_ THE POET.
A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
I. THE POET.
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often
persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired
pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for
whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they
are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are
like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish
and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you
should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce
fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge
of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars,
or some limited judgment of color or form, which is
exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of
the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies
in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have
lost the perception of the instant dependence of form
upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy.
We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to
be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment
between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter
the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms,
the intellectual men do not believe in any essential
dependence of the material world on thought and volition.
Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the
Spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a
contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid
ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are
contented with a civil and conformed manner of living,
and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance
from their own experience. But the highest minds of the
world have never ceased to explore the double meaning,
or shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or much more
manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact; Orpheus,
Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg,
and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we
are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire
and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it,
and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three
removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden
truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time
and its creatures floweth are intrinsically ideal and
beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature
and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty; to the
means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect
of the art in the present time.
The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet
is representative. He stands among partial men for
the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth,
but of the common wealth. The young man reveres men
of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more
himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he
also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her
beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief
that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time.
He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and
by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits,
that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all
men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In
love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in
games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man
is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Notwithstanding this necessity to be published,
adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is
that we need an interpreter, but the great majority
of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into
possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report
the conversation they have had with nature. There is
no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility
in the sun and stars, earth and water. These stand
and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there
is some obstruction or some excess of phlegm in our
constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the
due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature
on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill.
Every man should be so much an artist that he could
report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in
our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient
force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach
the quick and compel the reproduction of themselves in
speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are
in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and
handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole
scale of experience, and is representative of man, in
virtue of being the largest power to receive and to
impart.
For the Universe has three children, born at one
time, which reappear under different names in every
system of thought, whether they be called cause,
operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove,
Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the
Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here
the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand
respectively for the love of truth, for the love
of good, and for the love of beauty. These three
are equal. Each is that which he is essentially,
so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and
each of these three has the power of the others
latent in him, and his own, patent.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents
beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre.
For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from
the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some
beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the
universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive
potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism
is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes
that manual skill and activity is the first merit of
all men, and disparages such as say and do not,
overlooking the fact that some men, namely poets, are
natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of
expression, and confounds them with those whose province
is action but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But
Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer as
Agamemnon's victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does
not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and
think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and
must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries
also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants;
as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as
assistants who bring building materials to an architect.
For poetry was all written before time was, and
whenever we are so finely organized that we can
penetrate into that region where the air is music,
we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write
them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a
verse and substitute something of our own, and thus
miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear
write down these cadences more faithfully, and
these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs
of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as
it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much
appear as it must be done, or be known. Words and
deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy.
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
The sign and credentials of the poet are that he
announces that which no man foretold. He is the
true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is
the only teller of news, for he was present and
privy to the appearance which he describes. He is
a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary
and causal. For we do not speak now of men of
poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre,
but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation
the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics,
a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a
music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose
skill and command of language, we could not sufficiently
praise. But when the question arose whether he was not
only a lyrist but a poet, we were obliged to confess
that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man.
He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a
Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid
Base through all the climates of the globe, with belts
of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled
sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a
modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with
well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the
walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied
music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets
are men of talents who sing, and not the children of
music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the
verses is primary.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument
that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and
alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal
it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature
with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal
in the order of time, but in the order of genesis
the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new
thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he
will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be
the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each
new age requires a new confession, and the world seems
always waiting for its poet. I remember when I was
young how much I was moved one morning by tidings that
genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at
table. He had left his work and gone rambling none
knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but
could not tell whether that which was in him was
therein told; he could tell nothing but that all was
changed,--man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. How gladly
we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be
compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which
was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at
twice the distance it had the night before, or was
much farther than that. Rome,--what was Rome? Plutarch
and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no
more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry
has been written this very day, under this very roof,
by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not
expired! These stony moments are still sparkling and
animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent,
and nature had spent her fires; and behold! all night,
from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming.
Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet,
and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know
that the secret of the world is profound, but who or
what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain
ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the
key into our hands. Of course the value of genius to us
is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and
juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind in good
earnest have availed so far in understanding themselves
and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak
announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken,
and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and
the unerring voice of the world for that time.
