscrupulousness Molièremultiplies improbable blunders and conjunctions. All verisimilitude issacrificed to scenic vivacity. Hence, the very highest of his comediesare farce-like; even "Tartuffe" is so. 

In Molière little dramatic growth goes on before thespectator's eye. His personages are not gradually built up bysuccessive touches, broad or fine; they do not evolve themselveschiefly by collision with others; in the first act they come on thestage unfolded. The action and plot advance rapidly, but not throughthe unrolling of the persons represented. Hence, his most importantpersonages are prosaic and finite. They interest you more as agentsfor the purpose in hand than as men and women. They are subordinaterather to the action than creative of action. 

Molière is a most thorough realist, and herein is his strength. In himthe comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency andbody to the comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet. Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, wasa present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedyought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life. Molière's comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are, philosophically speaking, low life. His are comedies not of characterand sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore cannot behighly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remoteground, clean of all local coloring and association, such as isessential to the dramatist whose inspiration is poetical, and whotherefore must reconcile the ideal with the real, by whichreconciliation only can be produced the purest truth. That, notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, hiscomedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of thebreadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of hisrich mind, and his superlative comic genius. 

Of Alfieri's twenty-two tragedies, three only are modern, and of thesethree the scene of one is in Spain. 

Of the nine or ten tragedies of the foremost German dramatic poet, Schiller, three are German, "The Robbers, " "Intrigue and Love, " and"Wallenstein. "

Goethe's highest dramas, "Iphigenia, " "Egmont, " "Torquato Tasso, " areall foreign in clothing. "The Natural Daughter" has no localhabitation, no dependence on time or place. "Goetz von Berlichingen, "written in Goethe's earliest days of authorship, is German and inprose, "Faust"--the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivalingthe greatest poems of all time--"Faust" is not strictly a drama: itswonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramaticnecessity. 

The drama of Spain, like the comedies of Molière, is an exception tothe rule we deduce from the practice of other dramatists; but it is anexception which, like that of Molière, confirms the rule. Unlike theancient Greek and the French tragic poets, unlike Schiller, Shakespeare, Goethe, Alfieri, the Spanish dramatists do not aim atideal humanity. The best of them, Calderon, is so intensely Spanishand Romish, as to be, in comparison with the breadth and universalityof his eminent compeers above named, almost provincial. His personagesare not large and deep enough to be representative. The manifoldrecesses of great minds he does not unveil; he gets no deeper than thesemi-barbarous exaggerations of selfish, passionate love; of revenge, honor, and jealousy. His characterization is weak. His highestcharacters lack intellectual calibre, and are exhibited in lyricalone-sidedness rather than dramatic many-sidedness. He is mostlycontent with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled bythe conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which havealready passed away even in Spain. He is a marvelously fertile, skillful, poetic playwright. 

Thus we perceive that, with poetic dramatists, the prevailingpractice is, to look abroad for fables. Moreover, in the cases wherethese were drawn from the bosom of the poet's own people, he shuns thepresent, and hies as far back as he can into the dark abysms of time, as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear. The Greek tragic poets, having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era ofGreece. The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that ofplace as well as that of time; and he must have one or the other. 

The law lying behind this phenomenon is transparent. The higher poetryis, the more generic it is. Its universality is a chief constituent ofits excellence. The drama is the most generically human, and, therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry. The epic dealswith the material, the outward--humanity concreted into events; thelyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as togush out in ode or song. The dramatic is the union of the epic andlyric--the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outwardwhile co-working with it. In the dramatic, the action is more made bythe personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in thestrong, full stream of events. The lyric is the utterance ofone-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which mustbe linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and hisactions. The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic. Out ofhumanity and human action it extracts the essence. It presents men intheir completest form, in warm activity, impelled thereto by strongestfeelings. Hence, it must be condensed and compact, and must, for itshighest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, andall prosaic circumscriptions. The poetic dramatist needs the highestpoetic freedom, and only through this can he attain to that breadthand largeness whereof the superiority of his form admits, and whichare such in Shakespeare, that in his greatest plays the whole worldseems to be present as spectators and listeners. 

