The torch, and other lectures and addresses

ENGLISH 1

California
WithSraWrr—

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

LIBRARY

COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE
DAVIS

••

THE TORCH

AND OTHER LECTURES AND
ADDRESSES

BY

GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE
1920

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

COPYRIGHT, IQOS, 1910, 1916, BY
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.

ENGLISH 1

CONTENTS

THE TORCH

Man and the Race, 3

The Language of all the World, 25

The Titan Myth (I), 43

The Titan Myth (H), 63

Spenser, 83

Milton, 103

Wordsworth, 121

Shelley, 143

THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Poetic Madness, 165
Marlowe, 183
Camoens, 202
Byron, 221
Gray, 241
Tasso, 261
Lucretius, 281
Inspiration, 301

THE POE CENTENARY, 323

SHAKESPEARE, 329

THE SALEM ATHEN^UM, 351

,!3-

THE TORCH

Eight lectures on Race Power in Litera
ture, delivered before the Lowell Institute
of Boston, 1903

AUGESCUNT ALIAE GENTES, ALIAE MINUUNTUR,
INQUE BREVI SPATIO MUTANTUR SAECLA ANIMANTUM
ET QUASI CURSORES VITAI LAMPADA TRADUNT

MAN AND THE RACE

IT belongs to a highly developed race to become, in a
true sense, aristocratic — a treasury of its best in practi
cal and spiritual types, and then to disappear in the sur
rounding tides of men. So Athens dissolved like a pearl
in the cup of the Mediterranean, and Rome in the cup
of Europe, and Judaea in the cup of the Universal Com
munion. Though death is the law of all life, man touches
this earthen fact with the wand of the spirit, and trans
forms it into the law of sacrifice. Man has won no vic
tory over his environment so sublime as this, finding in
his mortal sentence the true choice of the soul and in the
road out of Paradise the open highway of eternal life.
Races die; but the ideal of sacrifice as the highest race-
destiny has seldom occurred to men, though it has been
suggested both by devout Jews and by devout Irishmen
as the divinely appointed organic law of the Hebrew
and the Celt. In the general view of men the extinction
of a race partakes of the unreasoning finality of
nature.

The vital flow of life has this in common with disease
— that it is self -limited ; the fever runs its course, and
burns away. "All thoughts, all passions, all delights,"
have this history. In the large arcs of social being, move
ments of the human spirit, however embracing and pro
found, obey the same law of the limitation of specific
energy. Revolutions, reforms, re-births exhaust their

3

4 THE TORCH

fuel, and go out. Races are only greater units of man;
for a race, as for an individual, there is a time to die; and
that time, as history discloses it, is the moment of per
fection. This is the largest fact in the moral order of the
world; it is the center of providence in history. In the
life of the human spirit the death of the best of its
achieving elements, in the moment of their consumma
tion, is as the fading of the flower of the field or the
annual fall of the leaves of the forest in the natural world;
and unless this be a sacrificial death, it were wantonness
and waste like the deaths of nature; but man and his
works are supernatural, and raised above nature by an
imperishable relation which they contain. Race-history
is a perpetual celebration of the Mass. The Cross ini
tials every page with its broad gold, and he whose eye
misses that letter has lost the clue to the meaning. I
do not refer to the self-devotion of individuals, the
sacred lives of the race. I speak of the involuntary
element in the life of nations, or what seems such on
the vast scale of social life. Always some great culture
is dying to enrich the soil of new harvests, some civi
lization is crumbling to rubbish to be the hill of a more
beautiful city, some race is spending itself that a lower
and barbarous world may inherit its stored treasure-
house. Although no race may consciously devote itself
to the higher ends of mankind, it is the prerogative of
its men of genius so to devote it; nor is any nation truly
great which is not so dedicated by its warriors and
statesmen, its saints and heroes, its thinkers and
dreamers. A nation's poets are its true owners; and
by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of
its real possessions to strangers and aliens.

This dedication of the energy of a race by its men

MAN AND THE RACE 5

of genius to the higher ends of mankind is the sap of
all the world. The spiritual life of mankind spreads, the
spiritual unity of mankind grows, by this age-long sur
render of privilege and power into the hands of the
world's new men, and the leavening of the mass by the
best that has anywhere arisen in it, which is thus brought
about. The absorption of aristocracies in democracies,
the dissolution of the nobler product in inferior en
vironments, the salutary death of cultures, civilizations,
breeds of men, is the strict line on which history, draw
ing the sundered parts of the earth slowly together,
moves to that great consummation when the best that
has at any time been in the world shall be the portion
of every man born into it. If the old English blood,
which here on this soil gave birth to a nation, spread
civilization through it, and cast the orbit of its starry
course in time, is destined to be thus absorbed and lost
in the nation which it has formed, we should be proud
and happy in such a fate; for this is to wear the seal of
God's election hi history. Nay, if the aristocracy of the
whole white race is so to melt in a world of the colored
races of the earth, I for one should only rejoice in such
a divine triumph of the sacrificial idea in history; for
it would mean the humanization of mankind.

Unless this principle is strongly grasped, unless there
be an imperishable relation in man and his works which
they contain, and which, though it has other phases, here
appears in this eternal salvage stored up in a slowly per
fecting race, history through its length and breadth is
a spectacle to appall and terrify the reason. The per
petual flux of time —

"Scepters, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes
Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" —

6 THE TORCH

is a mere catastrophe of blood and error unless its mighty
subverting and dismaying changes are related to some
thing which does not pass away with dethroned gods,
abandoned empires and repealed codes of law and morals.
But in the extinction of religions, in imperial revolu
tions, in the bloody conflict of ideas, there is one thing
found stable; it is the mind itself, growing through ages.
That which in its continuity we call the human spirit,
abides. Men, tribes, states disappear, but the race-mind
endures. A conception of the world and an emotional
response thereto constitute the life of the race-mind, and
fill its consciousness with ideas and feelings, but in these
there is no element of chance, contingency or frailty;
they are master-ideas, master-emotions, clothed with
the power of a long reign over men, and imposing them
selves upon each new generation almost with the yoke
of necessity. What I designated as the race-mind —
the sole thing permanent in history — is this potential
ity of thought and feeling, in any age, realizing itself
in states of mind and habits of action long established
in the race, deeply inherited, and slowly modified. The
race-mind is the epitome of the past. It contains all
human energy, knowledge, experience, that survives. It
is the resultant of millions of lives whose earthly power
it stores in one deathless force.

This race-mind is simply formed. Life presents cer
tain permanent aspects in the environment, which gen
erates ways of behavior thereto, normal and general
among men. The world is a multiplicity, a harvest-
field, a battle-ground; and thence arises through human
contact ways of numbering, or mathematics, ways of
tillage, or agriculture, ways of fighting, or military tac
tics and strategy, and these are incorporated in individ-

MAN AND THE RACE 7

uals as habits of life. The craftsman has the mind of
his craft. Life also presents certain other permanent
internal aptitudes in the soul, whence arises the mind of
the artist, the inventor, the poet. But this cast of mind
of the mathematician or of the painter is rather a phase
of individual life. In the larger unit of the race, en
vironment and aptitude, working together in the historic
life of ages, develop ideas, moods and energies character
istic of the race in which they occur. In the sphere of
ideas, freedom is indissolubly linked with the English,
righteousness with the Hebrew; in the temperamental
sphere, a signal instance is the Celtic genius — mystery,
twilight, supernatural fantasy, lamentation, tragic dis
aster; or the Greek genius — definiteness, proportioned
beauty, ordered science, philosophic principle; and, in
the sphere of energy, land and gold hunger, and that
strange soul-hunger — hunger to possess the souls of
men — which is at the root of all propagandism, have
been motive powers in many races.

Thus, in one part or another of time and place, and
from causes within and without, the race, coming to its
best, flowers in some creative hope, ripens in some shap
ing thought, glows in some resistless enthusiasm. Each
of these in its own time holds an age in its grasp. They
seize on men and shape them in multitudes to their will,
as the wind drives the locusts; make men hideous ascet
ics, send them on forlorn voyages, devote them to the
block and the stake, make Argonauts, Crusaders, Lol
lards of them, fill Europe in one age with a riot of
revolution and in the next with the camps of tyrannic
power. These ideas, moods, energies have mysterious
potency; they seem to possess an independent being;
though, like all the phenomena of life-energy they are

8 THE TORCH

self -limited, the period of their growth, culmination and
decline extends through generations and centuries; they
seem less the brood of man's mind than higher powers
that feed on men. They are surrounded by a cloud
of witnesses — fanatics, martyrs, dupes; they doom
whole peoples to glory or shame; in the undying battle
of the soul they are the choosers of the slain. Though
they proceed from the human spirit, they rule it; and
in life they are the spiritual presences which are most
closely unveiled to the apprehension, devotion and love
of men.

The race-mind building itself from immemorial time
out of this mystery of thought and passion, as genera
tion after generation kneels and fights and fades, takes
unerringly the best that anywhere comes to be in the
world, holds to it with the cling of fate, and lets all else
fall to oblivion; out of this best it has made, and still
fashions, that enduring world of idea and emotion into
which we are born as truly as into the natural world.
It has a marvelous economy.

"One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world has never lost."

Egypt, India, Greece and Rome, Italy, the English,
France, America, the Turk, the Persian, the Russian,
the Japanese, the Chinese, the Negro feed its pure tra
dition of what excellence is possible to the race-mind,
and has grown habitual in its being; and, as in the old
myth, it destroys its parent, abolishing all these differ
ences of climate, epoch and skull. The race-mind uni
fies the race which it preserves; that is its irresistible
line of advance. It wipes out ihe barriers of time,
language and country. It undoes the mischief of Babel,

MAN AND THE RACE 9

and restores to mankind one tongue in which all things
can be understood by all men. It fuses the Bibles of
all nations in one wisdom and one practice. It knocks
off the tribal fetters of caste and creed; and, substitut
ing thought for blood as the bond of the world, it slowly
liberates that free soul, which is one in all men and com
mon to all mankind. To free the soul in the individual
life, and to accomplish the unity of mankind — that is
its work.

To share in this work is the peculiar and characteris
tic office of literature. This fusion of the nations of
the earth, this substitution of the thought-tie for the
blood-tie, this enfranchisement of the soul, is its chief
function; for literature is the organ of the race-mind.
That is why literature is immortal. Though man's in
heritance is bequeathed in many ways — the size and
shape of the skull, the physical predisposition of the
body, oral tradition, monumental and artistic works,
institutions — civilization ever depends in an increasing
degree upon literature both for expression and tradition;
and whatever other forms the race-mind may mold itself
into, literature is its most universal and comprehensive
form. That is why literature is the great conservator of
society. It shares in the life of the race-mind, partakes
of its nature, as language does of thought, corresponds
to it accurately, duplicates it, is its other-self. It is
through literature mainly that we know the race-mind,
and come to possess it; for though the term may seem
abstract, the thing is real. Men of genius are great in
proportion as they share in it, and national literatures
are great in proportion as they embody and express it.
Brunetiere, the present critic of France, has recently an
nounced a new literary formula. He declares that there

io THE TORCH

is a European literature, not the combined group of na
tional literatures, but a single literature common to
European civilization, and that national literatures in
their periods of culmination, are great in proportion as
they coincide for the time being with this common litera
ture, feed it, and, one after another taking the lead,
create it. The declaration is a gleam of self-conscious
ness in the unity of Europe. How slowly the parts of a
nation recognize the integrity of their territory and the
community of their interests is one of the constant les
sons of history; the Greek confederation, the work of
Alfred or of Bismarck, our own experience in the Revo
lutionary period illustrate it; so the unity of Europe is
still half-obscure and dark, though Catholicism, the Re
naissance, the Reformation, the Revolution in turn
flashed this unity forth, struggling to realize itself in
the common civilization. The literature of Europe is
the expression of this common genius — the best that
man has dreamed or thought or done, has found or been
in Europe — now more brilliant in one capital, now in
another as the life ebbs from state to state, and is re
newed; for, though it fail here or there, it never ceases.
This is the burning of the race-mind, now bright along the
Seine, the Rhine and the Thames, as once by the Ganges
and the Tiber. The true unity of literature, however,
does not lie in the literature of Europe or of India or of
antiquity, or in any one manifestation, but in that world-
literature which is the organ of the race-mind in its
entire breadth and wholeness. The new French formula
is a brilliant application, novel, striking and arresting,
of the old and familiar idea that civilization in its evo
lution in history is a single process, continuous, advanc
ing and integral, of which nations and ages are only the

MAN AND THE RACE n

successive phases. The life of the spirit in mankind is
one and universal, burns with the same fires, moves to
the same issues, joins in a single history; it is the race-
mind realizing itself cumulatively in time, and mainly
through the inheriting power of great literature.

I have developed this conception of the race-mind at
some length because it is a primary idea. The nature of
literature, and the perspective and interaction of partic
ular literatures, are best comprehended in its light. I
emphasize it. The world-literature, national literatures,
individual men of genius, are what they are by virtue
of sharing in the race-mind, appropriating it and identi
fying themselves with it; and what is true of them,
on the great scale and in a high degree, is true also of
every man who is born into the world. A man is a man
by participating in the race-mind. Education is merely
the process by which he enters it, avails himself of it,
absorbs it. In the things of material civilization this
is plain. All the callings of men, arts, crafts, trades,
sciences, professions, the entire round of practical life,
have a body of knowledge and method of work which
are like gospel and ritual to them; apprentice, journey
man and master are the stages of their career; and if
anything be added, from life to life, it is on a basis of
ascertained fact, of orthodox doctrine and fixed practice.
I suppose technical education is most uniform, and by
definiteness of aim and economy of method is most effi
cient; and in the professions as well as in the arts and
crafts competition places so high a premium on knowl
edge and skill that the mastery of all the past can teach
is compulsory in a high degree. Similarly, in society,
the material unities such as those which commerce,
manufacturing, banking establish and spread, are soon-

12 THE TORCH

est evident and most readily accepted; so true is this
that the peace of the world is rather a matter of finance
than of Christianity. These practical activities and the
interests that spring out of them lie in the sphere of
material civilization; but the race-mind, positive, endur
ing and beneficent as it is in that sphere, is there par
celed out and individualized, and gives a particular and
almost private character to man and classes of men, and
it seeks a material good. There is another and spiritual
sphere in which the soul which is one and the same in
all men comes to self-knowledge, has its training, and
achieves its mastery of the world. Essential, universal
manhood is found only here; for it is here that the race-
mind, by participation in which a man is a man, en
franchises the soul and gives to it the citizenship of the
world. Education in the things of the spirit is often
vague in aim and may seem wasteful in method, and
it is not supported by the thrust and impetus of physi
cal need and worldly hope; but it exists in all men in
some measure, for no one born in our civilization is
left so savage, no savage born in the wild is left so
primitive but that he holds a mental attitude, however
obscure, toward nature, man and God, and has some
discipline, however initial, in beauty, love and religion.
These things lie in the sphere of this soul. It is, never
theless, true that the greatest inequalities of condition
exist here, and not in that part of life where good is
measured by the things of fortune. The difference be
tween the outcast and the millionaire is as nothing to
that between the saint and the criminal, the fool and
the knower, the boor and the poet. It is a blessing
in our civilization, and one worthy of the hand of Provi
dence, that if in material things justice be a laggard and

MAN AND THE RACE 13

disparities of condition be hard to remedy, the roads to
church and school are public highways, free to all.
This charter of free education in the life of the soul,
which is the supreme opportunity of an American life,
is an open door to the treasury of man's spirit. There
whosoever will shall open the book of all the world,
and read and ponder, and shall enter the common mind
of man which is there contained and avail of its wisdom
and absorb its energies into his own and become one
with it in insight, power and hope, and ere he is aware
shall find himself mingling with the wisest, the holiest,
the loveliest, as their comrade and peer. He shall have
poet and sage to sup with him, and their meal shall be
the bread of life.

What, then, is the position of the youth — of any
man whose infinite life lies before him — at his entrance
on this education, on this attempt to become one with
the mind of the race? and, to neglect the material side
of life, what is the process by which he begins to live
in the spirit, and not as one new-born, but even in his
youth sharing in the wisdom and disciplined power of
a soul that has lived through all human ages — the soul
of mankind? We forget the beginnings of life; we for
get first sensation, first action, and the unknown magic
by which, as the nautilus builds its shell, we built out of
these early elements this world of the impalpable blue
walls, the ocean and prairie floors, and star-sown space,
each one of us for ourselves. There is a thought, which
I suppose is a commonplace and may be half-trivial,
but it is one that took hold of me in boyhood with great
tenacity, and stirred the sense of strangeness and marvel
in life; the idea that all I knew or should ever know was
through something that had touched my body. The

i4 THE TORCH

ether-wave envelops us as the ocean, and in that small
surface of contact is the sphere of sensibility — of light,
sound, and the rest — out of which arises the world
which each one of us perceives. It seems a fantastic
conception, but it is a true one. For me the idea
seemed to shrink the world to the dark envelope of my
own body. It served, however, to initiate me in the
broader conception that the soul is the center, and that
life — the world — radiates from it into the enclosing
infinite. Wordsworth, you remember, in his famous
image of our infancy presents the matter differently;
for him the infant began with the infinite, and boy and
man lived in an ever narrowing world, a contracting
prison, like that fabled one of the Inquisition, and in
the end life became a thing common and finite:

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy:

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."