All that we call sacred history attests that the
birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.
Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the
arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a
truth until he has made it his own. With what joy I
begin to read a poem which I confide in as an
inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I
shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in
which I live,--opaque, though they seem transparent,
--and from the heaven of truth I shall see and
comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to
life and renovate nature, to see trifles animated
by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will
no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women,
and know the signs by which they may be discerned
from fools and satans. This day shall be better than
my birthday: then I became an animal; now I am
invited into the science of the real. Such is the
hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls
that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven,
whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with
me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that
he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice,
am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way
into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire
his skill to rise like a fowl or a flying fish, a little
way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing,
all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven that man shall
never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks,
and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have
lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can
lead me thither where I would be.
But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with
new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses,
has ensured the poet's fidelity to his office of
announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of
things, which becomes a new and higher beauty when
expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as
a picture-language. Being used as a type, a second
wonderful value appears in the object, far better
than its old value; as the carpenter's stretched
cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical
in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every
image," says Jamblichus, "are expressed through
images." Things admit of being used as symbols
because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in
every part. Every line we can draw in the sand has
expression; and there is no body without its spirit
or genius. All form is an effect of character; all
condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony,
of health; and for this reason a perception of beauty
should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches:--
"So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make."
Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical
speculation but in a holy place, and should go very
warily and reverently. We stand before the secret
of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance
and Unity into Variety.
The Universe is the externization of the soul.
Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance
around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore
superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies,
physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if
they were self-existent; but these are the retinue
of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said
Proclus, "exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear
images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions;
being moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods
of intellectual natures." Therefore science always
goes abreast with the just elevation of the man,
keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or the
state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.
Since everything in nature answers to a moral power,
if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is that
the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet
active.
No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that we
hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty
of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to
the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every
man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these
enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts
whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that
the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves
nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of
leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but
also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though
they express their affection in their choice of life
and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders
what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in
horses and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When
you talk with him he holds these at as slight a rate as
you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions,
but he is commanded in nature, by the living power
which he feels to be there present. No imitation or
playing of these things would content him; he loves
the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and
wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable is dearer than
a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature
the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body
overflowed by life which he worships with coarse but
sincere rites.
The inwardness and mystery of this attachment
drives men of every class to the use of emblems.
The schools of poets and philosophers are not more
intoxicated with their symbols than the populace
with theirs. In our political parties, compute the
power of badges and emblems. See the great ball
which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In
the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom,
and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness
the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick,
the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See
the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies,
leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other
figure which came into credit God knows how, on an
old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on a fort
at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle
under the rudest or the most conventional exterior.
The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all
poets and mystics!
Beyond this universality of the symbolic language,
we are apprised of the divineness of this superior
use of things, whereby the world is a temple whose
walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and
commandments of the Deity,--in this, that there is
no fact in nature which does not carry the whole
sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make
in events and in affairs, of low and high, honest
and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol.
Thought makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary
of an omniscient man would embrace words and images
excluded from polite conversation. What would be
base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes
illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.
The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness.
The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry
to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things
serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by
which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and
the more lasting in the memories of men: just as we
choose the smallest box or case in which any needful
utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found
suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind; as it
is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to
read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to
speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich
enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why
covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house
and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as
well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are
far from having exhausted the significance of the few
symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a
terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem
should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every
new relation is a new word. Also we use defects and
deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our
sense that the evils of the world are such only to
the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists
observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as
lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like,
--to signify exuberances.
For as it is dislocation and detachment from the
life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who
re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,--
re-attaching even artificial things and violations
of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,--disposes
very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers
of poetry see the factory-village and the railway,
and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken
up by these; for these works of art are not yet
consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them
fall within the great Order not less than the beehive
or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them
very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding
train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a
centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical
inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and
never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not
gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact remains
unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no
mountain is of any appreciable height to break the
curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy goes to the
city for the first time, and the complacent citizen
is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not
that he does not see all the fine houses and know that
he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as
easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The
chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great
and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and
every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum
and the commerce of America are alike.