Observe that the highest dramatic literatures belong to the two freestpeoples--the Greeks and the English. A people, possessing already alarge political freedom, must be capable of, and must be in the actof, vigorous, rich development, through deep inward passion andfaculty, in order that its spirit shall issue in the perennial flowersof the poetic drama. The dramatic especially implies anddemands variety and fullness and elevation of _personality_; andthis is only possible through freedom, the attainment of which freedomimplies on its side the innate fertility of nature which results infullness and elevation. 

Now in the subjective elevation of the individual, and therewith theunprecedented relative number of individuals thus elevated, herein dowe exceed all other peoples. By subjective elevation I mean, liberation from the outward, downward pressure of dogmaticprescription, of imperious custom, of blindfolded tradition, ofirresponsible authority. The despotic objectivity of Asia--wherereligion is submissiveness, and manhood is crushed by obedience--hasbeen partially withstood in Europe. The emancipation therefrom of theIndo-Germanic race is completed in Anglo-America. Through thismanifold emancipation we are to be, in all the high departments ofhuman achievement, preeminently creative, because, while equipped withthe best of the past, we are at the same time preeminently subjective;and, therefore, high literature will, with us, necessarily take thelyrical, and especially the dramatic, form. 

More than our European ancestors, we mold, each one of us, ourown destiny; we have a stronger inward sense of power to unfold andelevate ourselves; we are more ready and more capable to withstand theassaults of circumstance. Here is more thoroughly embodied the trueChristian principle, that out of himself is to come every man'sredemption; that the favor and help of God are only to be obtainedthrough resolute self-help, and honest, earnest struggle. InChristendom we stand alone as having above us neither the objectivityof politics nor that of the church. The light of the past we have, without its darkness. We carry little weight from the exacting past. Hence, our unexampled freedom and ease of movement which, wanting theold conventional ballast, to Europeans seems lawless and reckless. Even among ourselves, many tremble for our future, because they havelittle faith in humanity, and because they cannot grasp the new, grandhistoric phenomenon of a people possessing all the principles, practices, and trophies of civilization without its paralyzingincumbrances. 

But think not, because we are less passive to destiny, we arerebellious against Deity; because we are boldly self-reliant, we are, therefore, irreligiously defiant. The freer a people is, thenearer it is to God. The more subjective it is, through acquiredself-rule, the more will it harmonize with the high objectivity ofabsolute truth and justice. For having thrown off the capricioussecondary rule of man, we shall not be the less, but the more, underthe steadfast, primary rule of God; for having broken the force ofhuman, fallible prescription, we shall the more feel and acknowledgethe supremacy of flawless, divine law; for having rejected the tyrannyof man's willfulness, we shall submit the more fully to the beneficentpower of principle. 

Our birth, growth, and continued weal, depending on large, deepprinciples--principles deliberately elaborated and adopted by reason, and generously embracing the whole--our life must be interpenetratedby principle, and thence our literature must embrace the widest andmost human wants and aspirations of man. And thus, it will be ourprivilege and our glory to be then the most national in our books whenwe are the most universal. 

IX. 

USEFULNESS OF ART. 

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE RHODE ISLAND ARTASSOCIATION IN PROVIDENCE, SEPTEMBER 4, 1854. 

_Gentlemen of the Rhode Island Art Association:_--

We are met to inaugurate an Association whose aim and end shall be theencouragement and culture of Art. A most high end--among the highestthat men can attempt; an end that never can be entertained except bymen of the best breed. There is no art among savages, none amongbarbarians. Barbarism and art are adversary terms. When men capable ofcivilization ascend into it, art manifests itself an inevitableaccompaniment, an indispensable aid to human development. I will sayfurther, that in a people the capacity to be cultivated involves thecapacity, nay, the necessity of art. And still further, that thosenations that have been or are preeminent on the earth, are preeminentin art. Nay, more, that a nation cannot attain to and maintaineminence without being proficient in art; and that to abstract from apeople its artists were not merely to pluck the flowers from itsbranches; it were to cut off its-deep roots. 

Who is the artist?

He who embodies, in whatever mode, --so that they be visible oraudible, and thus find entrance to the mind, --conceptions of thebeautiful, is an artist. The test and characteristic of the artisticnature are superior sensibility to the beautiful. Unite to this thefaculties and the will to give form to the impressions and emotionsthat are the fruit of this susceptibility, and you have the artist. Whether he shall embody his conception in written verse, in marble, instone, in sound, on the canvas, that will depend on each one'sindividual aptitudes. Generic, common, indispensable to all is thesuperior sensibility to the beautiful. In this lies the essence of theartist. 