This was never my own conception, nor do I think it is
natural to many men. On the contrary, life is an expan
sion. The sense of the larger world comes first, per
haps, in those unremembered years when the sky ceases
to be an inverted bowl, and lifts off from the earth. The
experience is fixed for me by another half-childish
memory, the familiar verses of Tom Hood in which he
describes his early home. You will recall the almost
nursery rhymes:

MAN AND THE RACE 15

"I remember, I remember

The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky;
It was a childish ignorance,

But now 't is little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven

Than when I was a boy."

Sentiment in the place of philosophy, the thought is the
same as Wordsworth's, but the image is natural and
true. The noblest image, however, that sets forth the
spread of the world, is in that famous sonnet by an ob
scure poet, Blanco White, describing the first time that
the sun went down in Paradise:

"Mysterious night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,

This glorious canopy of light and blue?

Yet, 'neath the curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,

And lo! creation widened in man's view."

The theory of Copernicus and the voyage of Columbus
are the great historical moments of such change in the
thoughts of men. As travel thus discloses the amplitude
of the planet and science fills the infinite of space for the
learning mind, history in its turn peoples the "dark
background and abysm of time." But more marvelous
than the unveiling of time and space, is that last revela
tion which unlocks the inward world of idea and emotion,
and gives solidity to life as by a third dimension. It is
this world which is the realm of imaginative literature;
scarcely by any other interpreter shall a man come into
knowledge of it with any adequacy; and here the sub-

16 THE TORCH

ject draws to a head, for it is by the operation of litera
ture in this regard that the race-mind takes possession
of the world.

We are plunged at birth in medias res, as the phrase
is, into the midst of things — into a world already old, of
old ideas, old feelings, old experience, that has drunk
to the lees the wisdom of the teacher of Ecclesiastes,
and renews hi millions of lives the life that has been
lived a million times; a world of custom and usage, of
immemorial habits, of causes prejudged, of insoluble
problems, of philosophies and orthodoxies and things
established; and yet, too, a world of the undiscovered.
The youth awakes in this world, intellectually, in litera
ture; and since the literature of the last age is that on
which the new generation is formed, he now first comes
in contact with the large life of mankind in the litera
ture of the last century. It is an extraordinary miscel
laneous literature, varied and copious in matter, full of
conflicting ideas, cardinal truths, and hazardous guesses;
and for the young mind the problem of orientation —
that is of finding itself, of knowing the true East, is
difficult. Literature, too, has an electric stimulation,
and in the first onrush of the intellectual life brings
that well-known storm and stress which is the true
awakening; with eager and delighted surprise the soul
feels fresh sensibilities and unsuspected energies rise in
its being. It is a time of shocks, discoveries, experiences
that change the face of the world. Reading the poets,
the youth finds new dynamos in himself. A new truth
unseals a new faculty in him; a new writer unlooses a
new force in him; he becomes, like Briar eus, hundred-
handed, like Shakespeare, myriad-minded. So like a
miracle is the discovery of the power of life.

MAN AND THE RACE 17

Let me illustrate the experience in the given case —
the literature of the nineteenth century. It will all fall
under three heads: the world of nature's frame, the
world of man's action, the world of God's being. Na
ture is, in the first instance, a spectacle. One may see
the common sights of earth, and still have seen little.
The young eye requires to be trained in what to see,
what to choose to see out of the vague whole, and so
to see his true self reflected there in another form, for
in the same landscape the farmer, the military engineer,
the painter see each a different picture. Burns teaches
the young heart to see nature realistically, definitely, in
hard outline, and always in association with human life
— and the presence of animals friendly and serviceable
to man, the life of the farm, is a dominant note in the
scene. Byron guides the eye to elemental grandeur in
the storm and in the massiveness of Alp and ocean.
Shelley brings out color and atmosphere and evokes
the luminous spirit from every star and dew-drop and
dying wave. Tennyson makes nature an artist's easel
where from poem to poem glows the frescoing of the
walls of life. Thus changing from page to page the
youth sees nature with Burns as a man who sympathizes
with human toil, with Byron as a man who would mate
with the tempest, with Shelley as a man of almost spiri
tualized senses, with Tennyson as a man of artistic
luxury. Again, nature is an order, a law in matter, such
as science conceives her; and this phase appears incep-
tively in "Queen Mab" and explicitly in "In Memoriam,"
and many a minor poem of Tennyson, not the less great
because minor in his work, in which alone the scientific
spirit of the age has found utterance equal to its own
sublimity. Yet, again, nature is a symbol, an expres-

i8 THE TORCH

sion of truth itself in another medium than thought; and
so, in minute ways, Burns moralized the "Mountain
Daisy," and Wordsworth the "Small Celandine"; and,
on the grand scale, Shelley mythologized nature in vast
oracular figures of man's faith, hope, and destiny. And
again, nature is a molding influence so close to human
life as to be a spiritual presence about and within it.
This last feeling of the participation of nature in life
is so fundamental that no master of song is without it;
but, in this group, Wordsworth is pre-eminent as its
exponent, with such directness, certainty and power did
he seize and express it. What he saw in dalesmen was
what the mountains had made them; what he told in
"Tintern Abbey" was nature's making of him; what he
sang in his lyric of ideal womanhood was such an inti
macy of nature with woman's being that it was scarcely
to be divided from her spirit. The power which fashions
us from birth, sustains the vital force of the body, and
feeds its growing functions, seems to exceed the blind
and mute region of matter, and feeding the senses with
color, music and delight shapes the soul itself and guides
it, and supports and consoles the child it has created
in mortality. I do not overstate Wordsworth's sense of
this truth; and it is a truth that twines about the roots
of all poetry like a river of life. It explains to the grow
ing boy something in his own history, and he goes on in
the paths he has begun to follow, it may be with touches
of vague mystery but with an expectant, receptive and
responsive heart. In regard to nature, then, the youth's
life under the favor of these poets appreciates her in
at least these four ways, artistically, scientifically, sym
bolically and spiritually, and begins to fix in molds of
his own spirit that miracle of change, the Protean being
of matter.

MAN AND THE RACE 19

To turn to the world of man's life, the simplest gain
from contact with this literature of which I am speaking
is in the education of the historic sense. Romance dis
covered history, and seeking adventure and thriving on
what it sought, made that great find, the Middle Ages,
which the previous time looked on much as we regard
the civilization of China with mingled ignorance and
contempt. It found also the Gael and the Northmen,
and many an outlying region, many a buried tract of
time. In Scott's novels characteristically, but also in
countless others, in the rescued and revived ballad of
England and the North, and in the renewed forms of
Greek imagination, the historic sense is strongly drawn
on, and no reader can escape its culture, for the place
of history and its inspirational power in literature is
fundamental in the spirit of the nineteenth century.
But what most arrests the young heart, in this world
of man's life, is those ideas which we sum up as the
Revolution, and the principle of democracy which is
primary in the literature of the last age. There the
three great words — liberty, fraternity and equality —
and the theory that in Shelley was so burning an enthusi
asm and in Byron so passionate a force, are still aflame;
and the new feeling toward man which was implicit in
democracy is deeply planted in that aspect of fraternity
which appears in the interest in the common lot, and in
that aspect of liberty which appears in the sense of the
dignity of the individual. Burns, Scott, Dickens illus
trate the one; Byron, Shelley and Carlyle the other.
The literature of the great watchwords, the literature
of the life of the humble classes, the literature of the
rebellious individual will — the latter flashing out many
a wild career and exploding many a startling theory of

20 THE TORCH

how life is to be lived — are the very core and substance
of the time. The application of ideas to life in the large,
of which Rousseau was so cardinal an example, opens
an endless field in a century so rich in discovery, so
active in intellect and so plastic in morals; and here one
may wander at will. Here is matter for a lifetime. But
without particularizing, it is plain how variously, how
profoundly and vividly through this literature the mind
is exercised in the human world, takes on the color, pic-
turesqueness and movement of history, builds up the
democratic social faith and develops the energy of in
dividual freedom, and becomes a place for the career of
great ideas.

There remains the world of God's being, or to vary
the phrase in sympathy with the mode of approach char
acteristic of the nineteenth century, the world in which
God is. It may be broadly stated that the notion of
what used to be called an absentee God, a far-off Ruler
overseeing by modes analogous to human administra
tion the affairs of earth as a distant province, finds no
place in this literature of the last age. The note of
thought is rather of the intimacy of God with his crea
tion and with the soul of man. God is known in two
ways; as an idea in the intellect and as an experience in
the emotions; and in poetry the two modes blend, and
often blur where they blend. Their habitual expression
in the great poets of the age is in pantheistic forms, but
this is rather a matter of form than of substance. The
immanence of the divine is the root-idea; in Wordsworth
it is an immanence of sublime power, seized through com
munion with nature; in Shelley, who was more pro
foundly human, it is an immanence of transcendent love,
seized through his sense of the destiny of the universe

MAN AND THE RACE 21

that carries in its bosom the glory of life; in Tennyson,
in whom the sense of a veiled intellect was more deep,
it is an immanence of mystery in both the outer and the
inner world. In other parts of the field, God is also con
ceived in history, and there immanent as Providence.
His immanence in the individual — a matter dark to
any thought — is most explicitly set forth by Emerson.
It is perhaps generally considered that in the literature
of the nineteenth century there is a large sceptical and
atheistic element; but this is an error. Genius by its
own nature has no part in the spirit that denies; it is
positive, affirms and creates. Its apparent denials will
be found to be partial, and affect fragments of a dead
past only; its denials are, in reality, higher and more
universal affirmations. If Wordsworth appears to put
nature in the place of God, or Shelley love, or Keats
beauty, they only affirm that phase of the divine which
is nighest to their own apprehension, affection and de
light. Their experience of the divine governs and blends
with their intellectual theory, sometimes, as I have said,
with a blur of thought. Each one's experience in these
things is for himself alone, and private; the ways of
the Spirit no man knows; but it is manifest that for
the opening mind, whether of youth or of older years,
the sense of eternity, however delicate, subtle and silent
is its realm, is fed nobly, sweetly and happily, by these
poets in whom the spirit of man crying for expression
unlocks the secrecy of its relations to the infinite.

Such is the nature of the contact of the mind with
literature by means of which it enters on its race inheri
tance of idea and emotion, takes possession of the stored
results, clothes itself with energies whose springs are in
the earliest distance of time, and builds up anew for it-

22 THE TORCH

self the whole and various world as it has come to be
known by man in his age-long experience. The illus
tration I have employed minimizes the constancy, the
completeness, the vastness of the process; for it takes no
account of other disciplines, of religious tradition and
practice, of oral transmission, and of such universal and
intimate formative powers as mere language. But it will
be found on analysis that all of these depend, in the
main, on literature in the broad sense; and, in the educa
tion of the soul in the higher life, the awakening, the re
vealing and upbuilding force lies, I am persuaded, in the
peculiar charge of literature in which the race-mind has
stamped an image of itself.

It is obvious that what I have advanced, brings the
principle of authority into a cardinal place in life, and
clothes tradition with great power. It might seem that
the individual in becoming one with the race-mind has
only to endue himself with the past as with a garment,
to take its mold with the patience of clay, and to be in
the issue a recast of the past, thinking old thoughts,
feeling old emotions, doing old actions, in pre-established
ways. But this is to misconceive the process by which
the individual effects this union; he does not take the
impress of the race-mind as the wax receives the imprint
of the seal. This union is an act of life, a process of
energy, joy and growth, of self-expression; here learning
is living, and there is no other way to know the doctrine
than to do its will; so the race-mind is not copied, but
is perpetually re-born in men, and the world which each
one of us thus builds for himself out of his preferred
capacities, memories and desires — our farmer's, engi
neer's, painter's world, as I have said — is his own origi
nal and unique world. There is none like it, none.

MAN AND THE RACE 23

Originality consists in this re-birth of the world in the
young soul. This world, nevertheless, the world of each
of us, is not one of willfulness, fantasy and caprice; if,
on the one hand, it is such stuff as dreams are made of,
on the other it is the stuff of necessity. It has a con
sistency, a law and fate, of its own, which supports, wields
and sustains it. Authority is no more than the recog
nition of and obedience to this underlying principle of
being, whose will is disclosed to us in man's life so far
as that life in its wholeness falls within our view; in
knowledge of this will all wisdom consists, of its action
in us all experience is woven, and in union with it all
private judgment is confirmed. Authority, truly inter
preted, is only another phase of that identity of the soul
in all men by virtue of which society exists, and espe
cially that intellectual state arises, that state which used
to be called the republic of letters and which is the insti
tution of the race-mind to be the center, the home and
hope of civilization in all ages — that state where the
unity of mankind is accomplished in the spiritual unities
of science, art and love.

To sum up these suggestions which I have thought it
desirable to offer in order that the point of view taken in
these lectures might, perhaps, be plain, I conceive of
history as a single process in which through century
after century in race after race the soul of man proceeds
in a progressive comprehension of the universe and evo
lution of its own humanity, and passes on to each new
generation its accumulated knowledge and developed
energies, in their totality and without loss, at the acme
of achievement. I conceive of this inheriting and be
queathing power as having its life and action in the race-
mind. I conceive of literature as an organ of the race-

24 THE TORCH

mind, and of education as the process by which the in
dividual enters into the race-mind, becomes more and
more man, and in the spiritual life mainly by means of
literature. I conceive of the body of men who thus live
and work in the soul as constituting the intellectual
state, that republic of letters, in which the race-mind
reaches, from age to age, its maximum of knowledge
and power, in men of genius and those whose lives they
illumine, move and direct; the unity of mankind is the
ideal end of this state, and the freeing of the soul which
takes place in it is its means. I conceive of the progres
sive life of this state, in civilization after civilization, as
a perpetual death of the best, in culture after culture,
for the good of the lower, a continuing sacrifice, in the
history of humanity, of man for mankind. And from
this mystery, though to some it may seem only the re
course of intellectual despair, I pluck a confident faith in
that imperishable relation which man and his works
contain, and which though known only in the continuity
of the race-mind, I am compelled to believe, has eternal
reality.

II

THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD

THE language of literature is the language of all the
world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the
notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which
constitutes the various tongues of the earth, and
conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of
all men. Words are intermediary between thought and
things. We express ourselves really not through words,
which are only signs, but through what they signify —
through things. Literature is the expression of life.
The question, then, is — what things has literature found
most effectual to express life, and has therefore habitu
ally preferred? and what tradition in consequence of this
habit of preference has been built up in all literatures,
and obtained currency and authority in this province
of the wider realm of all art? It is an interesting
question, and fundamental for any one who desires to
appreciate literature understandingly. Perhaps you will
permit me to approach it somewhat indirectly.

You are all familiar with something that is called
poetic diction — that is, a selected language specially
fitted for the uses of poetry; and you are, perhaps, not
quite so familiar with the analogous feature in prose,
which is now usually termed preciosity, or preciousness
of language, that is, a highly refined and esthetic diction,
such as Walter Pater employs. The two are constant
products of language that receives any literary cultiva-

25

26 THE TORCH

tion, and they are sometimes called diseases of language.
Thus, in both early and late Greek there sprang up lit
erary styles of expression, involving the preference of
certain words, constructions and even cadences, and the
teaching of art in these matters was the business of the
Greek rhetorician; so in Italy, Spain, and France, in the
Renaissance, similar styles, each departing from the
common and habitual speech of the time, grew up, and
in England you identify this mood of language in Eliza
beth's day as Euphuism. The phenomenon is common,
and belongs to the nature of language. Poetic diction,
however, you perhaps associate most clearly with the
mannerism in language of the eighteenth century in
England, when common and so-called vulgar words were
exiled from poetry, and Gray, for example, could not
speak of the Eton schoolboys as playing hoop, but only
as "chasing the rolling circle's speed," and when, to use
the stock example, all green things were "verdant." This
is fixed in our memory because Wordsworth has the
credit of leading an attack on the poetic diction of that
period, both critically in his prefaces and practically in
his verse; he went to the other extreme, and introduced
into his poetry such homely words as "tub," for ex
ample; he held that the proper language of poetry is the
language of common life. So Emerson in his addresses,
you remember, had recourse to the humblest objects for
illustration, and shocked the formalism of his time by
speaking of "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan."
He was applying in prose the rule of Wordsworth in
poetry. Walt Whitman represents the extreme of this
use of the actual language of men. But if you consider
the matter, you will see that this choice of the homely
word only sets up at last a fashion of homeliness in the

THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 27

place of a fashion of refinement, and breeds, for instance,
dialect poets in shoals; and often the choice is really not
of the word, but of the homely thing itself as the object
of thought and expressive image of it; and in men so
great as Emerson and Wordsworth the practice is a proof
of that sympathy with common life which made them both
great democrats. But in addition to the diction that
characterizes an age, you must have observed that in
every original writer there grows up a particular vocabu
lary, structure and rhythm that he affects and that in
the end become his mannerism, or distinctive style, so
marked that you recognize his work by its stamp alone,
as in Keats, Browning, and Swinburne in poetry, and in
Arnold in prose. In other words there is at work in the
language of a man, or of an age even, a constant principle
of selection which tends to prefer certain ways and forms
of speech to others, and in the end develops a language
characteristic of the age, or of the man.