The world being thus put under the mind for verb
and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it.
For though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs;
and though all men are intelligent of the symbols
through which it is named; yet they cannot originally
use them. We are symbols and inhabit symbols; workmen,
work, and tools, words and things, birth and death,
all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols,
and being infatuated with the economical uses of
things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The
poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives
them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and
puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate
object. He perceives the independence of the thought
on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the
accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of
Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the
poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all
things in their right series and procession. For
through that better perception he stands one step
nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis;
perceives that thought is multiform; that within the
form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend
into a higher form; and following with his eyes the life,
uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech
flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the
animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth,
are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of
man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and
higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and
not according to the form. This is true science. The
poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and
animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but
employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow
of space was strewn with these flowers we call suns and
moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with
animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks
he rides on them as the horses of thought.
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer
or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after
their appearance, sometimes after their essence,
and giving to every one its own name and not
another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which
delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made
all the words, and therefore language is the
archives of history, and, if we must say it, a
sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin
of most of our words is forgotten, each word was
at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency
because for the moment it symbolized the world to
the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist
finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant
picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone
of the continent consists of infinite masses of the
shells of animalcules, so language is made up of
images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use,
have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.
But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or
comes one step nearer to it than any other. This
expression or naming is not art, but a second nature,
grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What
we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or
change; and nature does all things by her own hands,
and does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes
herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. I
remember that a certain poet described it to me thus:
Genius is the activity which repairs the decays
of things, whether wholly or partly of a material
and finite kind. Nature, through all her kingdoms,
insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the
poor fungus; so she shakes down from the gills of
one agaric countless spores, any one of which,
being preserved, transmits new billions of spores
to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour
has a chance which the old one had not. This atom
of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to
the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods
off. She makes a man; and having brought him to
ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing
this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a
new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents
to which the individual is exposed. So when the
soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought,
she detaches and sends away from it its poems or
songs,--a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny,
which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary
kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious offspring,
clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out
of which they came) which carry them fast and far,
and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men.
These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The
songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent,
are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which
swarm in far greater numbers and threaten to devour
them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a
very short leap they fall plump down and rot, having
received from the souls out of which they came no
beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend
and leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.
So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech.
But nature has a higher end, in the production of
New individuals, than security, namely ascension,
or the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew
in my younger days the sculptor who made the statue
of the youth which stands in the public garden. He
was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, what
made him happy or unhappy, but by wonderful
indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according
to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning
break, grand as the eternity out of which it came,
and for many days after, he strove to express this
tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had fashioned out
of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus,
whose aspect is such that it is said all persons who
look on it become silent. The poet also resigns
himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated
him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally
new. The expression is organic, or the new type which
things themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun,
objects paint their images on the retina of the eye,
so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe,
tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence
in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into
higher organic forms is their change into melodies.
Over everything stands its daemon or soul, and, as
the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the
soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea,
the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed,
pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which
sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by
with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and
endeavors to write down the notes without diluting or
depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of
criticism, in the mind's faith that the poems are a
corrupt version of some text in nature with which they
ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets
should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of
a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group
of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not
tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode,
without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest
sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating
how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the
symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our
spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?
This insight, which expresses itself by what is
called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing,
which does not come by study, but by the intellect
being where and what it sees; by sharing the path
or circuit of things through forms, and so making
them translucid to others. The path of things is
silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them?
A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the
transcendency of their own nature,--him they will
suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's
part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura
which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly
learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and
conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy
(as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment
to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of
power as an individual man, there is a great public
power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks,
his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to
roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up
into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder,
his thought is law, and his words are universally
intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows
that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks
somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;"
not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the
intellect released from all service and suffered to
take its direction from its celestial life; or as the
ancients were wont to express themselves, not with
intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated by
nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way throws
his reins on his horse's neck and trusts to the
instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we
do with the divine animal who carries us through this
world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this
instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature;
the mind flows into and through things hardest and
highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.
