Part 9

There was then a fierce democracy of words; no grades had then been established, and no favored ones advanced to the Upper House of Poetry. Men had a meaning, and so their words had to have one, too. They were not representatives of value, but value itself. They say that Valhalla was roofed with golden shields; that was what they believed, and in their songs they called them golden shingles. We should think shields the more poetical word of the two; but to them the poetry was in the _thing_, and the thought of it and the phrase took its life and meaning from them.

It is one result of the admixture of foreign words in our language that we use a great many phrases without knowing the force of them. There is a metaphoric vitality hidden in almost all of them, and we talk poetry as Molière’s citizen did prose, without ever suspecting it. Formerly men _named_ things; now we merely label them to know them apart. The Vikings called their ships sea-horses, just as the Arabs called their camels ships of the desert. Capes they called sea-noses, without thinking it an undignified term which the land would resent. And still, where mountains and headlands have the luck to be baptized by uncultivated persons, Fancy stands godmother. Old Greylock, up in Berkshire, got his surname before we had State geologists or distinguished statesmen. So did Great Haystack and Saddle-Mountain. Sailors give good names, if they have no dictionary aboard, and along our coasts, here and there, the word and the thing agree, and therefore are poetical. Meaning and poetry still cling to some of our common phrases, and the crow-foot, mouse-ear, goat’s-beard, day’s-eye, heart’s-ease, snow-drop, and many more of their vulgar little fellow-citizens of the wood and roadsides are as happy as if Linnæus had never been born. Such names have a significance even to one who has never seen the things they stand for, but whose fancy would not be touched about a pelargonium unless he had an acquired sympathy with it. Our “cumulus” language, heaped together from all quarters, is like the clouds at sunset, and every man finds something different in a sentence, according to his associations. Indeed, every language that has become a literary one may be compared to a waning moon, out of which the light of beauty fades more and more. Only to poets and lovers does it repair itself from its luminous fountains.

The poetical quality of diction depends on the force and intensity of meaning with which it is employed. We are all of us full of latent significance, and let a poet have but the power to touch us, we forthwith enrich his word with ourselves, pouring into his verse our own lives, all our own experience, and take back again, without knowing it, the vitality which we had given away out of ourselves. Put passion enough into a word, and no matter what it is it becomes poetical; it is no longer what it was, but is a messenger from original man to original man, an ambassador from royal Thee to royal Me, and speaks to us from a level of equality. Pope, who did not scruple to employ the thoughts of Billingsgate, is very fastidious about the dress they come in, and claps a tawdry livery-coat on them, that they may be fit for the service of so fine a gentleman. He did not mind being coarse in idea, but it would have been torture to him to be thought commonplace. The sin of composition which he dreaded was,

Lest ten low words should creep in one dull line.

But there is no more startling proof of the genius of Shakspeare than that he always lifts the language up to himself, and never thinks to raise himself atop of it. If he has need of the service of what is called a low word, he takes it, and it is remarkable how many of his images are borrowed out of the street and the workshop. His pen ennobled them all, and we feel as if they had been knighted for good service in the field. Shakspeare, as we all know (for does not Mr. Voltaire say so?), was a vulgar kind of fellow, but somehow or other his genius will carry the humblest things up into the air of heaven as easily as Jove’s eagle bore Ganymede.

Whatever is used with a great meaning, and conveys that meaning to others in its full intensity, is no longer common and ordinary. It is this which gives their poetic force to symbols, no matter how low their origin. The blacksmith’s apron, once made the royal standard of Persia, can fill armies with enthusiasm and is as good as the oriflamme of France. A broom is no very noble thing in itself, but at the mast-head of a brave old De Ruyter, or in the hands of that awful shape which Dion the Syracusan saw, it becomes poetical. And so the emblems of the tradesmen of Antwerp, which they bore upon their standards, pass entirely out of the prosaic and mechanical by being associated with feelings and deeds that were great and momentous.

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Mr. Lowell here read a poem by Dr. Donne entitled “The Separation.”

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As respects Diction, _that_ becomes formal and technical when poetry has come to be considered an artifice rather than an art, and when its sole object is to revive certain pleasurable feelings already conventional, instead of originating new sources of delight. Then it is truly earth to earth; dead language used to bury dead emotion in. This kind of thing was carried so far by the later Scandinavian poets that they compiled a dictionary of the metaphors used by the elder Skalds (whose songs were the utterance of that within them which _would_ be spoken), and satisfied themselves with a new arrangement of them. Inspiration was taught, as we see French advertised to be, in six lessons.