This principle of selection, whether it works toward
refinement or homeliness, operates in the same way. It
must be remembered — and it is too often forgotten * —
that the problem of any artistic work is a problem of
economy. How to get into the two hours' traffic of the
stage the significance of a whole life, of a group of lives;
how to pack into a sixteen-line lyric a dramatic situation
and there sphere it in its own emotion; how to rouse
passion and pour it in a three-minute poem, like Shel
ley's "Indian Air" — all these are problems in economy,
by which speed, condensation, intensity are gained.
Now words in themselves are colorless, except so far as
their musical quality is concerned; but the thing that a
word stands for has a meaning of its own and usually a
meaning charged with associations, and often this asso-

28 THE TORCH

dative meaning is the primary and important one in its
use. A rose, for example, is but the most beautiful of
flowers in itself, but it is so charged with association in
men's lives, and still more heavily charged with long use
of emotion in literature, that the very word and mere
name of it awakes the heart and sets a thousand mem
ories unconsciously vibrating. This added meaning is
what I am accustomed to term an overtone in words;
and it is manifest that, in view of the necessity for econ
omy in poetic art, those words which are the richest and
deepest in overtone will be preferred, because of the speed,
certainty and fullness they contain. The question
will be what overtones in life appeal most to this or that
poet; he will reproduce them in his verse; Pope will use
the overtones of a polished society, Wordsworth and
Emerson those of humble life. Now our larger question
is what overtones are characteristically preferred in great
literature, in what objects do they most inhere, and in
what way is the authoritative tradition of literature, as
respects its means of expression, thus built up?

It goes without saying that all overtones are either of
thought or feeling. What modes of expression, then,
what material objects, what forms of imagination, what
abstract principles of thought, are most deeply charged
with ideas and emotions? It will be agreed that, as a
mere medium, music expresses pure emotion most directly
and richly; music seems to enter the physical frame
of the body itself, and move there with the warmth and
instancy of blood. The sound of words, therefore, can
not be neglected, and in the melody and echo of poetry
sound is a cardinal element; yet, it is here only the
veining of the marble, it is not the material itself. In
the objects which words summon up, there is sometimes

LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 29

an emotional power as direct and immediate as that of
music itself, as for example, in the great features of na
ture, the mountains, the plains, the ocean, which awe
even the savage mind. But, in general, the emotional
power of material objects is lent to them by association,
that is by the human use that has been made of them, as
on the plain of Marathon, to use Dr. Johnson's old illus
tration, it is the thought of what happened there that
makes the spectator's patriotism "gain force" as he
surveys the scene. This human use of the world is the
fountain of significance in all imaginative and poetic
speech; and in the broad sense history is the story of this
human use of the world.

History is so much of past experience as abides in
race-memory; and underlies race-literature in the same
way that a poet's own experience underlies his expres
sion of life. I do not mean that when a poet unlocks his
heart, as Shakespeare did in his sonnets, he necessarily
writes his own biography; in the poems he writes there
may be much of actual event as in Burns's love songs, or
little as in Dante's "New Life." Much of a poet's experi
ence takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is
oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the
power, the purity and height of his utterance may not
seldom be the greater because experience here uses the
voices of desire. "All I could never be," in Browning's
plangent line, has been the mounting strain of the sub-
limest and the tenderest songs of men. All Ireland could
never be, thrills and sorrows on her harp's most resonant
string, and is the master-note to which her sweetest
music ever returns. All man could never be makes the
sad majesty of Virgil's verse. As with a man, what a na
tion strongly desires is no small part of its life, and is the

30 THE TORCH

mark of destiny upon it, whether for failure or success;
so the note of world-empire is heard in the latest English
verse, and the note of humanity — the service of all men
— has always been dominant in our own. History,
then, must be thought of, in its relation to literature, as
including the desire as well as the performance of the race.
History, however, in the narrowest sense, lies close to
the roots of imaginative literature. The great place of
history and its inspirational power in the literature of
the last century I have already referred to; it is one of
the most important elements in the extraordinary reach
and range of that splendid outburst of imagination
throughout Europe. Aristotle recognized the value of
history as an aid to the imagination, at the very moment
that he elevated poetry above history. In that neces
sary economy of art, of which I spoke, it is a great gain
to have well-known characters and familiar events, such
as Agamemnon and the Trojan War, in which much
is already done for the spectator before the play begins.
So our present historical novelists have their stories half-
written for them in the minds of their readers, and es
pecially avail themselves of an emotional element there,
a patriotism, which they do not have to create. The use
of history to the imagination, however, goes farther than
merely to spare it the pains of creating character and in
cident and evoking emotion. It assists a literary move
ment to begin with race-power much as a poet's or —
as in Dickens's case — a novelist's own experience aids
him to develop his work, however much that experience
may be finally transformed in the work. Thus the novel
of the last age really started its great career from Scott's
historic sense working out into imaginative expression,
and in a lesser degree from so minor a writer as Miss

THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 31

Edgeworth in whose Irish stories — which were con
temporary history — Scott courteously professed to find
his own starting point. It is worth noting, also, that
the Elizabethan drama had the same course. Shake
speare following Marlowe's example developed from the
historical English plays, in which he worked in Scott's
manner, into his full control of imagination in the purely
ideal sphere. History has thus often been the hand
maid of imagination, and the foster-mother of great lite
rary ages. Yet to vary Aristotle's phrase — poetry is all
history could never be.

It appears to me, nevertheless, that history underlies
race-literature in a far more profound and universal way.
History is mortal: it dies. Yet it does not altogether die.
Elements, features, fragments of it survive, and enter
into the eternal memory of the race, and are there trans
formed, and — as we say — spiritualized. Literature is
the abiding-place of this transforming power, and most
profits by it. And to come to the heart of the matter,
there have been at least three such cardinal transforma
tions in the past.

The first transformation of history is mythology. I do
not mean to enter on the vexed question of the origin of
mythologies; and, of course, in referring to history as its
ground, I include much more than that hero-worship
such as you will find elaborated or invented in Carlyle's
essay on Odin, and especially I include all that experi
ence of nature and her association with human toil and
moods that you will find delineated with such marvelous
subtleness and fullness in Walter Pater's essay on
Dionysus. In mythology, mankind preserved from his
primitive experience of nature, and his own heroic past
therein, all that had any lasting significance; and, al-

32 THE TORCH

though all mythologies have specific features and a par
ticular value of their own, yet the race, coming to its best,
as I have said, bore here its perfect blossom in Greek
mythology. I know not by what grace of heaven, by
what felicity of blend in climate, blood and the fortune
of mortal life, but so it was that the human soul put forth
the bud of beauty in the Greek race; and there, at the
dawn of our own intellectual civilization and in the first
sunrise of our poetry in Homer, was found a world filled
with divine — with majestic and lovely figures, which
had absorbed into their celestial being and forms the
power of nature, the splendor and charm of the material
sphere, the fructifying and beneficent operations of the
external universe, the providence of the state and the
inspiration of all arts and crafts, of games and wars
and song; each of these deities was a flashing center of
human energy, aspiration, reliance — with a realm and
servants of its own; and mingling with them in fair
companionship was a company of demi-gods and heroes,
of kings and princes, and of golden youths, significant of
the fate of all young life — Adonis, Hippolytus, Orestes.
This mythologic world was near to earth, and it mixed
with legendary history, such history as the "Iliad" con
tained, and also with the private and public life of the
citizens, being the ceremonial religion of the state. It
was all, nevertheless, the transformation that man had
accomplished of his own past, his joys and sorrows, his
labors, his insights and desires, the deeds of his ancestors
— the human use that he made of the world. This was
the body of idea and emotion to which the poet appealed
in that age, precisely as our historical novelists now ap
peal to our own knowledge of history and pre-estab
lished emotion with regard to it, our patriotism. Here

LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 33

they found a language already full charged with emotion
and intelligence, of which they could avail themselves,
and speaking which they spoke with the voices of a
thousand years. Nevertheless, it was at best a language
like others, and subject to change and decay in expres
sive power. The time came when, the creative impulse
in mythology having ceased and its forms being fixed,
the mythic world lay behind the mind of the advancing
race which had now attained conceptions of the physical
universe, and especially ideas of the moral life, which
were no longer capable of being held in and expressed
by the mythic world, but exceeded the bounds of ear
lier thought and feeling and broke the ancient molds.
Then it was that Plato desired to exile the poets and their
mythology from the state. He could not be content,
either, with a certain change that had occurred; for the
creative power in mythology having long ceased, as I
have said, the imagination put forth a new function — a
meditative power — and brooding over the old fables of
the world of the gods discovered in them, not a record
of fact, but an allegorical meaning, a higher truth which
the fable contained. Mythology passed thus into an em
blematic stage, in which it was again long used by man
kind, as a language of universal power. Plato, however,
could not free himself from the mythologic habit of im
agination so planted in his race, and found the most ef
fective expression for his ideas in the myths of his own
invention which he made up by a dexterous and poetic
adaptation of the old elements; and others later than
Plato have found it hard to disuse the mythologic lan
guage; for, although the old religion as a thing of faith
and practice died away, it survived as a thing of form
and feature in art, as a phase of natural symbolism and

34 THE TORCH

of inward loveliness of action and passion in poetry, as
a chapter of romance in the history of the race; and the
modern literatures of Europe are, hi large measure, un
intelligible without this key.

The second great transformation of history is chivalry.
Here the phenomenon is nearer in tune and lies more
within the field of observation and knowledge; it is pos
sible to trace the stages of the growth of the story of Ro
land with some detail and precision; but, on the other
hand, the Arthur myth reaches far back into the be
ginnings of Celtic imagination, and all such race-myths
tend to appropriate and embody in themselves the char
acteristic features both of one another and of whatever is
held to be precious and significant in history or even in
classical and Eastern legend. The true growth, however,
is that feudal culture, which we know as knighthood,
working out its own ideal of action and character and
sentiment on a basis of bravery, courtesy, and piety,
and thereby generating patterns of knighthood, typical
careers, and in the end an imaginative interpretation of
the purest spiritual life itself in the various legends of
the Holy Grail. As in the pagan world the forms and
fables of mythology and their interaction downward with
the human world furnished the imaginative interpreta
tion of life as it then was, so for the medieval age, the
figures and tales of chivalry and their interaction upward
with the spiritual world of Christianity, and also with
the magic of diabolism round about, furnished the imagi
native interpretation of that later life. It was this new
body of ideas and emotion in the minds of men that the
medieval poets appealed to, availed themselves of, and
so spoke a language of imagery and passion that was a
world-language, charged as I have said with the thought

THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 35

and feeling, the tradition, of a long age. What happened
to the language of mythology, happened also to this
language; it lost the power of reality, and men arose who,
being in advance of its conceptions of life, desired to
exile it, denounce it or laugh it out of existence, like
Ascham in England, and Cervantes in Spain. It also
suffered that late change into an allegorical or emble
matic meaning, and had a second life in that form as in
the notable instance of Spenser's "Faerie Queene." It
also could not die, but — just as mythology revived
in the Alexandrian poets for a season, and fed Theo
critus and Virgil — chivalry was re-born in the last cen
tury, and in Tennyson's Arthur, and in Wagner's "Par
sifal" lived again in two great expressions of ideal life.

The third great transformation of history is contained
in the Scriptures. The Bible is, in itself, a singularly
complete expression of the whole life of a race in one
volume — its faith and history blending in one body of
poetry, thought and imaginative chronicle. It contains
a celestial world in association with human events; its
patriarchs are like demi-gods, and it has heroes, legends,
tales in good numbers, and much romantic and passion
ate life, on the human side, besides its great stores of
spirituality. In literary power it achieves the highest in
the kinds of composition that is uses. It is as a whole,
regarded purely from the human point of view, not un
fairly to be compared in mass, variety, and scope of ex
pression, with mythology and chivalry as constituting a
third great form of imaginative language; nor has its his
tory been dissimilar in the Christian world to which it
came with something of that same remoteness in time and
reality that belonged equally to mythology and chivalry.
It was first used in a positive manner, as a thing of fact

36 THE TORCH

and solid belief; but there soon grew up, you remember,
in the Christian world that habit of finding a hidden
meaning in its historical record, of turning it to a parable,
of extracting from it an allegorical signification. It be
came, not only in parts but as a whole, emblematic, and
its interpretation as such was the labor of centuries.
This is commonly stated as the source of that universal
mood of allegorizing which characterized the medieval
world, and was as strongly felt in secular as in religious
writers. Its historical tales, its theories of the universe,
its cruder morals in the Jewish ages, have been scoffed
at, just as was the case with the Greek myth, from the
Apostate to Voltaire and later; but how great are its
powers as a language is seen in the completeness with
which it tyrannized over the Puritan life in England and
made its history, its ideas, its emotions the habitual and
almost exclusive speech of that strong Cromwellian age.
In our country here in New England it gave the mold
of imagination to our ancestors for two whole centuries.
A book, which contains such power that it can make
itself the language of life through so many centuries and
in such various peoples is to be reckoned as one of the
greatest instruments of race-expression that man pos
sesses.

Mythology, chivalry, the Scriptures are the tongues of
the imagination. It is far more important to know them
than to learn French or German or Italian, or Latin or
Greek; they are three branches of that universal lan
guage which though vainly sought on the lips of men is
found in their minds and hearts. To omit these in edu
cation is to defraud youth of its inheritance; it is like de
stroying a long-developed organ of the body, like putting
out the eye or silencing the nerves of hearing. Nor is it

THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 37

enough to look them up in encyclopedias and notes, and
so obtain a piecemeal information; one must grow fa
miliar with these forms of beauty, forms of honor, forms
of righteousness, have something of the same sense of
their reality as that felt by Homer and Virgil, by the
singer of Roland and the chronicler of the "Mort
d'Arthur," by St. Augustine, and St. Thomas. He must
form his imagination upon these idealities, and load his
heart with them; else many a masterpiece of the human
spirit will be lost to him, and most of the rest will be im
paired. If one must know vocabulary and grammar
before he can understand the speech of the mouth, much
more must he know well mythology, chivalry and Bible-
lore before he can take possession of the wisdom that the
race-mind has spoken, the beauty it has molded life
into, as a thing of passion and action, the economy of
lucid power it has achieved for perfect human utterance,
in these three fundamental forms of a true world-lan
guage. The literature of the last century is permeated
with mythology, chivalry and to a less degree with
Scripture, and no one can hope to assimilate it, to re
ceive its message, unless his mind is drenched with these
same things; and the further back his tastes and desires
lead him into the literature of earlier times, the greater
will be his need of this education in the material, the
modes and the forms of past imagination.

It may be that a fourth great tongue of the imagina
tion is now being shaped upon the living of men in
the present and succeeding ages. If it be so, this will be
the work of the democratic idea, which is now still at the
beginning of its career ; but since mythology and chivalry
had their development in living men, it is natural to
suppose that the human force is still operative in our

38 THE TORCH

own generation as it once was in those of Hellenic and
medieval years. The characteristic literature of de
mocracy is that of its ideas, spiritualized in Shelley, and
that of the common lot as represented in the sphere of
the novel, spiritualized most notably in Victor Hugo. In
our own country it is singular to observe that the demo
cratic idea, though efficient in politics, does not yet es
tablish itself in imaginative literature with any great
power of brilliancy, does not create great democratic
types, or in any way express itself adequately. This
democratic idea, in Dickens for example, uses the ex
perience of daily life, that is, contemporary history, or at
least it uses an artistic arrangement of such experience;
but the novel as a whole has given us in regard to the
common lot, rather a description of life in its variety
than that concentrated and essential significance of life
which we call typical. If democracy in its future course
should evolve such a typical and spiritualized embodi
ment of itself as chivalry found in Arthur and the Round
Table, or as the heroic age of Greece found in Achilles
and the Trojan War, or as the genius of Rome found
in Aeneas and his fortunes, then imagination — race-
imagination will be enriched by this fourth great instru
ment; but this is to cast the horoscope of too distant an
hour. I introduce the thought only for the sake of in
cluding in this broad survey of race-imagination that
experience of the present day, that history in the con
temporary process of being transformed, out of which the
mass of the books of the day is now made.