This is the reason why bards love wine, mead,
narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal
-wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of
animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of
such means as they can, to add this extraordinary
power to their normal powers; and to this end they
prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture,
dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires,
gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal
intoxication,--which are several coarser or finer
quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar,
which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming
nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the
centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out
into free space, and they help him to escape the
custody of that body in which he is pent up, and
of that jail-yard of individual relations in which
he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were
professionally expressers of Beauty, as painters,
poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than
others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence;
all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as
it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was
an emancipation not into the heavens but into the
freedom of baser places, they were punished for that
advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration.
But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a
trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence
of the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of
opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure
and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not
an inspiration, which we owe to narcotics, but some
counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton says that the
lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the
epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods and their
descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden
bowl. For poetry is not 'Devil's wine,' but God's wine.
It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands
and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls,
drums, and horses; withdrawing their eyes from the
plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun,
and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which
should be their toys. So the poet's habit of living
should be set on a key so low that the common
influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should
be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice
for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.
That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to
come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass,
from every pine-stump and half-imbedded stone on which
the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and
hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill
thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and
covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with
wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of
wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is
not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis
excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The
use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation
and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched
by a wand which makes us dance and run about happily,
like children. We are like persons who come out of
a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the
effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all
poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men
have really got a new sense, and found within their
world another world, or nest of worlds; for, the
metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not
stop. I will not now consider how much this makes
the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which
also have their tropes, but it is felt in every
definition; as when Aristotle defines space to be
an immovable vessel in which things are contained;
--or when Plato defines a line to be a flowing
point; or figure to be a bound of solid; and many
the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have
when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists
that no architect can build any house well who does
not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in
Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its
maladies by certain incantations, and that these
incantations are beautiful reasons, from which
temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls
the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the
plants also are animals; or affirms a man to be a
heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his
head, upward; and, as George Chapman, following him,
writes,--
"So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top;" --
when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white
flower which marks extreme old age;" when Proclus
calls the universe the statue of the intellect;
when Chaucer, in his praise of 'Gentilesse,' compares
good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though
carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the
mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office
and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it
behold; when John saw, in the Apocalypse, the ruin
of the world through evil, and the stars fall from
heaven as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit;
when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common
daily relations through the masquerade of birds and
beasts;--we take the cheerful hint of the immortality
of our essence and its versatile habit and escapes,
as when the gypsies say "it is in vain to hang them,
they cannot die."
The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient
British bards had for the title of their order, "Those
Who are free throughout the world." They are free, and
they make free. An imaginative book renders us much
more service at first, by stimulating us through its
tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise
sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value
in books excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.
If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought,
to that degree that he forgets the authors and the
public and heeds only this one dream which holds him
like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may
have all the arguments and histories and criticism.
All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus,
Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling,
Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts
into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology,
palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we
have of departure from routine, and that here is a new
witness. That also is the best success in conversation,
the magic of liberty, which puts the world like a ball
in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems;
how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the
intellect the power to sap and upheave nature; how great
the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and
disappear like threads in tapestry of large figure and
many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and while the
drunkenness lasts we will sell our bed, our philosophy,
our religion, in our opulence.
There is good reason why we should prize this
liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who,
blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a
drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an
emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the
waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying.
The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we
are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it;
you are as remote when you are nearest as when you
are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every
heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet,
the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or
in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded
us a new thought. He unlocks our chains and admits
us to a new scene.
This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power
to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and
scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore
all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend
to that truth that the writer sees nature beneath him,
and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence
possessing this virtue will take care of its own
immortality. The religions of the world are the
ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
But the quality of the imagination is to flow,
and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the
color or the form, but read their meaning; neither
may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same
objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the
difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that
the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a
true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and
false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language
is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries
and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and
houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in
the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol
for an universal one. The morning-redness happens
to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen,
and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and,
he believes, should stand for the same realities to
every reader. But the first reader prefers as
naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a
gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a
gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally
good to the person to whom they are significant. Only
they must be held lightly, and be very willingly
translated into the equivalent terms which others use.