The beautiful and the perfect being, if not identical, in closestconsanguinity, the artist's is an important, a great function. Theartist must receive into his mind, or engender in his mind's nativerichness, conceptions of what is most high, most perfect, mostbeautiful in shape or sound, in thought or feeling; and producing itbefore his fellow-men, appeal to their sensibility to the beautiful, to their deepest sympathies, to their capacity of being moved by thegrandest and the noblest there is in man and nature. Truly, a mightypart is that of the artist. 

Artists are the educators of humanity. Tutors and professors instructprinces and kings, but poets (and all genuine artists are poets)educate nations. Take from Greece Homer and Phidias, and Sophocles andScopas, and the planner of the Parthenon, and you efface Greece fromhistory. Wanting them, she would not have been the great Greece thatwe know; she would not have had the vigor of sap, the nervousvitality, to have continued to live in a remote posterity, immortal inthe culture, the memories, and the gratitude of men. 

So great, so far-stretching, so undying is the power of this exaltedclass of men, that it were hardly too much to say that had Homer andPhidias never lived, we should not be here today. If this be deemedextravagant, with confidence I affirm that but for the existence ofthe greatest artist the world has ever known, --of him who maybe called the chief educator of England, --but for Shakespeare, weassuredly should not be here to-day doing the good work we are doing. 

There are probably some of this company who, like myself, having hadthe good fortune to be in London at the time of the world's fair, stood under that magnificent, transparent roof, trod that immense areawhereon fifty thousand people moved at ease. It was a privilege, --thememory of which will last a life-time, to have been admitted into thatgigantic temple of industry, there to behold in unimaginable profusionand variety the product of man's labor, intellect, and genius, gathered from the four corners of the earth into one vast, gorgeouspile, --a spectacle peerless from its mere material splendor, and fromits moral significance absolutely sublime. 

On entering by the chief portal into the transept, --covering in thehuge oaks of Hyde Park, --the American, after wondering for a moment inthe glare of the first aspect, will, with the eagerness and perhapsthe vanity of his nation, --have hastened through the compartments ofFrance, Belgium, Germany, gorgeous with color, glistening with gold. He will have hastened, hard as it was to hurry through such ashow, in order to reach at once the far eastern end of the palacewhere a broad area had been allotted to the United States, --Jonathan, as is his wont, having helped himself largely. Great was theAmerican's disappointment, cutting was the rebuke to his vanity; hiscountry made no _show_ at all. The samples of her industry werenot outwardly brilliant. Their excellence lay in their inward power, in their wide usefulness. They were not ornaments and luxuries for thedwellings of the few, they were inventions that diffuse comforts andblessings among the many, --labor-saving machines and cheap newspapers. By the thoughtful visitor the merit of these was appreciated, as itwas acknowledged in the final awards of the judges. And even in thishigh department where we are so eminent, owing to distance andmisunderstandings, we were not adequately represented. But even if wehad been, the European would have said, "This has a high value andinterest; but still I find not here enough to justify the expectationsentertained by this people, and by many in Europe, of the futuregreatness of the American Republic. These things, significant as theyare, are yet not an alphabet that can be so compounded as towrite the richest page of man's history. In this present display Ifind not prefigured that splendid future the Americans are fond ofpredicting for themselves. " And the American, acknowledging the forceof the comment, would have turned away mortified, humbled. But he wassaved any such humiliation. In the midst of that area, under thatbeautiful flag, day after day, week after week, month after month, from morn till night, go when he would, he beheld there a circle everfull, its vacancies supplied as soon as they were made, a circlesilent with admiration, hushed by emotion, gazing at a master-piece ofAmerican art, the Greek Slave of Powers. And from that contemplationhundreds of thousands of Europeans carried away an impression ofAmerican capacity, a conviction that truly a great page is to bewritten by the young republic in the book of history, --a sense ofAmerican power which they could have gotten from no other source. 

Our Association, gentlemen, owes its origin to the wants of industry. The moving power which has been strongest in bringing so many of ustogether to found an institution for the encouragement of art in RhodeIsland, is the desire hereby more thoroughly to inweave thebeautiful into cotton and woolen fabrics, into calicoes and delaines;to melt the beautiful into iron and brass, and copper, as well as intosilver and gold; so that our manufacturers and artisans may hold theirown against the competition of England and France and Germany, whereofin the two latter countries especially, schools of design have longexisted, and high artists find their account in furnishing thebeautiful to manufacturers. 