Let me recur now to that principle of selection which
through the cumulative action of repeated preferences of
phrase and image fixes a habit of choice which at last
stamps the diction of a man, a school or an age. It is

THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 39

plain that in what I have called the transformation of
history, of which literature is the express image, there is
the same principle of selection which, working through
long periods of race-life, results at last in those idealities
of persons and events in which inhere most powerfully
those overtones of beauty, honor and righteousness that
the race has found most precious both for idea and
emotion; and to these are to be added what I have
had no time to include and discuss, the idealities of
persons and events found outside mythology, chivalry
and Scripture, in the work of individual genius like
Shakespeare, which nevertheless have the same ground
in history, in experience, that in them is similarly trans
formed. Life-experience spiritualized is the formula of
all great literature; it may range from the experience of
a single life, like Sidney's in his sonnets to that of an
empire in VirgiPs "Aeneid," or of a religion in Dante's
"Comedy." In either case the formula which makes it
literature is the same. I have illustrated the point by
the obvious spiritualizations of history. Race-life, from
the point of view of literature, results at last in these
molds of imagination, and all else though slowly, yet
surely, drops away into oblivion. In truth, it is only by
being thus spiritualized that anything human survives
from the past. The rose, I said, has been so dipped in
human experience that it is less a thing of nature than
a thing of passion. In the same way Adonis, Jason and
Achilles, Roland and Arthur, Lancelot, Percival and Gala
had, Romeo and Hamlet have drawn into themselves
such myriads of human lives by admiration and love
that from them everything material, contemporary and
mortal has been refined away, and they seem to all of
us like figures moving in an immortal air. They have

40 THE TORCH

achieved the eternal world. To do this is the work of
art. It may seem a fantastic idea, but I will venture the
saying of it, since to me it is the truth. Art, I sup
pose, you think of as the realm and privilege of selected
men, of sculptors, painters, musicians, poets, men of
genius and having something that has always been called
divine in their faculty; but it appears to me that art,
like genius, is something that all men share, that it is
the stamp of the soul in every one, and constitutes their
true and immaterial life. The soul of the race, as it is
seen in history and disclosed by history, is an artist soul;
its career is an artistic career; its unerring selective
power expels from its memory every mortal element and
perserves only the essential spirit, and thereof builds
its ideal imaginative world through which it finds its
true expression; its more perfect comprehension of the
world is science, its more perfect comprehension of its
own nature is love, its more perfect expression of its
remembered life is art. Mankind is the grandest and
surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure
fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the
beautiful soul.

It appears, then, that the language of literature in the
race is a perfected nature and a perfected manhood and
a perfected divinity, so far as the race at the moment can
see toward perfection. The life which literature builds
up ideally out of the material of experience is not wholly
a past life, but there mingles with it and at last con
trols it the life that man desires to live. Fullness of
life — that fullness of action which is poured in the
epic, that fullness of passion which is poured in the
drama, that fullness of desire that is poured in the lyric
: — the life of which man knows himself capable and

THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 41

realizes as the opportunity and hope of life — this is the
life that literature enthrones in its dream. You have
heard much of the will to believe and of the desire to
live: literature is made of these two, warp and woof.
Race after race believes in the gods it has come to know
and in the heroes it has borne, and in what it wishes to
believe of divine and human experience; and the life it
thus ascribes to its gods and to its own past is that life
it most ardently desires to live. Literature, which
records this, is thus the chief witness to the nobility, the
constancy and instancy of man's effort for perfection.
What wonder, then, if in his sublimest and tenderest song
there steals that note of melancholy so often struck by
the greatest masters in the crisis and climax of their
works, and which, when so struck, has more of the infi
nite in it, more of the human in it, than any other in the
slowly triumphant theme!

To sum up — the language of literature is experience;
the language of race-literature is race-experience, or his
tory, the human use that the race has made of the world.
The lav/ appears to be that history in this sense is slowly
transformed by a refining and spiritualizing process into
an imaginative world, such as the world of mythology,
chivalry or the Scriptures, and that this world in turn
becomes emblematic and fades away into an expression
of abstract truth. The crude beginning of the process is
seen in our historical fiction; the height of it in Arthur
or in Odin; the end of it in the symbolic or allegoric in
terpretation of even so human a book as Virgil's
"Aeneid." Human desire for the best enters into this
process with such force that the record of the past slowly
changes into the prophecy of the future, and out of the
passing away of what was is built the dream of what

42 THE TORCH

shall be; so arises in race-life the creed of what man
wishes to believe and the dream of the life he desires to
live; this human desire for belief and for life is, in the
final analysis, the principle of selection whose operation
has been sketched, and on its validity rests the validity
and truth of all literature.

Ill

THE TITAN MYTH
I

I PROPOSE now to illustrate by the specific example
of the Titan Myth how it is that Greek mythology
is a tongue of the imagination — a living tongue of the
universal imagination of men.

The Titan Myth — I wonder what it means to you?
The Titans were the earliest children of the earth, elder
than the Greek gods even, and were the sons of the
Earth, their mother. You perhaps think of them as
mere giants, such as Jack killed — medieval monsters
of the kin of Beauty and the Beast. Think of them
rather as majestic forms, with something of the sweep
and mystery of those figures you may remember out of
Ossian and his misty mountains, with the largeness and
darkness of the earth in them, a massive dim-featured
race, but with an earthly rather than celestial grandeur,
embodiments of mighty force dull to beauty, intelligence,
light. When Zeus, the then young Olympian, was born,
and with him the other deities of the then new divine
world, and when he dethroned his father and put the new
gods in possession of the universe, these children of the
old regime, misliking change, took the father's part, and
warred on the usurper of ancient power, and were over
thrown by his lightnings, and mountains were piled on
them; and now you may read in Longfellow of Encela-
dus, the type and image of their fate, buried under

43

44 THE TORCH

Etna whose earthquakes are the struggling of the great
Titan beneath. This was the war of the Titans and the
gods. One of the Titans, however, stood apart from the
rest, being wiser than they. Prometheus made friends
with Zeus, but his fortune was not less grievous to him;
for when he saw that Zeus took no account of men — "of
miserable men," — but yearned to destroy them from
the face of the earth, he took pity on mankind, and stole
for them the celestial fire and gave it to them, for until
then man had lived a life of mere nature, without knowl
edge, or any arts, not even that of agriculture. Prome
theus was the fire-bringer ; and, bringing fire, he brought
to men all the uses of fire, such as metal-working, for
example, and in a word he gave to mankind its entire
career, the long labor of progressive civilization, and
the life of the spirit itself which is kindled, as we say,
from the Promethean spark within. It was but a step
for the Pagan imagination, at a later stage, to think of
this patron of mankind as the creator of men, since he
was the fosterer of their lives; it was said that he had
made clay images, and moistened these with holy water,
so that they became living creatures — men. Zeus was
angered by this befriending of the human race; and he
flung Prometheus upon a mountain of the Caucasus,
chained him there, and planted a vulture to eat always
on his entrails; and in the imagination of men there
he hangs to this day. Yet there was one condition on
which he might be released and again received into
heaven. He alone knew the secret of the fall of Zeus —
the means by which it would be brought about; and if
he would tell this secret, so that Zeus might avoid the
danger as was possible, and thereby his unjust reign
become perpetual, Prometheus might save himself. But

THE TITAN MYTH 45

the Titan so loved justice that he kept silence, knowing
that in the course of ages at last Zeus would fall. This
was the myth of Prometheus.

Of the aspects which the entire legend presents in
literature, there are three which stand out. I shall ask
you to consider the first as the cosmic idea — the idea
of the law of human progress that it contains. To the
Greek mind the development of the universe consisted
in the supplanting of a lower by a higher power, under
the will of a supreme fate or necessity which was above
both gods and men: after Uranus was Chronos, after
Chronos was Zeus, after Zeus there would be other gods.
The Greeks were themselves a higher power in their
world, and as such had conquered the Persians; theirs
was the victory of light over darkness, of civilization
over barbarism, and therefore on the walls of their great
temple, the Parthenon, which was the embodiment of
their spiritual consciousness as a race, they depicted
three great mythic events symbolizing the victory of the
higher power — that is, the war of the Centaurs and
the Lapithse, of the Athenians and the Amazons, and
of the gods and the Titans. This cosmic idea — the
Greek conception of progress — it is more convenient
to delay to the next lecture. Secondly, I shall ask you
to consider the conception of the friend of man suffering
for his sake — one that without irreverence may be desig
nated as the Christ-idea. This phase of the myth natu
rally has received less development in literature, inas
much as the ideas and emotions it embodies find expres
sion inevitably and almost exclusively in the symbol of
the Cross and the life that led up thereto. But for
those who, in the chances of time have stood apart from
the established faith of Christendom, and have not sel-

46 THE TORCH

dom encountered the creed and practice of their age in
persecution, being victims for the sake of reason — for
these men, the figure of Prometheus has been in the
place of the Cross, an image of themselves, their proto
type. The expression of this particular idea, however,
has been slight in literature; but it naturally appears
there, and Prometheus has come to be the characteristic
symbol of the peculiar suffering of genius; so Longfellow
uses it in his "Prometheus."

"All is but a symbol painted

Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer;
Only those are crowned and sainted
Who with grief have been acquainted,
Making nations nobler, freer."

Under this aspect Prometheus is the martyr of humanity.
Thirdly, I shall ask you to consider the conception of
Prometheus, not as an individual, but as identified with
mankind, as mankind itself suffering in all its race-life
and throughout its history, wretched, tyrannized over
by some dark and unjust necessity, yet unterrified, reso
lute, invincible in its faith in that

"One far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."

The imagination, age after age, finds in Prometheus such
a symbol of man's race-life. This is to conceive of Pro
metheus as the idea of humanity.

^Eschylus fixed the form of the Titan for the imagina
tion and surrounded it with the characteristic scene.
He nailed Prometheus in chains riveted into the rock,
the vast desolate cliffs of the Caucasus, an indistinct and
mighty figure, frosted with the night and watching the
stars in their courses with lidless eyes, the dark vulture

THE TITAN MYTH 47

hovering in his bosom. Perhaps I can make the scene
more real to you by a passage from a letter of a friend
who last spring was in that solitude. "All the fore
noon," he says, "I have been traveling forward beneath
the giant wall of the frosty Caucasus. The snow-clad
plain serves as a dazzling foreground to the towering
rugged peaks so sharply denned in steel white and dull
black wherever the snow leaves the beetling rock bare.
The gorges and ravines which are here and there visible
look like old-time scars of jagged wounds on the sullen
face of the mountains. The dreary solitude of the scene
is very impressive. Far off yonder in the distance I
can picture the chill and desolate vulture-peak where
Prometheus, in his galling chains, longed for the day to
give peace to 'starry-kirtled night' (if I remember my
^Eschylus rightly) and yearned for the sun to arise and
dispel the hoar-frost of dawn. It all comes up again
before my mind in this far-away solitary region."
Thither to this scene, that my friend describes, came
with comfort or counsel the daughters of the Ocean, and
old Oceanus himself, the Titan's brother, and lo on her
wanderings, and Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, to make
terms with Prometheus, or inflict new tortures should he
refuse. But Prometheus remained the resolute and faith
ful sufferer; there stretched on the rock he would await
the sure coming of that justice which is above even the
heavens of Zeus and contains and orders even them. It
is a sublime moral situation. Who could ever forget
that figure, once stamped on his imagination, though but
a schoolboy? So Byron remembered his Harrow days:
"Of the 'Prometheus' of ^Eschylus," he says, "I was
passionately fond as a boy. It was one of the Greek
dramas we used to read three times a year at Harrow.

48 THE TORCH

Indeed, it and the 'Medea' were the only ones, except
the 'Seven Against Thebes,' which pleased me. The
Trometheus,' if not exactly in my plan has always been
so much in my head that I well understand how its
influences have passed into all I have done." It goes
with this acknowledgment, and bespeaks the critic's acute
penetration, to find Jeffrey affirming that there is no
work of modern literature that more than Byron's
"Manfred" approaches the "Prometheus" of ^Eschylus.
Byron only illustrates the fascination that this myth
has for the race; the world will never let go of this
symbol of itself.

The moment and the cause, the invincible resolution
denying the will of the apparent gods of the hour in
obedience to the higher light within, are the same that
have nailed all martyrs to the cross, sent patriots to rot
in prisons, and borne on the leaders of all forlorn
hopes in their death-charges, and of these the history
of the last century gives many a modern instance. In
our own time Siberia has been one vast Caucasus; I re
member when not long ago its name was Crete; and now
it is Macedonia — they are all tracts of that desolation
that swallows up in its voiceless solitude and buries from
the ears of God and man the human cry. In the mind
and memory of the race there are two great mountains;
over against Sinai towers the peak of the Caucasus with
perpetual challenge; yet they are twin peaks — one,
the mount of faith in God, the other, the mount of faith
in man. You know how the race, from time to time,
as great moods sweep over it — the mood of asceticism,
or of Christian chivalry, or of world conquest, sets up
some historic figure as the type and expression of this
mood — some St. Francis, or Philip Sidney, or Napoleon;

THE TITAN MYTH 49

this is because the race sees in these men a greater image
of itself in those particular moods. So, in a more ab
stract way the race takes some part of its self-conscious
ness — say, its perception of what is evil in its own heart
— and puts it outside of itself so as to see it better,
projects or objectifies itself, as we say, in an image, like
Mephistopheles; it sees in Mephistopheles itself in a
certain mood — a mood of mocking denial of all good.
So, in its own history and memory the race perceives
that often its greatest men, those who have been its
civilizers, have been victims of the powers of their
day, and have served the race and carried on its life
by fidelity to their own hearts and the truth in them in
spite of the utmost suffering that could be inflicted on
them. The race thinks of these men as constituting its
ov/n life, gathers and blends them in one being and finds
that being — the type that stands for its continuous
life — in Prometheus. In him the race projects — as
I have said — or objectifies itself in the mood of suffer
ing the worst for the good of men, with undismayed
courage and unbroken will. Prometheus is man as he
knows himself in history, the immortal sufferer under
injustice bringing even by his sorrows the higher justice
that shall at last prevail — he is this figure set clear and
separate before the mind: he is the idea of humanity,
conceived in the characteristic act of its noblest life — •
he is mankind.

I dwelt in the last lecture on the treasure that the race-
imagination possesses in the Greek myths, as a means
of expression; in the whole inheritance of our literature
there is nothing that the poet finds so great a gift as
these forms and tales of the mythic world in which the
work of creation is already half done for him, and the

50 THE TORCH

storing of ideas and emotions has been accomplished,
so that with a word he can release in the mind the flood
of meaning they contain, as if he pushed an electric
button; they are to him what the common law is to a
lawyer — the stored results of the past, in experience
and principle; he has only to adopt them into his human
verse, as he adopts into his verse of nature the Andes
and Ararat. It was not surprising that such a tale as
the Titan Myth should be among the chief memories of
the race, never wholly forgotten; yet it waited for its
moment. After the first mention of it in literature three
thousand years went by, before the moment came. Then
the French Revolution struck its hour. It is true that
the myth stirred in the Renaissance when all things
Greek revived, and Calderon, the great Spanish poet,
treated some minor aspects of it; but, in and about the
Revolution, it was handled repeatedly by great poets
who strove to recast the story and use it to express the
ideas and emotions of their own age. Goethe in his
youth, and the Germans — Herder and Schlegel, each
wrote a Prometheus; in Italy Monti took the subject; in
England Landor and Byron touched it lightly, and Keats
and Shelley made it the matter of great poems; and later,
in France, where Voltaire had approached it, Victor
Hugo and Edgar Quinet elaborated it; nor do these
names exhaust the list of those who in the last century
made it a principal theme of verse. This re-birth was
a natural one; for the French Revolution, which you
remember Wendell Phillips in his great Harvard speech
described as "the most unmixed blessing that ever befell
mankind" — the French Revolution was rooted in the
idea of humanity and was the cause of humanity. More
over, the Revolution has a Titanic quality in itself; there

THE TITAN MYTH 51

is the feeling of large earth-might in the struggle of the
heavy masses of the darkened people, peasant-born; and
in their revolt against the kingdoms of the world whose
serfs they were, there was the sense of a strife with the
careless luxury of the unjust gods; there was in the
wretchedness of the European peoples the state of man
that Prometheus pitied when he rebuked Zeus for tak
ing no account of men — "of miserable men"; and in
the tumult and ardor and invincible faith of the Revo
lution there was both the Titanic atmosphere and the
Promethean spirit. Shelley was the poet through whom v
the literary expression of the Revolution was to be
poured. It is necessary to mark the time precisely.
The Revolution had flamed, and in Napoleon, whom more
than one poet celebrated as the Prometheus of the age,
had apparently flamed out. The Revolution, as a politi
cal idea seemed to have failed, and Europe sank back
into the arms of king and priest. It was then that these
great Englishmen, Byron and Shelley, in their youth
took up the fallen cause and bore it onward in their
hands till Byron died for it in the war of Greek Inde
pendence and Shelley, having sung his song, sank in the
waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

Shelley came to this subject naturally and through
years of unconscious preparation; and when the moment
of creation came, he felt the Titanic quality, that I
spoke of, in the Revolution, felt the Promethean secur
ity of victory it contained — felt, too, the Promethean
suffering which was the heart of mankind as he saw it
surveying Europe in his day, and knew it in his own
bosom as well. He conceived of Prometheus as man
kind, of his history and fate as the destiny of man; and
being full of that far sight of Prometheus which saw

52 THE TORCH

the victorious end — being as full of it as the wheel of
Ezekiel was full of eyes — he saw, as the center of all
vision, Prometheus Unbound — the millennium of man
kind. He imagined the process of that great liberation
and its crowning prosperities. This is his poem. In
this poem the Revolution as a moral idea reached its
height; that is what makes it, from the social point of
view, the race-point of view, the greatest work of the
last century in creative imagination — for it is the sum
mary and center, in the world of art, of the greatest
power in that century — the power of the idea of human
ity. I shall present only the cardinal phases of the
dramatic situation, hi the poem, and of the moral idea
by which it is solved.