And the mystic must be steadily told,--All that you
say is just as true without the tedious use of that
symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra,
instead of this trite rhetoric,--universal signs,
instead of these village symbols,--and we shall both
be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show
that all religious error consisted in making the
symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing
but an excess of the organ of language.
Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands
eminently for the translator of nature into thought.
I do not know the man in history to whom things
stood so uniformly for words. Before him the
metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which
his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature.
The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When
some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig
which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise
which at a distance appeared like gnashing and
thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice
of disputants. The men in one of his visions, seen in
heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in
darkness; but to each other they appeared as men, and
when the light from heaven shone into their cabin,
they complained of the darkness, and were compelled
to shut the window that they might see.
There was this perception in him which makes the poet
or seer an object of awe and terror, namely that the
same man or society of men may wear one aspect to
themselves and their companions, and a different aspect
to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom he
describes as conversing very learnedly together,
appeared to the children who were at some distance,
like dead horses; and many the like misappearances. And
instantly the mind inquires whether these fishes under
the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in
the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only
so appear to me, and perchance to themselves appear
upright men; and whether I appear as a man to all eyes.
The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same question,
and if any poet has witnessed the transformation he
doubtless found it in harmony with various experiences.
We have all seen changes as considerable in wheat and
caterpillars. He is the poet and shall draw us with
love and terror, who sees through the flowing vest the
firm nature, and can declare it.
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do
not with sufficient plainness or sufficient
profoundness address ourselves to life, nor dare we
chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we
filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink
from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many
gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion,
the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise
is that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal
cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius
in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of
our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism
and materialism of the times, another carnival of the
same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer;
then in the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and
tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and
Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but
rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of
Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing
away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our
fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our
repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity
of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting,
the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung.
Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography
dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for
metres. If I have not found that excellent combination
of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could
I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now
and then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of
English poets. These are wits more than poets, though
there have been poets among them. But when we adhere
to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even
with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer
too literal and historical.
But I am not wise enough for a national criticism,
and must use the old largeness a little longer, to
discharge my errand from the muse to the poet
concerning his art.
Art is the path of the creator to his work. The
paths or methods are ideal and eternal, though few
men ever see them; not the artist himself for years,
or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions.
The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic
rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely
to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly,
not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put
themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter and
sculptor before some impressive human figures; the
orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others
in such scenes as each has found exciting to his
intellect; and each presently feels the new desire.
He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is
apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him
in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter,
"By God, it is in me and must go forth of me." He
pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him.
The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of
the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by
and by he says something which is original and beautiful.
That charms him. He would say nothing else but such
things. In our way of talking we say 'That is yours,
this is mine;' but the poet knows well that it is not
his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to
you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length.
Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have
enough of it, and as an admirable creative power exists
in these intellections, it is of the last importance
that these things get spoken. What a little of all we
know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science
are baled up! and by what accident it is that these are
exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the
necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and
heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly,
to the end namely that thought may be ejaculated as Logos,
or Word.
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me,
and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb,
stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand
and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that
dream-power which every night shows thee is thine
own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and
by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the
whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps,
or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise
and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes
he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible.
All the creatures by pairs and by tribes pour into
his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again
to people a new world. This is like the stock of air
for our respiration or for the combustion of our
fireplace; not a measure of gallons, but the entire
atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets,
as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have
obviously no limits to their works except the limits
of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried
through the street, ready to render an image of every
created thing.
O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and
pastures, and not in castles or by the sword-blade
any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal.
Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only.
Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs,
graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take
all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled
from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the
universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of
animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God
wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex
life, and that thou be content that others speak for
thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall
represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee;
others shall do the great and resounding actions also.
Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not
be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world
is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this
is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a
long season. This is the screen and sheath in which
Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou
shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall
console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not
be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy
verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And
this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to
thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall
fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome,
to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole
land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and
navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods
and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess
that wherein others are only tenants and boarders.
Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever
snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day
and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven
is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are
forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets
into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and
love,--there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee,
and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt
not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble. _