In narrative and descriptive poetry we feel that proper keeping demands a certain choice and luxury of words. The question of propriety becomes one of prime importance here. Certain terms have an acquired imaginative value from the associations they awake in us. Certain words are more musical than others. Some rhymes are displeasing; some measures wearisome. Moreover, there are words which have become indissolubly entangled with ludicrous or mean ideas. Hence it follows that there is such a thing as Poetic Diction, and it was this that Milton was thinking of when he spoke of making our English “search her coffers round.”

I will illustrate this. Longfellow’s “Evangeline” opens with a noble solemnity:

This is the forest primeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like the Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

There is true feeling here, and the sigh of the pines is heard in the verses. I can find only one epithet to hang a criticism on, and that is the “_wail_ of the forest” in the last line, which is not in keeping with the general murmur. Now I do not suppose that the poet turned over any vocabulary to find the words he wanted, but followed his own poetic instinct altogether in the affair. But suppose for a moment, that instead of being a true poet, he had been only a gentleman versifying; suppose he had written, “This is the primitive forest.” The prose meaning is the same, but the poetical meaning, the music, and the cadence would be gone out of it, and gone forever. Or suppose that, instead of “garments green,” he had said “dresses green”; the idea is identical, but the phrase would have come down from its appropriate remoteness to the milliner’s counter. But not to take such extreme instances, only substitute instead of “harpers hoar,” the words “harpers gray,” and you lose not only the alliteration, but the fine hoarse sigh of the original epithet, which blends with it the general feeling of the passage. So if you put “sandy beaches” in the place of “rocky caverns,” you will not mar the absolute truth to nature, but you will have forfeited the relative truth to keeping.

When Bryant says so exquisitely,

Painted moths Have _wandered the blue sky_ and died again,

we ruin the poetry, the sunny spaciousness of the image, without altering the prose sense, by substituting

Have _flown through the clear air_.

But the words “poetic diction” have acquired a double meaning, or perhaps I should say there are two kinds of poetic diction, the one true and the other false, the one real and vital, the other mechanical and artificial. Wordsworth for a time confounded the two together in one wrathful condemnation, and preached a crusade against them both. He wrote, at one time, on the theory that the language of ordinary life was the true dialect of poetry, and that one word was as good as another. He seemed even to go farther and to adopt the Irishman’s notion of popular equality, that “one man is as good as another, and a dale better, too.” He preferred, now and then, prosaic words and images to poetical ones. But he was not long in finding his mistake and correcting it. One of his most tender and pathetic poems, “We are Seven,” began thus in the first edition:

A simple child, _dear brother Jim_.

All England laughed, and in the third edition Wordsworth gave in and left the last half of the line blank, as it has been ever since. If the poem had been a translation from the Turkish and had begun,

A simple child, dear Ibrahim,

there would have been nothing unpoetical in it; but the “dear brother Jim,” which would seem natural enough at the beginning of a familiar letter, is felt to be ludicrously incongruous at the opening of a poem.

To express a profound emotion, the simpler the language and the less removed from the ordinary course of life the better. There is a very striking example of this in Webster’s tragedy of “The Duchess of Malfy.” The brother of the Duchess has procured her murder, and when he comes in and sees the body he merely says:

“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.”

Horror could not be better expressed than in these few words, and Webster has even taken care to break up the verse in such a way that a too entire consciousness of the metre may not thrust itself between us and the bare emotion he intends to convey.

In illustration, Mr. Lowell quoted from Shakspeare (“Henry V”), Marlowe, Chapman, Dunbar, Beaumont and Fletcher, Waller, Young, and Cawthorn.

These men [the poets of the eighteenth century] were perfectly conscious of the fact that poetry is not produced under an ordinary condition of the mind, and accordingly, when they begin to grind their barrel-organs, they go through the ceremony of invoking the Muse, talk in the blandest way of divine rages and sacred flames, and one thing or another, and ask for holy fire to heat their little tea-urns with as coolly as one would borrow a lucifer. They appeal ceremoniously to the “sacred Nine,” when the only thing really necessary to them was the ability to count as high as the sacred ten syllables that constituted their verse. If the Muse had once granted their prayer, if she _had_ once unveiled her awful front to the poor fellows, they would have hidden under their beds, every man John of them.

The eighteenth century produced some true poets, but almost all, even of them, were infected by the prevailing style. I cannot find any name that expresses it better than the “Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick always called wine the “rosy,” sleep the “balmy,” and so forth, so did these perfectly _correct_ gentlemen always employ either a fluent epithet or a diffuse paraphrasis to express the commonest emotions or ideas. If they wished to say _tea_ they would have done it thus:

Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.

Coffee would be

The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray,

or brown or black, as the rhyme demanded. A boot is dignified into

The shining leather that the leg encased.

Wine is

The purple honor of th’ ambrosial vine.