The poem opens in the Caucasus, with Prometheus
bound to the rock, an indistinct figure such as I have
described him; his form is left undefined — he is a voice
in the vast solitudes; and his first speech, which dis
closes the situation, makes you aware of physical suffer
ing, mental anguish, an undismayed and patient will, an
unconquerable faith — these are the qualities which
make him an elemental being and characterize him at
once. It is an ^Sschylean speech, phrases from ^Eschylus
are welded into it; but the moral grandeur of Prometheus
— all, that is, except the historical and physical features
of the scene — bears the creative mark of Shelley's own
sublimity of conception.

"Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,

THE TITAN MYTH 53

And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope;
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair — these are mine empire:
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O, Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured ; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!

"No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun,
Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm,
Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below,
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!

"The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains
Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips
His beak in poison not his own, tears up
My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by,
The ghastly people of the realm of dream,
Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind:
While from their loud abysses howling throng
The genii of the storm, urging the rage
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail.

54 THE TORCH

"And yet to me welcome is day and night,
Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn,
Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs
The leaden-colored east; for then they lead
The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom
— As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim —
Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood
From these pale feet, which then might trample thee
If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.
Disdain ! Ah no ! I pity thee. What ruin
Will hunt thee undefended through the wide Heaven!
How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror,
Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief
Not exultation, for I hate no more,
As then ere misery made me wise. The curse
Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains,
Whose many-voiced Echoes, through the mist
Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell!
Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost,
Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept
Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air,
Through which the Sun walks burning without beams!
And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poised wings
Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss,
As thunder, louder than your own, made rock
The orbed world! If then my words had power,
Though I am changed so that aught evil wish
Is dead within; although no memory be
Of what is hate, let them not lose it now!
What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak."

Prometheus's character, you observe, is developed in
the point that he no longer hates Zeus, but is filled with
pity for him. Later in the scene the Furies enter, to tor
ture the Titan with new torments. What torments will
be the most piercing to the suffering spirit of man — the
spirit that suffers in advancing human welfare? Will
it not be the fact that the gifts he has given man have

THE TITAN MYTH 55

proved evil gifts, and that in the effort for perfection
man has but the more heaped on himself damnation?
The thought is found in many treatments of the myth:
Themis warned Prometheus that in aiding man with
fire and the arts he only increased man's woes. It is the
old pessimistic thought that civilization is a curse —
that the only growth of the soul is growth in the capacity
for pain, for disillusion, for despair. Shelley introduces
it in quite the Promethean spirit — as a thing, which if
it be, is to be borne. What were the two characteristic
failures of human hope in Shelley's eyes? The capital
instances? They were the failure of Christianity to
bring the millennium, and the failure of the French Revo
lution in the same end — and not only their failure to
bring the millennium, but, on the contrary, their in
fluence in still further confounding the state of mankind
and flooding the nations with new miseries. The Furies
show these two failures to Prometheus in vision. The
passage is somewhat involved as the vision is successive
ly disclosed through the words of the chorus of Furies,
of the attendant sisters lone and Panthea, and of Pro
metheus, but I will endeavor to make it plain:

"CHORUS

"The pale stars of the morn
Shine on a misery, dire to be borne.
Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn.
Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for man?
Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran
Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever,
Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever.
One came forth of gentle worth
Smiling on the sanguine earth;
His words outlived him, like swift poison
Withering up truth, peace, and pity.

56 THE TORCH

Look! where round the wide horizon
Many a million-peopled city
Vomits smoke in the bright air.
Mark that outcry of despair!
'T is his mild and gentle ghost
Wailing for the faith he kindled:
Look again, the flames almost
To a glow-worm's lamp have dwindled:
The survivors round the embers
Gather in dread.

Joy, joy, joy!

Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.

"SEMICHORUS I
"Drops of bloody agony flow
From his white and quivering brow.
Grant a little respite now:
See a disenchanted nation
Springs like day from desolation;
To Truth its state is dedicate,
And Freedom leads it forth, her mate;
A legioned band of linked brothers
Whom Love calls children —

"SEMICHORUS II

" 'T is another's:
See how kindred murder kin:
'T is the vintage time for death and sin:
Blood, like new wine, bubbles within:
Till Despair smothers
The struggling world, which slaves and tyrants win.

[ALL THE FURIES VANISH, EXCEPT ONE]

IONE. Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan
Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart
Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep,
And beasts hear the sea moan in inland caves.

THE TITAN MYTH 57

Darest them observe how the fiends torture him?

PANTHEA. Alas! I looked forth twice, but will no more.

IONE. What didst thou see?

PANTHEA. A woful sight: a youth

With patient looks nailed to a crucifix.

IONE. What next?

PANTHEA. The heaven around, the earth below

Was peopled with thick shapes of human death,

All horrible, and wrought by human hands,

And some appeared the work of human hearts,

For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles:

And other sights too foul to speak and live

Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear

By looking forth: those groans are grief enough.

FURY. Behold an emblem: those who do endure

Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap

Thousandfold torment on themselves and him.

PROMETHEUS. Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;

Close those wan lips ; let that thorn- wounded brow

Stream not with blood; it mingles with thy tears!

Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death,

So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix,

So those pale fingers play not with thy gore.

O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak,

It hath become a curse. I see, I see

The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just,

Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee,

Some hunted by foul lies from their heart's home,

An early-chosen, late-lamented home;

As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind ;

Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells:

Some — Hear I not the multitude laugh loud? —

Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms

Float by my feet, like sea-uprooted isles,

Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood

By the red light of their own burning homes.

FURY. Blood thou canst see, and fire ; and canst hear groans ;

Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind.

PROMETHEUS. Worse?

58 THE TORCH

FURY. In each human heart terror survives

The ruin it has gorged: the loftiest fear

All that they would disdain to think were true:

Hypocrisy and custom make their minds

The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.

They dare not devise good for man's estate,

And yet they know not that they do not dare.

The good want power, but to weep barren tears.

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.

The wise want love ; and those who love want wisdom ;

And all best things are thus confused to ill.

Many are strong and rich, and would be just,

But live among their suffering fellow-men

As if none felt: they know not what they do.

PROMETHEUS. Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes;

And yet I pity those they torture not.

FURY. Thou pitiest them? I speak no more! [VANISHES]

PROMETHEUS Ah woe!

Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, for ever!

I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear

Thy works within my woe-illumed mind,

Thou subtle tyrant! Peace is in the grave.

The grave hides all things beautiful and good:

I am a God and cannot find it there,

Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge,

This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.

The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul

With new endurance, till the hour arrives

When they shall be no types of things which are.

PANTHEA. Alas! what sawest thou?

PROMETHEUS There are two woes:

To speak, and to behold; thou spare me one.

Names are there, Nature's sacred watchwords, they

Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry;

The nations thronged around, and cried aloud,

As with one voice, Truth, liberty, and love!

Suddenly fierce confusion fell from heaven

Among them: there was strife, deceit, and fear.

Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil.

This was the shadow of the truth I saw."

THE TITAN MYTH 59

The victory of Prometheus is in his declaration that
he pities those who are not tortured by such scenes. He
had '"already disclosed this pitiful heart in his first
speech; and, desiring to hear the curse he had originally
launched on Zeus, and being gratified in this wish by the
Earth, he had revoked it:

"It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;
Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine.
I wish no living thing to suffer pain."

Thus he had forgiven his great enemy. \
As I read the play, this forgiveness of Zeus by Pro
metheus makes the predestined hour of the downfall of
Zeus. The chariot bears aloft the new principle of su
preme being, a higher and younger-born principle, which
exceeds that which Zeus embodied, just as Zeus had in
his birth been a higher principle than the old reign con
tained; and Zeus is flung headlong, like Lucifer, into
the abyss of past things. Thus Shelley, as is the uni
versal way of genius, had created a great work by
fusing in it two divergent products of the human spirit
— the Hellenic idea of a higher power superseding the
lower, and the Christian idea that this power was one of
non-resistance, of forgiveness, of love. The reign of
love now begins in the poem: Prometheus is released and
wedded with Asia, who stands for the spirit of nature,
in which marriage is typified the union of the human
soul with nature, the harmony of man and nature, and
he shares in the millennium which is thus established on/
earth.

At the end, you observe, the Titan Myth drops away;
it does not appear in the last acts; for in it there was no
such completion of the Promethean faith as Shelley de
scribes.

60 THE TORCH

And here I might end the discussion of Shelley's
handling of the myth; but I cannot refrain from direct
ing your attention to the marvelous power of the myth
which could so blend the Greek and Christian genius,
and contain the passion of the French Revolution
issuing in the highest and most extreme forms of Chris
tian ethics — in non-resistance, that is, and in the for
giveness of enemies. I say nothing of the practical wis
dom of this doctrine; what is it, but the old verses?

"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:"

but I desire that you should identify this wisdom with
its moment of utterance. The French Revolution —
the Revolution of the Terror and the block, of the
burnt chateaux and the Napoleonic wars, was over and
done with; Shelley, in whom its spirit burnt as the
pure flame, had rejected its methods, while holding to
its ideals. He had lifted it from a political to a moral
cause: he had abandoned the sword as its Evangel, and
he put persuasion in the place of force, and love in the
place of hate, and the genius of victory which he invoked
was the conversion of society by the stricken cheek
and the lost cloak. The idea of humanity was the
fountain of his thought and the armor of his argument.
I will not refrain from saying that the idea of a suffer
ing humanity, which finds the path of progress in invin
cible opposition to the ruling gods of the hour in the faith
in greater divinities to come, is properly crowned and
consecrated by this doctrine, that patient forgiveness of
the wrong is the essence of victory over it, and the sure
road to its downfall. But the significance of such a myth

THE TITAN MYTH 61

is not to be exhausted by one poet, or by one treatment;
and in my next lecture I shall take up the work of Keats,
Goethe, Herder, and Schlegel, in interpreting life, as
they conceived it, by the same formula.

I have left myself a moment to bring forward two
considerations which may prove suggestive. The first
is the analogy between Hebrew and Greek myths in the
point that whereas in Eden the eating of the fruit of the
knowledge of good and evil, whereby man became as
God, was the occasion of man's ills, so in the myth of
Greece the sharing of men in the divine fire was the
cause of the sorrows of civilization. The second is that
in the drama of the Book of Job there is a strong likeness
to the situation in Prometheus, in the point that there is
no action, but only a passive suffering in the principal
character; and that in this suffering there is a dissent
from the wisdom of Divine ways; that Job holds to his
integrity and faith in his own righteousness in the face
of all disaster and all argument, in quite the Promethean
spirit, obdurately; and that he has the Promethean faith
in the issue. The situation lies in the verse:

"Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him; but I will
maintain my ways before him."

The dignity of the human soul is dramatically upheld
at the great climax of Job's final assertion of his right
eousness; and the situation is solved only by the voice
from the whirlwind declaring that as nature is a mystery,
much more must human life find mystery as an element
of its being. But in this great drama — one of the
marvelous works of human genius — though there is the
presence of Unjust suffering, of human integrity, and of a
final victory of the right — there is no such clear presen-

62 THE TORCH

tation of the idea and its operation, as is found in the
Promethean legend — the idea formulated in this myth
by the race out of its knowledge of its own life, not as
a dramatic incident such as Job's, but as a pervading and
constant law — the idea that the progress of man lies
in an immortal suffering, an invincible endurance of the
injustice of the present world, in anticipation of the ab
solute justice known only to the prophetic heart within.
This idea is a natural product of man's reflection on his
history, a natural interpretation of his experience; and
he finds it imaginatively embodied in Prometheus more
adequately and humanly than elsewhere. It has entered
into thousands of lives in this century of the Revolution,
with both illumination and courage; sharing in this idea,
and the life which is led in obedience to it, the humblest
of men shares in the sublimity of the great Titan.

* JL+*

THE TITAN MYTH

II

THE importance of history in literature can hardly be
emphasized too much. I have not hesitated to speak of
mythology and chivalry, and even of the Scriptures, as
transformations of history, and of imaginative literature
as the spiritual after-life both of historical events and
conditions in the narrow sense, and of general human ex
perience in the broad sense. I have directed attention
also to the influence of history in a more direct way, hi
the literature of the last century — to its inspirational
power there; out of it came, in particular, the pictur-
esqueness of the historical novel; and, inasmuch as the
romantic spirit of the century explored all lands and
times for new material, and eagerly absorbed all that
travel or research brought forward new to the European
mind, it naturally happened that the conception of his
torical humanity became one of rich variety; the formula
— "many men, many minds" — received unending illus
tration, and it might be thought that the result would
have been to impress on the race a sense of hopeless di
versity in its members rather than of unbroken unity.
But history had this inspirational power, not only in lit
erature, but in philosophy; the mind of man was stimu
lated to find in all this new mass of different detail a
single principle that would explain and reconcile the ap
es

64 THE TORCH

parent confusion — to frame, that is, a philosophy of
history. Herder, the German writer, was one of the
most influential of the great men who attacked this prob
lem; he gave his life to it. At the dawn of a new age, you
know, there is often a singular phenomenon: men of
genius arise, with a poetical cast of mind, and they are
prophetic of the new day because they show forth some
single idea or mood of it though they do not grasp the
whole; they catch like morning clouds, some the red,
some the gold, some the purple ray, but none of them
gives that one white light which will prevail when the
day is fully come. An outburst of poetry — the prev
alence of a poetical view of things — is the sign of an
advance along the whole line. Herder was a man of
this kind; and it is easy now to say that his method was
imperfectly scientific, and that his imagination and desire
led him astray. Nevertheless he had one of those minds
which, if it does not build a system squared of solid
timber, flings seeds on every wind like a living tree.
His intellect was capacious, and in the attempt he made
to include all things in his philosophizing he seems an
anticipation of Herbert Spencer; in his theorizing, too,
students find innumerable thoughts — that are half-
guesses — which are almost the words of Darwin. He
was, thus, you see, in the true path of advance; he
caught the first gleams of the new hour of time. He was
interested, over and above all else, in humanity and its
destiny as disclosed in history. He saw in history the
working of a law of beneficence and justice, which though
it might not seem such when viewed in its means, always
and unfailingly is such when viewed in its end; thus from
the concourse and struggle of forces in civilization there
is always issuing the slow triumph of reason. This was

THE TITAN MYTH 65

what Herder conceived as the law of progress; and is
the view taken in his leading prose works, the "Ideas on
the History of Mankind" and the "Letters for the Fur
therance of Humanity," which are still great and fruit
ful books. At the very end of a life spent thus in
meditation on the career of man in civilization, Herder
set forth his faith in the principle of progress in a series
of dramatic scenes built out of the myth of Prometheus.
He identified the fire which was the Titan's character
istic gift to mortals, as civilization, and saw in it the
two-fold symbol — first, of the arts themselves, secondly,
of that divine soul which restlessly excites and spurs on
all the powers of man.

I will sketch very briefly the story as Herder tells it.
Prometheus has been long chained to the rock and (as
in Shelley's poem) time has ripened and softened his
heart, partly because he knows that his work is pros
pering among men. In the first scene he hears a distant
song of victory, and voices announces to him that reason
fructifies the earth. In later scenes, first the daughters
of the Ocean and old Oceanus himself come complaining
that mankind disturbs the sea with ships, changes the
course of the waters by dams and canals, and brings
the ends of the earth together with commerce; but
Prometheus replies, prophesying: —

"The sea which girds the earth shall be the mediator and
peace-maker of the nations."

Then the Dryads, daughters of the earth, come with a
similar tale; but Prometheus tells them that in the end
man will make a garden of the earth; and other mytho
logical characters enter, each with its tale, Ceres, the
goddess of harvest, who works with man — and Bac-

66 THE TORCH

chus, the giver of the vine; at last Hercules and Theseus
release the Titan, all go before Themis, the goddess of
justice who judges the cause between Prometheus and
the gods, and gives the decision for Prometheus. Pallas
then leads to Prometheus Agatia, the pure spirit of hu
manity, and the drama ends. You see the work is little
more than a series of picturesque classical tableaux, in
which the victory of man through reason is set forth
with a maintenance of self-sacrifice, perseverance, pa
tience, social labor and love as the essential elements of
the moral ideal.