"A low origin this for such a society, and the fruits will be withoutflavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered, " will say some travelleddilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wondersof the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teachesa different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely, but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studdedcanopy of the earth, but also our near earth itself, has He madebeautiful. He surrounds us with beauty; He envelops us in beauty. Beauty is spread out on the familiar grass, glows in the daily flower, glistens in the dew, waves in the commonest leafy branch. All aboutus, in infinite variety, beauty is lavished by God in sightsand sounds, and odors. Now, in using the countless and multifarioussubstances that are put within our reach, to be by our ingenuity andcontrivance wrought into materials for our protection and comfort, andpleasure, it becomes us to--it is part of his design that weshall--follow the divine example, so that in all our handiwork, as inhis, there shall be beauty, so much as the nature of each product issusceptible of. That it is the final purpose of Providence that ourwhole life, inward and outward, shall be beautiful, and be steeped inbeauty, we have evidence, in the yearnings of the best natures for theperfect, in the delight we take in the most resplendent objects of artand nature, in the ennobling thrill we feel on witnessing a beautifuldeed. 

By culture we can so create and multiply beauty, that all oursurroundings shall be beautiful. 

Can you not imagine a city of the size of this, or vastly larger, thestructure of whose streets and buildings shall be made under thecontrol of the best architectural ideas, being of various stones andmarbles, and various in style and color, so that each and every oneshall be either light, or graceful, or simple, or ornate, or solid, or grand, according to its purpose, and the conception of thebuilder; and in the midst and on the borders of the city, squares, andparks, planted with trees and flowers and freshened by streams andfountains. And when you recall the agreeable, the elevating sensationyou have experienced in front of a perfect piece of architecture(still so rare), will you not readily concede that where every edificeshould be beautiful, and you never walked or drove out but throughstreets of palaces and artistic parks, the effect on the wholepopulation of this ever-present beauty and grandeur, would be torefine, to expand, to elevate. When we look at the architecturalimprovements made within a generation, in London, in Paris, in NewYork, we may, without being Utopians, hope for this transformation. But the full consummation of such a hope can only be brought about inunison with improvements in all the conditions and relations of life, and the diffusion of such improvements among the masses. 

It is to further-such diffusion that this Association has beenfounded. Our purpose is to meet the growing demand for beauty in allthings; to bring into closer cooperation the artisan and the artist;to make universally visible and active the harmony, --I almost mightsay the identity, --there is between the useful and the beautiful. 

Gentlemen, ever in the heart of the practical, in the very core of theuseful, there is enclosed a seed of beauty; and upon thefructification, growth, and expansion of that seed depends, --aye, absolutely depends, --the development of the practical. But for theexpansion of that seed, we should have neither the plough nor theprinting-press, neither shoes nor the steam engine. To that we owesilver forks as well as the electric telegraph. In no province of workor human endeavor is improvement made, is improvement possible, but bythe action of that noble faculty through which we are uplifted whenstanding before a masterpiece of Raphael. This ceaseless seeking for abetter, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought theEnglish race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, fromthe narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to thiswide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence oflife; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to ourpresent as that is to the times of Alfred. 

In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they areradiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is oftenthe measure of its usefulness. How beautiful is a field ofgolden wheat--whereby our bodies live--and the more beautiful thecloser it stands and the fuller are its heads. The oak and the pineowe their majestic beauty to that which is the index of theirusefulness, the solid magnitude of their trunks. The proportions whichgive the horse his highest symmetry of form, give him his fleetnessand endurance and strength. And thus, too, with man, --his works, whenbest, sparkle most with this fire of the beautiful. We profit byhistory in proportion as it registers beautiful sayings and beautifuldoings. We profit one another in everyday life in proportion as ouracts, the minor as well as the greater, are vitalized by this divineessence of beauty. To the speeches of Webster, even to the mosttechnical, this essence gives their completeness and their grandeur ofproportion; while it is this which illuminates with undying splendorthe creations of Allston. Thus, gentlemen, the aim of our Associationis most noble and useful, drawing its nobleness from its highusefulness. May it so prosper, that a generation hence, thousands andtens of thousands shall look back to this the day of its inaugurationwith praise and thankfulness.