All women are “nymphs,” carriages are “harnessed pomps,” houses are sumptuous or humble “piles,” as the case may be, and everything is purely technical. Of nature there seems to have been hardly a tradition.

But instead of attempting to describe in prose the diluent diction which passed for poetic under the artificial system--which the influence of Wordsworth did more than anything else to abolish and destroy--I will do it by a few verses in the same style. Any subject will do--a Lapland sketch, we will say:

Where far-off suns their fainter splendors throw O’er Lapland’s wastes of uncongenial snow, Where giant icebergs lift their horrent spires And the blank scene a gelid fear expires, Where oft the aurora of the northern night Cheats with pale beams of ineffectual light, Where icy Winter broods o’er hill and plain, And Summer never comes, or comes in vain; Yet here, e’en here, kind Nature grants to man A boon congenial with her general plan. Though no fair blooms to vernal gales expand, And smiling Ceres shuns th’ unyielding land, Behold, even here, cast up a monstrous spoil, The sea’s vast monarch yields nutritious oil, Escaped, perchance, from where the unfeeling crews Dart the swift steel, and hempen coils unloose, He whirls impetuous through the crimson tide, Nor heeds the death that quivers in his side; Northward he rushes with impulsive fin, Where shores of crystal groan with ocean’s din, Shores that will melt with pity’s glow more soon Than the hard heart that launched the fierce harpoon. In vain! he dies! yet not without avail The blubbery bulk between his nose and tail. Soon shall that bulk, in liquid amber stored, Shed smiling plenty round some Lapland board. Dream not, ye nymphs that flutter round the tray When suns declining shut the door of day, While China’s herb, infused with art, ye sip, And toast and scandal share the eager lip. Dream not to you alone that Life is kind, Nor Hyson’s charms alone can soothe the mind; If you are blest, ah, how more blest is he By kinder fate shut far from tears and tea, Who marks, replenished by his duteous hand, Dark faces oleaginously expand; And while you faint to see the scalding doom Invade with stains the pride of Persia’s loom, Happier in skins than you in silks perhaps, Deals the bright train-oil to his little Lap’s.

LECTURE XI

WORDSWORTH

(_Tuesday Evening, February 13, 1855_)

XI

A few remarks upon two of the more distinguished poets of the eighteenth century will be a fitting introduction to Wordsworth, and, indeed, a kind of commentary on his poetry. Of two of these poets we find very evident traces in him--Thomson and Cowper--of the one in an indiscriminating love of nature, of the other in a kind of domestic purity, and of both in the habit of treating subjects essentially prosaic, in verse; whence a somewhat swelling wordiness is inevitable.

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Thomson had the good luck to be born in Scotland, and to be brought up by parents remarkable for simplicity and piety of life. Living in the country till he was nearly twenty, he learned to love natural beauty, and must have been an attentive student of scenery. That he had true instincts in poetry is proved by his making Milton and Spenser his models. He was a man of force and originality, and English poetry owes him a large debt as the first who stood out both in precept and practice against the vicious artificial style which then reigned, and led the way back to purer tastes and deeper principles. He was a man perfectly pure in life; the associate of eminent and titled personages, without being ashamed of the little milliner’s shop of his sisters in Edinburgh; a lover of freedom, and a poet who never lost a friend, nor ever wrote a line of which he could repent. The licentiousness of the age could not stain him. His poem of “Winter” was published a year before the appearance of the “Dunciad.”

Thomson’s style is not equal to his conceptions. It is generally lumbering and diffuse, and rather stilted than lofty. It is very likely that his Scotch birth had something to do with this, and that he could not write English with that unconsciousness without which elegance is out of the question--for there can be no true elegance without freedom. Burns’s English letters and poems are examples of this.

But there are passages in Thomson’s poems full of the truest feelings for nature, and gleams of pure imagination.

Mr. Lowell here read a passage from “Summer,” which, he said, illustrated better than almost any other his excellences and defects. It is a description of a storm, beginning:

At first heard solemn o’er the verge of Heaven The tempest growls.

This is fustian patched with cloth of gold. The picture, fine as it is in parts, is too much frittered with particulars. The poet’s imagination does not seem powerful enough to control the language. There is no autocratic energy, but the sentences are like unruly barons, each doing what he likes in his own province. Many of them are prosaic and thoroughly _un_picturesque, and come under the fatal condemnation of being _flat_. Yet throughout the passage,

The unconquerable genius struggles through

half-suffocated in a cloud of words.