A few years before, Schlegel had produced a Prome
theus in the form of a poem, in the same realm of his
tory but with much less scenic elaboration. In it he
describes the Golden Age before the Titan War, the deso
late state of man after Zeus came to the throne, and
how Prometheus made of clay a new race, and animated
the clay with the heavenly fire. Themis reproves him
for this act, and foretells the sorrows of this Promethean
man — this being of divine desire chained to the earth
and tyrannized over by the thought of the past and of
the future alike. But Prometheus believes, he says,
that good will not die, that the toil of one generation will
help the next, that human will reduces life to order and
human action subdues nature; and that out of the midst
of opposing principles civilization grows to more and
more. The law of progress is stated with sure opti
mism: though there may be ages of terror and apparent
degeneration, yet the immortal principle of good in the
race is such that it passes invulnerable through all his
tory, and accomplishes the work of civilization. The
poem is no more than a reply to the sad prophecy of
Themis, and perhaps incidentally to such reactionaries

THE TITAN MYTH 67

as saw in the Reign of Terror and the Revolution
generally the denial of progress and of the social ideal.
But in the sphere of history, one of the latest rework-
ings of the myth, the Prometheus of Quinet, the French
poet, contains the most interesting variation. He con
ceived firmly the unity of history; and in obedience to
this conception he endeavored to unite the Greek myth
with Christianity, not ethically as Shelley did, but his
torically. "If Prometheus" — he says in his preface —
"is the eternal prophet, as his name indicates, each new
age of humanity can put new oracles in the mouth of the
Titan. Perhaps there is no character so well fitted to
express the feelings — the premature and half melan
choly desires — in which our age is enchained." In this
spirit he wrote a drama in three parts: the first depicts
the creation of man by Prometheus, the gift of fire —
that is, the soul — and the beginning of life in sorrow.
The second part depicts the suffering of Prometheus on
Caucasus, in which the foreknowledge of the fall of
Zeus becomes a prophecy of Christ's coming. The
third act depicts the advent of Christianity. The Arch
angels, Raphael and Michael descend on Caucasus, and
release Prometheus, who rises transfigured; the gods of
Olympus prostrate themselves before him and the angels,
and pray in vain for life. Then Prometheus has a singu
lar thought which to me is the most dramatic in the
play: as he listens to the death-song of the gods, his mind
is clouded with a doubt — will not the new divinity also
pass away? — and does he not already see a new Cauca
sus before him in the distant time? — will he not be
bound again? — The angels comfort him, and he ascends
to heaven; but as he disappears in that hierarchy of celes
tial peace and love, he still wears the shadow of thought

68 THE TORCH

— for he remembers that on earth men still suffer. This
attempt at a true synthesis of the Greek and Christian
imagination — in behalf of the unity of history — is a
most interesting illustration of the spirit of the century;
which was on the whole a century of peace-making be
tween the great historic elements of spiritual civilization,
a drawing together and harmonizing of religions, philos
ophies and half-developed and fragmentary doctrines, by
virtue of the identical principle they contain; or as Herder
said, in consequence of that symmetry of human reason
which makes all nobler minds tend to think the same
thoughts.

Interesting as the historical point of view is, it is plain
that the myth loses something of its poetical quality, be
comes pure allegory, becomes almost mechanical; it be
comes, in fact, what is called poetical machinery, a hard
and fast means of figurative expression. The characters
in Herder and Schlegel move like marionettes, and you
hear the voice of the author apart from his work. Let us
turn to a mind in which the myth really was alive again,
with creative as well as expressive power — the mind of
Keats. In his "Hyperion," the tale is of the Titans im
mediately after their overthrow; they have been de
throned from power, Saturn is an exile hiding in the
deep glens, but their ruin is still incomplete; Hyperion
still is lord in the sun, and the others are at liberty to
gather for a great council. In order to display the idea of
Keats, let me approach it indirectly. The point of view
which he takes has much affinity with science — more,
that is, than with either history or ethics. Modern the
ories of evolution have accustomed our minds to the
conception of an original state of the universe, vast,
homogeneous, undiversified, simple; out of this — to

THE TITAN MYTH 69

adopt the nebular theory — slowly great masses con
glomerated, gathered into sun and planets; and out of
these arose finally living things on a smaller scale but of
higher perfection of being. Now if you will think of
man's progressive conceptions of the divinity as some
thing similar to this, as parallel to it, you will have
Keats's idea. In the beginning were the vast, vague, un
defined, half-unconscious beings, like Uranus, the heav
ens, and Gaia, the earth, and Chronos, time; to them
succeeded the more conscious and half -humanized brood
of the Titans, like the sun and planets, as it were; last
came the gods of Olympus, in the perfection of full hu
manity, and on the physical scale of man in form, feature
and spirit. The change from the Titanic to the Olym
pian rule, was like the change from one geological age of
vast forms of brute and vegetable life to another of smaller
but nobler species. The higher principle displaces the
lower, according to that Greek idea of progress which I
have described; and this successive displacement of the
lower by the higher is the law of development in the
Universe.

In Keats's poem, Oceanus, speaking to the Titans in
council as the wisest of them all, sets forth the matter
plainly, and I should like you to notice how the concep
tion of a progressive order in nature (not as hitherto in
civilization merely) and the conception of the necessity
of accepting truth, bear the mark of the scientific spirit.
Oceanus thus speaks: —

"We fall by course of Nature's law, not force
, Of thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, thou

Hast sifted well the atom-universe ;

But for this reason, that thou art the King,

And only blind from sheer supremacy,

70 THE TORCH

One avenue was shaded from thine eyes,

Through which I wander'd to eternal truth.

And first, as thou wast not the first of powers,

So art thou not the last; it cannot be,

Thou art not the beginning nor the end.

From chaos and parental darkness came

Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil,

That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends

Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came,

And with it light, and light, engendering

Upon its own producer, forthwith touch'd

The whole enormous matter into life.

Upon that very hour, our parentage,

The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest:

Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race,

Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms.

Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 7t is pain;

O folly! for to bear all naked truths,

And to envisage circumstance, all calm,

That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!

As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far

Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;

And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth

In form and shape compact and beautiful,

In will, in action free, companionship,

And thousand other signs of purer life;

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,

A power more strong in beauty, born of us

And fated to excel us, as we pass

In glory that old Darkness: nor are we

Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule

Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil

Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed

And feedeth still, more comely than itself?

Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?

Or shall the tree be envious of the dove

Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings

To wander wherewithal and find its joys?

We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs

THE TITAN MYTH 71

Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves,
But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower
Above us in their beauty, and must reign
In right thereof; for 't is the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might:
Yea, by that law, another race may drive
Our conquerors to mourn as we do now.
Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas,
My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face?
Have ye beheld his chariot, foam'd along
By noble winged creatures he hath made?
I saw him on the calmed waters scud,
With such a glow of beauty in his eyes,
That it enforc'd me to bid sad farewell
To all my empire; farewell sad I took,
And hither came, to see how dolorous fate
Had wrought upon ye, and how I might best
Give consolation in this woe extreme.
Receive the truth, and let it be your balm."

It appears, then, that the new principle of being, in
whose advent lay the ruin of the old world, is beauty.

" 'T is the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might."

This is, as you know, Keats's distinctive mark — the per
ception and adoration of beauty. What love was to:
Shelley, that beauty was to Keats — the open door to
divinity; he saw life as a form of beauty. And he means
what he says — not that beauty has strength as an added
quality, but that beauty is strength, and reigns in its own
right. This rise of the Olympians was beauty's moment
of birth in the minds of men; this birth was a revelation,
like a new religion, and it is presented as such by Keats
in a two-fold way. First it is a revelation to the Titans.
You have seen how Oceanus on beholding the new god

72 THE TORCH

of the sea, gave up the rule over it. So Clymene, who
describes herself —

"O Father, I am here the simplest voice" —
tells her experience:

"I stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore,
Where a sweet clime was breathed from a land
Of fragrance, quietness, and trees, and flowers.
Full of calm joy it was,| as I of grief;
Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth;
So that I felt a movement in my heart
To chide, and to reproach that solitude
With songs of misery, music of our woes;
And sat me down, and took a mouthed shell

, And murmur'd into it, and made melody —

0 melody no more! for while I sang,
And with poor skill let pass into the breeze
The dull shell's echo, from a bowery strand
Just opposite, an island of the sea,

There came enchantment with the shifting wind,
That did both drown and keep alive my ears.

1 threw my shell away upon the sand,
And a wave fill'd it, as my sense was fill'd
With that new blissful golden melody.

A living death was in each gush of sounds,

Each family of rapturous hurried notes,

That fell, one after one, yet all at once,

Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string:

And then another, then another strain,

Each like a dove leaving its olive perch,

With music wing'd instead of silent plumes

To hover round my head, and make me sick

Of joy and grief at once. Grief overcame,

And I was stopping up my frantic ears,

When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands,

A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune,

And still it cried, 'Apollo! young Apollo!

The morning-bright Apollo! young Apollo!'

I fled, it follow'd me, and cried, 'Apollo!' "

THE TITAN MYTH 73

Beauty is also a revelation to the gods themselves in
their own bosoms where it has sprung into life. The pas
sage in which Apollo's awakening is described — full
of a poet's personal touches of his own experience in
coming into possession of himself — is one of the most
impassioned in all Keats 's writing:

"Together had he left his mother fair
And his twin-sister sleeping in their bower,
And in the morning twilight wandered forth
Beside the osiers of a rivulet,
Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.
The nightingale had ceas'd, and a few stars
Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush
Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave
Unhaunted by the numerous noise of waves,
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess.
He listen'd, and he wept, and his bright tears
Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
Thus with half-shut suffused eyes he stood,
While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by
With solemn step an awful Goddess came,
And there was purport in her looks for him,
Which he with eager guess began to read
Perplex'd, the while melodiously he said:
'How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?
Or hath that antique mien and robed form
Mov'd in these vales invisible till now?
Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o'er
The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone
In cool mid- forest. Surely I have traced
The rustle of those ample skirts about
These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers
Lift up their heads, as still the whisper pass'd.
Goddess ! I have beheld those eyes before,
And their eternal calm, and, all that face,
Or I have dream'd.' — 'Yes/ said the supreme shape,

74 THE TORCH

'Thou hast dream Jd of me; and awaking up

Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side,

Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast

Unwearied ear of the whole universe

Listen'd in pain and pleasure at the birth

Of such new tuneful wonder. Is 't not strange

That thou shouldst weep, so gifted? Tell me, youth,

What sorrow thou canst feel; for I am sad

When thou dost shed a tear: explain thy griefs

To one who in this lonely isle hath been

The watcher of thy sleep and hours of life,

From the young day when first thy infant hand

Pluck'd witless the weak flowers, till thine arm

Could bend that bow heroic to all times.

Show thy heart's secret to an ancient Power

Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones

For prophecies of thee, and for the sake

Of loveliness new-born.' — Apollo then,

With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes,

Thus answer'd, while his white melodious throat

Throbb'd with the syllables: — ' Mnemosyne!

Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how;

Why should I tell thee what thou so well seest?

Why should I strive to show what from thy lips

Would come no mystery? For me, dark, dark,

And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes:

I strive to search wherefor I am so sad,

Until a melancholy numbs my limbs;

And then upon the grass I sit, and moan,

Like one who once had wings. — O why should I

Feel curs'd and thwarted, when the liegeless air

Yields to my step aspirant? why should I

Spurn the green turf as hateful to my feet?

Goddess benign, point forth some unknown thing:

Are there not other regions than this isle?

What are the stars? There is the sun, the sun!

And the most patient brilliance of the moon!

And stars by thousands! Point me out the way

To any one particular beauteous star,

THE TITAN MYTH 75

And I will flit into it with my lyre,

And make its silvery splendor pant with bliss

I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power?

Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity

Makes this alarum in the elements,

While I here idle listen on the shores

In fearless yet in aching ignorance?

O tell me, lonely Goddess, by thy harp,

That waileth every morn and eventide,

Tell me why thus I rave, about these groves !

Mute thou remainest. — Mute! yet I can read

A wondrous lesson in thy silent face:

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.

Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,

Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,

Creations and destroyings all at once

Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,

And deify me, as if some blithe wine

Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,

And so become immortal/ — Thus the God,

While his enkindled eyes, with level glance

Beneath his white soft temples, steadfast kept

Trembling with light upon Mnemosyne.

Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush

All the immortal fairness of his limbs;

Most like the struggle at the gate of death ;

Or liker still to one who should take leave

Of pale immortal death, and with a pang

As hot as death's is chill, with fierce convulse

Die into life: so young Apollo anguish'd;

His very hair, his golden tresses famed

Kept undulation round his eager neck.

During the pain Mnemosyne upheld

Her arms as one who prophesied. — At length

Apollo shriek'd; — and lo! from all his limbs

Celestial. ..."

The birth-cry of Apollo was the death-cry of Keats:
there the golden pen fell from his hands, and the poem
« — a fragment — ends.

76 THE TORCH

There is one detail in Keats's work, which though it is
subsidiary, deserves mention because it completes the
reality of the Titan Myth in an important way. In all the
other writers, whom I have named, you do not get any
idea of the Titans physically, you do not see them as Ti
tans. In Shelley, and the rest, Prometheus is essentially
a man; he has human proportion; in Keats Prometheus
does not appear at all. But Keats has realized the Ti
tanic figures to the imagination as distinct and noble
forms; they have the massiveness of limb and immobil
ity of feature that we associate with Egyptian art, with
the Sphinxes and the Memnons; yet each is charac
terized differently; Saturn, Oceanus, Enceladus, Thea,
Mnemosyne are individualized, and especially Hyperion
is set forth, in ways of grandeur. The subject would
require more illustration than I can now give it; but let
me cite the very remarkable figure which is found in the
second version of "Hyperion," a version that is as full of
Dante as the first one is of Milton. The figure is that of
Moneta, the solitary and ageless priestess of the temple
of the Titans, "sole goddess of its desolation," who gives
the poet the vision of the past.

"And yet I had a terror of her robes,
And chiefly of the veils that from her brow
Hung pale, and curtain'd her in mysteries,
That made my heart too small to hold its blood.
This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand
Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face,
Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd
By an immortal sickness which kills not ;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it had past
The lily and the snow; and beyond these

THE TITAN MYTH 77

I must not think now, though I saw that face.

But for her eyes I should have fled away;

They held me back with a benignant light,

Soft, mitigated by divinest lids

Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd

Of all external things; they saw me not,

But in blank splendor beam'd like the mild moon,

Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not

What eyes are upward cast."

A similar imaginative power to that shown here per
vades Keats's conceptions of the Titans, and distin
guishes his work from all others as a creation in the vis
ible world of the imagination such as is not elsewhere to
be found. Here only is the Titan world made nobly real.
I fear to weary you with this long catalogue of the va
rious modern forms of the Titan Myth, but it is neces
sary to develop the theme. I must say at least a word
about Goethe's "Prometheus." It is only a brief frag
ment of a drama, and belongs to his youth. He was but
twenty-four when he experimented with it. In the scenes
which we possess, Prometheus is the maker of the clay
images to which he gives life by the aid of Pallas — that
is, really, by his own intelligence. He launches them as
men in the career of civilization by declaring to them the
principle of property; he tells one to build a house, and
to the question whether it will be for the man himself or
for everybody, Prometheus answers it shall be the man's
own private possession and dwelling; he declares also
the principle of retaliatory justice, saying on the occa
sion of the first theft, that he whose hand is against every
one, every one's hand shall be against him; and he an
nounces the fact and meaning of the first death. The
drama does not proceed further. Its significance lies in
two points; in the first place it is easy to see in Prome-

78 THE TORCH

theus's attitude toward his clay images and his lan
guage about them a reflection of the young poet's own
state of mind toward the mental beings whom he creates
— a reflection, that is, of the pride and glory of genius in
imaginary creation. Secondly, and more importantly,
the drama exhibits the intense desire of the young
Goethe for complete individual independence. In the
answer Prometheus makes to the messenger of Zeus, who
remonstrates with him, the central point is that Prome
theus feels he is a god like Zeus, and wants freedom to
do his will in his own realm as Zeus does in Olympus.
Let Zeus keep his own, and let me keep my own, he
says; he would rather his clay images should never live
than be subjects of Zeus, for being still unborn, they are
still free; liberty is the true good, and men, made by him,
shall be embodiments of his own independent spirit. In
all this is the prophecy of Goethe's own life. To me
Goethe is the type of the man who wants to be let alone;
and he accomplished his desire in a supremely selfish tran
quillity, in which he used life to develop himself, sacri
ficed all things to himself, was at once the model and
the condemnation of self-culture so pursued. In his
young Prometheus there is this impatient cry for indi
vidual liberty, as a basis of life; and I discern little else
significant in it. I must also spare a word for Victor
Hugo's "Titan." The poem is in the "Legend of the
Ages." This Titan is not Prometheus, or any other in
dividual Titan, but is all of them in one, the giant, con
ceived as one. He is, of course, mankind — earth-born
man, conceived as in scientific history, burrowing his
way out of the planet itself — a massive medieval crea
ture, gross and violent, tearing his path through cave
and grotto, till at last he emerges and sees the stars.

THE TITAN MYTH 79

This giant is clearly a symbol of man rising from his
crude earthliness of nature and barbaric ages up to the
sight and knowledge of the heavenly world. It is a
type of progress, as science and history jointly conceive
the evolution of humanity.

I have sufficiently illustrated how the Titan Myth in
its variety has been employed to embody and express the
idea of a progressive humanity in many aspects as it has
appeared to different poets. The idea of progress is in
our civilization a continuing and universal idea; and
Prometheus is a continuing and universal image of its
nature — the race-image of a race-idea. The Prome
thean situation is inherent in the law of human progress,
however viewed, whether historically or scientifically or
ethically, or in any other way. Emerson says

"The fiend that man harries,
Is Love of the Best."

The dream of this Best, and the will to bring it down to
earth — the struggle with the temporary ruling worse
that is in the world and must be dethroned — the proud
and resolute suffering of all that such a present world
can inflict — the faith in the final victory, are the Pro
methean characteristics; but the human spirit, in the
nature of the case, must forever be in bonds; its succes
sive liberations are partial only, and in the disclosure of
a forever fairer dream in the future, lies also the dis
closure of new bonds, for the present is always a state of
chains in view of the to-morrow; and for man there is
always to-morrow. The great words that seem the keys
of progress, such as reason, love, beauty, are only sym
bols of an infinite series in life — a series that never ends.
Such is the abstract statement that progress involves the

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idea of humanity as a Promethean sufferer. But the
race, which requires picturesque and vivid images of its
highest faith, hope and thought, comes to its poets, like
the human child, and says ever and ever — "Tell me a
story: tell me a story about myself." And the poet tells
the race a new story about itself — like the mother of
Marius when she told him of "the white bird which he
must bear in his bosom across the crowded market-place
— his soul." Each poet tells this new story to the child
about itself — a story it did not know before, and the
child believes the story and increases knowledge and life
with it. The question the race asks, in this Myth, is
"what is most divine in me?" "What is the god in me?"
f — and Shelley answers, it is all-enduring and all-for
giving love toward all; and Herder answers that it is rea
son, Keats that it is beauty, Goethe that it is liberty, and
Hugo that it is immense triumphant toil;^>and each in
giving his answer tells the story of the old gods and the
younger gods, and the wise Titan who knew yet other
gods that should come. And the race listens to these
tales because it hears in them its own voice speaking.
Men of genius are men, like other men; but their genius,
if I may use an obvious comparison, is like the reflector
in front of the light-house flame — in all directions but
one it is a common flame, but in that one direction along
which the reflector magnifies, glorifies and speeds its
radiance, it is the shining of a great light. Look at
men of genius, as you find them in biography, and they
seem ordinary persons of daily affairs; but if you can
catch sight of genius through that side which is turned
out to the infinite as to a great ocean, you will see, I will
not say the man himself, but the use God makes of the
man. That use is to reveal ourselves to ourselves, to

THE TITAN MYTH 81

show what human nature is and can do, to unlock our
minds, our hearts, all our energies, for use. We admire
and love such men because they are more ourselves than
we are, the undeveloped, often unknown selves that in us
are but partially born. "What is most divine in me?"
is the question the race puts; and perhaps it is true
(though the statement may be startling), that as soon
as man discovers a god in himself, all external gods fall
from their thrones — and this is the meaning of the
myth. But again, what is this but the old verse —

"The kingdom of heaven is within you?"

That realized, the old gods may go their ways. It is
realized, perhaps, for one of its modes, in this way:
that as the being of beauty is entire and perfect in
the grass that flourishes for a summer, or in the rose
of dawn that fades even while it blossoms, so the power
of moral ideas enters, entire and perfect, into our being,
and, as I said, the humblest of men suffering for man's
good as he conceives it shares in the moral sublimity
of Prometheus. What is thus within man — the thing
that is most divine — is certainly the medium by which
man approaches the divinity, and through which he
beholds it, in any living way. It belongs to Puritanism,
as a mood of mind, to be impatient of any external
thing between the soul and the divinity; it will have
the least of any such material element in its spiritual
sight and communion; it sees God by an inner vision.
Mediums of some sort there must be between human
nature and its idea of the divine; and it seems to me
that our inner vision by which the Puritan spirit reaches
outward and upward is the vision of imagination trans
figuring history to saints and martyrs in their holy living

82 THE TORCH

and holy dying, transfiguring all human experience to the
idealities of poetry. Mankind seeing itself more per
fect in St. Francis, in Philip Sidney, in all men of spir
itual genius, makes them a part of this inner vision —
and, rank over rank, above them the perfection of
Arthur and Parsifal, and still more high the perfection
of reason, beauty, and love in their element. In this
hierarchy of human daring, dreaming, desiring is the
only beatific vision that human eyes ever immediately
beheld — the vision of what is most divine in man.
What I maintain is that, humanly speaking, in the search
for God one path by which the race moves on is through
this inner vision of ideal perfections in its own nature
and its own experience, which it has fixed and illuminated
in these imaginative figures, these race-images of race-
ideas.

V

SPENSER

THE general principle which I have endeavored to set
forth in the first four lectures is that mankind in the
process of civilization stores up race-power, in one or an
other form, so that it is a continually growing fund; and
that literature, pre-eminently, is such a store of spiritual
race-power, derived originally from the historical life or
from the general experience of men, and transformed by
imagination so that all which is not necessary falls away
from it and what is left is truth in its simplest, most vivid
and vital form. Thus I instanced mythology, chivalry,
and the Scriptures as three such sifted deposits of the
past; and I illustrated the use poetry makes of such race-
images and race-ideas by the example of the myth of the
Titans. In the remaining four lectures I desire to ap
proach the same general principle of the storing of race-
power from the starting-point of the individual author
— to set forth Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Shelley,
not in their personality but as race-exponents, and
to show that their essential greatness and value are due
to the degree in which they availed themselves of the
race-store. You may remember that I defined education
for all men as the process of identifying oneself with the
race-mind, entering into and taking possession of the
race-store; and the rule is the same for men of genius as
for other men. You find, consequently, that the greatest
poets have always been the best scholars of their times

83

84 THE TORCH

— not in the encyclopedic sense that they knew every
thing, but in the sense that they possessed the living
knowledge of their age, so far as it concerns the human
soul in its history. They have always possessed what is
called the academic mind — that is, they had a strong
grasp on literary tradition and the great thoughts of
mankind, and the great forms which those thoughts had
taken on in the historic imagination. Virgil is a striking
example of such a poet, perfectly cultivated in all the ar
tistic, philosophic, literary tradition as it then was:
Dante and Chaucer are similar instances; and, in Eng
lish, Spenser, Milton, Gray, Shelley and Tennyson con
tinue the line of those poets in whom scholarship — the
academic tradition — is an essential element in their
worth. It ought not to be necessary to bring this out so
clearly; for it is obvious that men of genius, in the proc
ess of absorbing the race-store, by the very fact become
scholarly men, men of intellectual culture, though in
consequence of their genius they neglect all culture ex
cept that which still has spiritual life in it. This is so
elementary a truth in literature that the index to the im
portance of an author is often his representative power

— the degree to which he sums up and delivers the hu
man past. How large a tract of time, what extent of
knowledge, what range of historical emotion — does his
mind drain? These are initial questions. And in lite
rary history, you know, there are here and there minds,
so central to the period, such meeting points of different
ages and cultures, that they resemble those junctions on
a railway map which seem to absorb all geography into
their own black dots. The greatest poets are just such
centers of spiritual history; where ancient and modern
meet, where classicism and medievalism, Christianity

SPENSER 85

and paganism, Renaissance and Reformation and Rev
olution meet — there is the focus, for the time being, of
the soul of man; and it is at that point that genius devel
ops its transcendent power.

Spenser was such a mind. I spoke in the first lecture
of that law of progress which involves the passing away
of a civilization at the moment of its perfection and the
death of that breed of men who have brought it to its
height. Spenser was the poet of a dying race and a dying
culture; in his work there is reflected and embodied a
climax in the spiritual life of humanity to which imagi
nation gives form, beauty, and passion. In this respect
I am always reminded of Virgil when I read him; for
Virgil used, like Spenser, the romanticism of a receding
past to express his sense of human life, and he was re
lated to his materials in much the same way. The Myth
of Arthur lay behind Spenser as the Myth of Troy lay
behind Virgil in the mist of his country's origins; the
Italians of the Renaissance, Ariosto, and Tasso, were a
school for Spenser much as the Alexandian poets had
been for Virgil ; and as in Virgil mythology and Homeric
heroism and the legend of the antique Italian land be
fore Rome blended in one, and became the last flower
ing of the pre-Christian world in what is, perhaps, the
greatest of all world-poems, the "^Eneid," so in Spenser
chivalry, medievalism and the new birth of learning in
Europe blended, and gave us a world-poem of the Chris
tian soul, in which medieval spirituality — as it seems
to me — expired. Spenser resembled Virgil, too, in his
moment; he was endeavoring to create for England a
poem such as Italy possessed in Ariosto's and Tasso's
epics, to introduce into his country's literature the most
supreme poetic art then in the world, just as Virgil

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was attempting to instill into the Roman genius the im
aginative art of Greece. He resembled Virgil again in
his poetic education inasmuch as he formed his powers
and first exercised them in pastoral verse, in the
"Shepheard's Calendar" as Virgil did in his "Eclogues";
and he resembled Virgil still more importantly in that
his theme was the greatest known to him — namely,
the empire of the soul, as Virgil's was the empire of
Rome. Spenser, then, when he came to his work is
to be looked on as a master of all literary learning, a
pioneer and planter of poetic art in his own country,
and a poet who used the world of the receding past as
his means of expressing what was most real to him in
human life.

The work by which he is remembered is "The Faerie
Queene," and in it all that I have said meets you at the
threshold. Perhaps the first, and certainly the abiding
impression the poem makes, is of its remoteness from
life. Remoteness, you know, is said to be a necessary
element in any artistic effect — such as you feel in look
ing at Greek statues or Italian Madonnas or French
landscapes. This remoteness of the artistic world the
poem has, in large measure: its country is no physical
region known to geography, but is that land of the plain
where Knights are always pricking, of forests and
streams and hills that have no element of composition,
and especially of a horizon like the sea's, usually lonely,
but where anything may appear at any time: it is a
land like a dream; and what takes place there at any
moment is pictorial, and can be painted. But the quality
of remoteness, so noticeable in the poem and to which I
refer, is not that of artistic atmosphere and setting. It
arises largely from the remoteness of history in the poem,

SPENSER 87

felt in the constant presence of outworn things, of by
gone characters, ways and incidents; and the im
pression of intricacy that the poem also makes at first,
the sense of confusion in it, is partly due to this same
presence of the unfamiliar in most heterogeneous variety.
This miscellaneousness is the result of Spenser's com
prehensive inclusion in the poem of all he knew, that is,
of the entire literary tradition of the race within his
ken. Thus you find, at the outset, Aristotle's scheme of
the moral virtues, and Plato's doctrine of the unity of
beauty and wisdom, on the philosophical side; and for
imagery out of the classics, here are Pluto, Proserpina,
and Night, the house of Morpheus, the bleeding tree,
the cloud that envelops the fallen warrior and allows
him to escape, the journey in Hades, the story of Hip-
polytus, and fauns, satyrs and other minor mythologi
cal beings. You find, also, out of medieval things, the
method of the poem which is the characteristic medieval
method of allegory, and in imagery dragons, giants,
dwarfs, the hermit, the magician, the dungeon, the wood
of error, the dream of Arthur, the holy wells, the Sara
cen Knights, the House of Pride, the House of Holi
ness, and many more; and, in these lists, I have cited
instances only from the first of the six books. A similar
rich variety of matter is to be found, consisting of the
characteristic belongings of Renaissance fable. This
multiplicity of imaginative detail, being as it is a sum
mary of all the poetical knowledge of previous time, is
perplexing to a reader unfamiliar with the literature
before Spenser, and makes the poem seem really, and not
merely artistically remote. Here appears most clearly
the fact which I emphasize, that the "Faerie Queene" de
picts and contains a receding world, a dying culture; for

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it is to be borne in mind that to Spenser and his early
readers these things were not then so remote; medieval-/
ism was as near to him as Puritanism is to us, and the
thoughts, methods, aims, language and imagery of the
Renaissance as near as the Revolution is to us. In that
age, too, chivalry yet lingered, at least as a spectacle,
and other materials in the poem that now seem to us
like stage-machinery were part and parcel of real life.
The tourney was still a game of splendid pleasure and
display at the Court of Elizabeth; the masque-proces
sion, so constant in one or another form in the poem, was
a fashion of Christmas mummery, of the Court Masque,
and of city processions; the physical aspect and furni
ture of the poem were, thus, not wholly antiquated; and
on the side of character, it is easy to read between the
lines the presence of Spenser's own noble friends — and
no one in that age was richer in noble friendship — the
presence, I mean, of the just Lord Grey, the adventurous
Raleigh, and the high-spirited Philip Sidney. The ele
ment of historical remoteness must, therefore, be thought
of as originally much less strong than now, and one which
the passage of time has imported into the poem very
largely.

We are, perhaps, too apt to think that our own age is
one in which great heterogenousness of knowledge, of
thought and principle and faith, is a distinctive trait;
but we are not the first to find our race-inheritance a
confusion of riches, and a tentative eclecticism the best
we can compass in getting a philosophy of our own.
Every learned and open mind, in the times of the flowing
together of the world's ideas, has the same experience.
Spenser, being a receptive mind and standing at the
center of the ideas of the world then, was necessarily

SPENSER 89

overwhelmed with the variety of his knowledge; but he
faced the same problem that Milton, Gray, Shelley, and
Tennyson in their time met; the problem of how to re
duce this miscellaneousness of matter to some order, to
reconcile it with his own mind, to build up out of it his
own world. It is the same problem that confronts each
one of us, in education; in the presence of this race-
inheritance, so vast, so apparently contradictory and
diverse — how to take possession of it, to make it ours
vitally, to have it enter into and take possession of us.
Spenser is an admirable example of this situation, for in
his poem the opposition between the race-mind and the
individual is clearly brought out in the point that he con
verges all this imagery, knowledge and method in order
to set forth the individual's life. Spenser states his
purpose in the preface: "The general end," he says, "of
all the Book is to fashion a gentleman, or noble person,
in vertuous and gentle discipline." It is the very
problem before each of us in education: "to fashion a
gentleman." Spenser's plan, in portraying how this is
to be done, is a very simple one. By a gentleman he
means a man of Christian virtue, perfected in all the
graces and the powers of human nature. The educa
tion required is an education in the development of the
virtues, as he named them — Holiness, Temperance,
Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy; he illustrates
the development of each virtue, one in each Knight, and
sends each Knight forth on an adventure in the course
of which the Knight meets and overcomes the character
istic temptations of the virtue which he embodies.
This was the plan of the poem, which, however, the poet
found it easier to formulate than to follow with precision.
The main fact stands out, however, that Spenser used

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all his resources of knowledge and art, miscellaneous
as they were, for the single purpose of showing how the
soul comes to moral perfection in the Christian world.
You see there is nothing contemporary or remote or
by-gone in the problem: that is universal and unchang
ing; but in answering it Spenser used an imaginative
language that to many of us is like a lost tongue. Shall
we, then, let the allegory go, as Lowell advised, content
that it does not bite us, as he says? I cannot bring
myself to second that advice. Though I am as fond
of the idols of poetry for their own sake as any one, yet
I have room for idols of morality and philosophy also
— let us have as many idols as we can get, is my way:
and to leave out of our serious-minded Spenser what was
to the poet himself the core of his meaning — its spir
ituality — is too violent a measure, and bespeaks such
desperate dullness in the allegory as I do not find in it.
To read the poem for the beauty of its surface, and to
let the noble substance go, is, at all events, not the way
to understand it as a focus of race-elements and a store
of race-power, as a poem not of momentary delight, but
of historical phases of knowledge, culture and aspira
tion, a poem of the thoughtful human spirit brooding
over its long inheritance of beauty, honor, and virtue.

Of course, I cannot in an hour convey much of an
idea of so great a poem, so various in its loveliness, so
profound in significance, so diversified in merely literary
interest. I shall make no attempt to tell its picturesque
and wandering story, to describe its characters, or to ex
plain what marvelous lives they led in that old world of
romance. But I shall try to show, in general terms, cer
tain aspects of it as a poem that presents life in a uni
versal, vital, and never-to-be-antiquated way, such as it

SPENSER 91

seemed to one of the most noble-natured of English
men, in a great age of human effort, thought and ac
complishment.