But the metre is hitchy and broken, and seems to have no law but that of five feet to the verse. There is no Pegasean soar, but the unwieldy gallop of an ox. The imagination, which Thomson undoubtedly had, contrasted oddly with the lumbering vehicle of his diction. He takes a bushel-basket to bring home an egg in. In him poetry and prose entered into partnership, and poetry was the sleeping partner who comes down now and then to see how the business is getting on. But he had the _soul_ of a poet, and that is the main thing.

Of Gray and Collins there is no occasion to speak at length in this place. Both of them showed true poetic imagination. In Gray it was thwarted by an intellectual timidity that looked round continually for precedent; and Collins did not live long enough to discharge his mind thoroughly of classic pedantry; but both of them broke away from the reigning style of decorous frigidity. Collins’s “Ode to Evening” is enough to show that he had a sincere love of nature--but generally the scenery of both is borrowed from books.

In Cowper we find the same over-minuteness in describing which makes Thomson wearisome, but relieved by a constant vivacity of fancy which in Thomson was entirely wanting. But Cowper more distinctly preluded Wordsworth in his delight in simple things, in finding themes for his song in the little incidents of his own fireside life, or his daily walks, and especially in his desire to make poetry a means of conveying moral truth. The influence of Cowper may be traced clearly in some of Wordsworth’s minor poems of pure fancy, and there is one poem of his--that on “Yardly Oak”--which is almost perfectly Wordsworthian. But Cowper rarely rises above the region of fancy, and he often applied verse to themes that would not sing. His poetry is never more than agreeable, and never reaches down to the deeper sources of delight. Cowper was one of those men who, wanting a vigorous understanding to steady the emotional part of his nature, may be called peculiar rather than original. Great poetry can never be made out of a morbid temperament, and great wits are commonly the farthest removed from madness. But Cowper had at least the power of believing that his own thoughts and pleasures were as good, and as fit for poetry, as those of any man, no matter how long he had enjoyed the merit of being dead.

The closing years of the eighteenth century have something in common with those of the sixteenth. The air was sparkling with moral and intellectual stimulus. The tremble of the French Revolution ran through all Europe, and probably England, since the time of the great Puritan revolt, had never felt such a thrill of national and indigenous sentiment as during the Napoleonic wars. It was a time fitted to give birth to something original in literature. If from the collision of minds sparks of wit and fancy fly out, the shock and jostle of great events, of world-shaping ideas, and of nations who do their work without knowing it, strike forth a fire that kindles heart and brain and tongue to more inspired conceptions and utterances.

It was fortunate for Wordsworth that he had his breeding in the country, and not only so, but among the grandest scenery of England. His earliest associates were the mountains, lakes, and streams of his native district, and the scenery with which his mind was stored during its most impressionable period was noble and pure. The people, also, among whom he grew up were a simple and hardy race, who kept alive the traditions and many of the habits of a more picturesque time. There was also a general equality of condition which kept life from becoming conventional and trite, and which cherished friendly human sympathies. When death knocked at any door of the hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside; and a wedding dropped an orange blossom at every door. There was not a grave in the little churchyard but had its story; not a crag or glen or aged tree without its legend. The occupations of the people, who were mostly small farmers and shepherds, were such as fostered independence and originality of character. And where everybody knew everybody, and everybody’s father had known everybody’s father, and so on immemorially, the interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and distant report. It was here that Wordsworth learned not only to love the simplicity of nature, but likewise that homely and earnest manliness which gives such depth and sincerity to his poems. Travel, intercourse with society, scholarly culture, nothing could cover up or obliterate those early impressions. They widened with the range of his knowledge and added to his power of expression, but they never blunted that fine instinct in him which enables him always to speak directly to men and to gentleman, or scholar, or citizen. It was this that enabled his poetry afterwards to conquer all the reviews of England. The great art of being a man, the sublime mystery of being _yourself_, is something to which one must be apprenticed early.

Mr. Lowell here gave an outline of Wordsworth’s personal history and character.

As a man we fancy him just in the least degree uninteresting--if the horrid word must come out--why, a little bit of a bore. One must regard him as a prophet in order to have the right kind of feeling toward him; and prophets are excellent for certain moods of mind, but perhaps are creatures

Too bright and good For human nature’s daily food.

I fancy from what I have heard from those who knew him that he had a tremendous prose-power, and that, with his singing-robes off, he was dry and stiff as a figure-head. He had a purity of mind approaching almost to prudery, and a pupil of Dr. Arnold told me he had heard him say once at dinner that he thought the first line of Keats’s ode to a “Grecian Urn” indecorous. The boys considered him rather _slow_. There was something rocky and unyielding in his mind; something that, if we found it in a man we did not feel grateful to and respect, we should call hard. Even his fancy sometimes is glittering and stiff, like crystallizations in granite. But at other times how tender and delicate and dewy from very contrast, like harebells growing in a crag-cleft!