Among the primary images under which life has been
figured, none is more universal and constant than that
into which the idea of travel enters. To all men at all
times life has been a voyage, a pilgrimage, a quest.
Spenser conceived of it as the quest, the peculiar image
of chivalry, but not as the quest for the Grail or any
other shadowy symbol on the attainment of which the
quest was ended in a mystic solution. The quest of his
Knights is for self-mastery; and it is achieved at each
forward step of the journey. You remember that in the
lecture on Prometheus I illustrated the way in which
man takes a certain part of his nature — the evil prin
ciple — and places it outside of himself, calls it Mephis-
topheles, and so deals with it artistically; in Spenser, the
temptation which each Knight is under is his worser
self, as we say, so taken and placed outside as his enemy
whom he overcomes; thus, Guyon, the Knight of Tem
perance, overcomes the various forms of anger, of
avarice, and of voluptuousness, which are merely, in
fact, his other and worser selves; in each victory he
gathers strength for the next encounter, and so ends
perfecting himself in that virtue. Life — that is to say,
the quest — has a goal in self-mastery, that is progres
sively reached by the Knight at each new stage of his
struggle. The atmosphere of life — so conceived as a
spiritual warfare — is broadly rendered; it is, for ex
ample, always a thing of danger, and this element is
given through the changing incident, the deceits prac
tised on the Knights, the troubles they fall into, often
unwittingly, and undeservedly, their constant need to be

92 THE TORCH

vigilant and to receive succor. The secret, the false, the
insidious, are as often present as is the warfare of the
open foe. Again, this life is a thing of mystery. How
ever clear we may try to make life, however positive in
mind we are and armed against illusions, it still remains
true that mystery envelops life. I do not mean the
mystery of thought, of the unknown, but the mystery of
life itself. Spenser conceives this mystery as the action,
friendly or inimical, of a spiritual world round about
man, a supernatural world; and he renders it by means
of enchantment. I dare say that to most readers the
presence of enchantment, both evil and good, is a hin
drance to the appreciation of the poem and impairs its
reality to their minds. Arthur, you know, has a veiled
shield; but its bared radiance will overthrow of itself any
foe. This seems like an unfair advantage, and takes
interest from the poem. Such enchanted weapons may
be regarded as symbolic of the higher nature of the cause
in which they are employed, of its inward power, and
possibly of the true powers of the heroes, their spiritual
force, and it may be that this emphasis on the spirituality
of their force is the true reason for the introduction of
the symbol; for these are not only Knights human, but
Knights Christian and clothed with a might which is not
of this world. Such an explanation, though plausible,
seems mechanical; the truth which it contains is that the
enchanted arms do not denote a higher degree of physi
cal strength, as if the Knights had rifles instead of
spears, but a difference of spiritual power. It is, how
ever, much more clear that by the realm of enchantment
in the poem is figured the interest which the supernatural
world takes in man's conflict — the medieval idea that
God and his angels are on one side and the devil and

SPENSER 93

his angels are on the other; and the presence of en
chantment in the poem is a means of expressing this
belief. The reality of divine aid against devilish mach
ination is thus symbolized; but in one particular this
aid is so important a matter that Spenser introduces it
in a more essential and, in fact, in a human way. To
Spenser's mind, no man could save himself, or perfect
himself in virtue even, without Divine Grace; this was
the doctrine he held, and, therefore, he made Arthur the
special representative and instrument of Grace, and at
each point of the story where the Knight cannot retrieve
himself from the danger into which he had fallen, Arthur
appears with his glorious arms for the rescue. The pres
ence of mystery in life, too, is not only thus felt in the
atmosphere of enchantment and in the signal acts of res
cue by Arthur, but it also envelops the cardinal ab
stract ideas of the poem — such ideas, I mean, as wis
dom in Una, and as chastity in Britomart, to whose
beauty (which is, of course, the imaging forth of the
special virtue of each) is ascribed a miraculous power of
mastery, as in Una's case over the Lion and the foresters,
and in Britomart's case over Artegal.

"And he himselfe long gazing there upon,

At last fell humbly downe upon his knee,
And of his wonder made religion,
Weening some heavenly goddesse he did see."

This is that radiance which Plato first saw in the counte
nance of Truth, such that, he said, were Truth to come
among men unveiled in her own form, all men would
worship her. So Spenser, learning from Plato, presents
the essential loveliness of all virtue as having inherent
power to overcome — precisely, you will remember, as

94 THE TORCH

Keats describes the principle of beauty in "Hyperion"
as inherently victorious.

The idea of life as a quest, with an atmosphere of
danger and mystery, and presided over by great princi
ples such as wisdom, grace, chastity, so clad in loveliness
to the moral sense that they seem like secondary forms
of Divine being — these are fundamental conceptions
in the poem, its roots, so to speak, and they belong in
the ethical sphere. But Spenser was the most poetically ;
minded of all English poets; he not only knew that
however true and exalted his ideas of life might be, they
must come forth from his mind as images, but he also by
nature loved truth in the image more than in the ab
stract; and he therefore approached truth through the
imagination rather than through the intellect. That is to
say, he was a poet, first and foremost; and wove his
poem of sensuous effects. Sensibility to all things of
sense was his primary endowment; he was a lover of
beauty, of joy, and his joy in beauty reached such a pitch
that he excels all English poets in a certain artistic
voluptuousness of nature, which was less rich in Milton
and less pure in Keats, who alone are to be compared
with him, as poets of sensuous endowment. It is seldom
that the artistic nature appears in the English race; it
belongs rather to the southern peoples, and especially to
Italy; but when it does arise in the English genius, and
blends happily there with the high moral spirit which
is a more constant English trait — especially when it
blends with the Puritan strain, it seems as if the young
Plato had been born again. Both Milton and Spenser
were Puritans who were lovers of beauty; and Spenser
showed Milton that way of grace. No language can
exaggerate the extent to which Spenser was permeated

SPENSER 95

with this sensuousness of temperament, and he created
the body of his poem out of it — the color, the picture,
the incident, figures and places, the atmosphere, the ca
dence and the melody of it. You feel this bodily delight
in the very fall of the lines, interlacing and sinuous, with
Italian softness, smoothness, and slide. You feel it in
his love of gardens and streams; in his love of pictured
walls, and all the characteristic adornments of Renais
sance art; in his grouping of human figures in the various
forms of the masque; in his descriptions of wealth and
luxury, of the bower of bliss, of the scenes of mythology;
in every part of the poem the flowing of this fount of
beauty is the one unfailing thing. It came to him from
the Italian Renaissance, of course. It is the Renaissance
element in the poem; and with it all the other elements
are suffused.

The worship of beauty, as it was known in all objects
of art, and in all poetry which had formed itself, in de
scription and motive, on objects of art, was perhaps its
center; but, in Spenser, it exceeded such bounds, and,
though taken from the Renaissance, it was given a new
career in Puritanism. For the singular thing about this
sensuous sensibility in Spenser, this artistic voluptuous
ness in the sight and presence of beauty, is that it re
mained pure in spirit. In Renaissance poetry, using the
same chivalric tradition as Spenser, this spirit has ended
in Ariosto's "Orlando" — a poem of cynicism, as it seems
to me. It is to the honor of the moral genius of the
English that the Renaissance spirit in poetry, in their
tongue, issued in so nobly different a poem as "The Faerie
Queene." This was because, as I say, the Renaissance
worship of beauty was given a new career by Spenser
in Puritanism. Perhaps I can best illustrate the matter

g6 THE TORCH

by bringing forward what was one of Spenser's noblest
points. He raised this worship of beauty to the highest
point of ideality by having recourse to the tradition of
chivalry in its worship of woman, and blended the two
in a new worship of womanhood. I think it will be
agreed that, although Spenser's romance is primarily
one of the adventures of men, it is his female characters
that live most vividly in the memory of the reader.
These characters are, indeed, very simple and elementary
ones; they are not elaborated on the scale to which the
novel has accustomed our minds; but they are of the
same kind, it seems to me, as Shakespeare's equally
simple types of womanhood — such as Cordelia, Imogen,
Miranda — of which they were prophetic. What I de
sire to bring out, however, is not their simplicity, but
the fact that they enter the poem to ennoble it, to
raise it in spiritual power, and to strengthen the heroes
in their struggles. In this respect, as I think, Spenser
did a new thing. In the epic, generally, woman comes
on the scene only to impair the moral quality and the
manly actions of the hero: such was Dido, you remem
ber, in the ".Eneid," and Eve in "Paradise Lost/' and the
same story, with slight qualifications holds of other epic
poems. It is a high distinction that in Spenser woman
hood is presented, not as the source of evil, its presence
and its temptation, but as the inspiration of life for such
Knights as Artegal, the Red-Cross Knight, and others;
and, furthermore, the worship of beauty, which they
found in the worship of womanhood, is in Spenser hardly
to be distinguished from the worship of those principles,
which I have described as secondary forms of Divine
being — the principles of wisdom, chastity and the like.
I find in these idealities of womanhood the highest reach

SPENSER 97

•* *•

of the poem, and in them blend harmoniously the chival-
ric, artistic and moral elements of Spenser's mind. And
as we feel in Spenser's men the near presence of such
friends as Lord Grey, Raleigh and Sidney, it is not
fanciful to feel here the neighborhood of Elizabethan
women — such as she of whom Jonson wrote the great
epitaph:

"Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse;
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Learned and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee."

With this supreme presence of womanhood in "The
Faerie Queene" goes the fact that warfare as such is a
disappearing element; it is less prominent, and it inter
ests less, than might be expected. This is because, just
as beauty in all its forms is spiritualized in the poem, so
is war; the war here described is the inner warfare of the
soul with itself; it is all a symbol of spiritual struggle,
and necessarily it seems less real as a thing of outward
event. The poem is one of thought, essentially; its ac
tion has to be interpreted hi terms of thought before it is
understood; it is, in truth, a contemplative poem, and
its mood is as often the artistic contemplation of beauty,
as the ethical contemplation of action. These are the
two poles on which the poem moves. Yet they are
opposed only in the analysis, and to our eyes; in Spenser's
poem, and in his heart they were closely united, for
virtue was to him the utmost of beauty, and its attain
ment was by the worship of beauty; so near, by certain
aptitudes of emotion towards the supreme good, did he

98 THE TORCH

come to Plato, his teacher, and is therefore to be fitly
described, in this regard, as the disciple of Plato.

I wonder whether, as I have been speaking, the poem
and its author grow more or less remote to you. Spenser

— this philosophical Platonist, this Renaissance artist,
this Puritan moralist — does he seem more or less cred
ible? Was it not a strange thing that he should think
that the abstract development of a Christian soul, how
ever picturesquely presented, was an important theme of
poetry? Yet it is true, that the most purely poetical of
English poets, and one of the most cultivated minds of
Europe in his time, had this idea; and in Elizabeth's
reign — that is, in a period of worldly and masculine ac
tivity, of immense vigor, in the very dawn and sun
burst of an England to which our American imperial
dream is but a toy of fancy — in that Elizabethan, that
Shakespearian age, Spenser chose as the theme of highest
moment the formation of a Christian character. I have
spoken of the artistic remoteness of his poem, and of the
remoteness of his literary tradition, its classical, me
dieval and Renaissance matter and method; but there is
a third remoteness by which it seems yet more distant —
the remoteness of its spirituality. In the days about and
before Spenser there was great interest in the question
of character in the upper classes; what were the quali
ties of a courtier was debated over and over in every
civilized country, and the books written about it are still
famous books and worth reading. Spenser took this
Renaissance idea — what is the pattern of manhood?

— and — just as in the case of the worship of beauty —
gave it a career in Puritanism. The question became —
what is a Christian soul, perfected in human experience?
What are its aims, its means, its natural history? What

SPENSER 99

is its ideal life in this world of beauty, honor, service?
And this question he debated in the six books of his
half-completed poem, which has made him known ever
since as the poet's poet. The Knight of the "Faerie
Queene" is the Renaissance courtier Christianized — that
is all. Here is the final spiritualization of the long result
of chivalry as an ideal of manly life. That is the curious
thing — that the result is, not merely moral, but spiritual.
The spiritual life, in this sense, is far removed from
our literature; it is so, because it is far removed from the
general thought of men. The struggle men now think of
as universal and typical of life, is not the clashing of
spear and shield on any field of tourney, nor the fencing
of the soul with any supernatural foe, seeking its dam
nation: it is the mere struggle for existence, with the
survival of the fittest as the result, a scientific idea, and
one that centers attention on the things of this world.
This increases the sense in mankind of the materialism
of human life and the importance of its mortal interests.
Commerce seconds science in defining this struggle as a
competition of trade, a conflict, on the larger scale, of
tariff wars, a race for special privilege and open oppor
tunity in new countries. Science and trade are almost
as large a part of life now as righteousness was in Mat
thew Arnold's day: he reckoned it, I believe, at three-
quarters. The result is that mankind is surrounded with
a different scheme of thought, meditation and effort from
that of Spenser's age. He was near the ages that we
call the ages of faith: he was not far from the old Catho
lic idea of discipline; he was not enfranchised from su-
pernaturalism in Reformation dogmas; he lived when
men still died for their religion; — all of which is to say
that the idea of the spiritual in man's life and its im-

ioo THE TORCH

portance, was nigh and close to him. In our literature
there is much presentation of moral character, in the
sense of the side that a man turns toward his fellow
beings in society: in Scott, Thackeray and in Dickens,
George Eliot — to name the greatest, this is found; but
such spiritual character as Spenser made the subject
of his meditation and picturing is not found. In the his
tory of literature, the hero of action has always ended by
developing into the saintly ideal: so it was in Paganism
from Achilles to ^Eneas; so it was in medievalism from
Roland and Lancelot to Arthur, Galahad and Parsifal;
and in this chivalric tradition Spenser is the last term.
Will our moral ideal, as it is now flourishing, show a
similar course — has our literature of the democratic
movement, now in its early stages, the making of such a
saint in it — that is, of the man to whom God only is
real — as Paganism and medievalism in their day
evolved?

Spenser, then, being so remote from us, in all ways —
the question is natural, why read his poem at all? Be- /
cause it is the flower of long ages: because you command
in it as in a panorama the poetical tradition of all the
great imaginative literature in previous centuries, classi
cal, medieval and Renaissance; because you see how
Spenser, by his appropriation of these elements became
himself the Platonist, the artist, the moralist, and fused
all in the passion for beauty on earth and in the heavens
above, and so centered his whole nature toward God; ,
and what took place in him may take place, according
to its measure, in us. For, though the thoughts of men
change from century to century, and one guiding prin
ciple yields to another, and the ideal life is built up in
new ways in successive generations, yet the soul's life

SPENSER :'•-'- :idi

remains, however cast in new forms of the old passion
for beauty and virtue. If Spenser be a poet's poet, as
they say, let him appeal to the poet in you — for in
every man there is a poet; let him appeal in his own way,
as a teacher of the spiritual life; and, if my wish might
prevail, let him come most home to you and receive inti
mate welcome as the Puritan lover of beauty.

VI
MILTON

MILTON is a great figure in our minds. He is a very
lonely figure. For one thing, he has no companions of
genius round him; there is no group about him, in his
age. Again, he was a blind old man, and there is some
thing in blindness that, more than anything else, isolates
a man; and in his case, by strange but powerful contrast,
his blindness is enlarged and glorified by the fact that
he saw all the glory of the angels and the Godhead as no
other mortal eye ever beheld them, and the fact that he
was blind makes the vision itself more credible. And
thirdly he has impressed himself on men's memories as
unique in character; and, in his age defeated and given
o'er, among his enemies exposed and left, with the Puri
tan cause lost, he is the very type and pattern of a great
spirit in defeat — imprisoned in his blindness, poor, neg
lected, yet still faithful and the master of his own integ
rity; for us, almost as much as a poet, he remains the
intellectual champion of human liberty. So through cen
turies there has slowly formed itself this lonely figure in
our minds as our thought of Milton, and as Caesar is a
universal name of imperial power, the name of Milton
has become a synonym of moral majesty. But it was not
thus that he was thought of in his own times. There is no
evidence that Cromwell or the other important men of
the state knew that Milton was greater than they, or that

103

104 THE TORCH

he was truly great at all; to them he was pre-eminently
a secretary in the state department. The next generation
of poets — Dryden — called him "the old schoolmas
ter," you remember. In his earlier years he appealed to
the taste of a few cultivated and traveled gentlemen,
like Sir Henry Wotton, as a graceful and noble-lan-
guaged poet; but it was a full generation after his death
that he was accepted into the roll of the great, by Addi-
son in the "Spectator," and the next century was well on
its way before he was imitated by new men as the Eng
lish model of blank verse. In the literary tradition of
England, however, he is now established, and for all of
us he stands apart, a majestic memory, as I have said,
touched with the sublimity of his subject and with the
sublimity of his own character. There is, too, in our
thoughts of him, something grim, something of the
sterner aspect of historical Puritanism; the softness of
Spenser, the softness of his youth, had gone out of him,
and he had all the hardness of man in him — he was
trained down to the last ounce — he was austere. Yet I
love to recall his youth — you remember the fair boy-
face of the first portrait — a face of singular beauty; and
you know his pink and white complexion was such at
the University that he was called "the Lady of Christ's";
and, in those first years of his poetizing, he was deep in
the loveliest verse of Greece and Italy, in Pindar and
Euripides, in Petrarch and Tasso, as well as in Shake
speare and Spenser who were his English masters. He was
a young humanist — filled to overflowing with the new
learning and its artistic products, a lover of them and of
music, and of everything beautiful in nature — he was
especially a landscape-lover. Even then the clear spirit
— the white soul — somewhat too unspotted for human

MILTON 105

affections to cling about, it may be — was there; you
hear it singing in the high and piercing melody of the
"Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which
happily is usually a child's first knowledge of him; a cer
tain aloofness of nature he has, and nowhere do you find
in his English verse — nor do I find it in his Latin verse
where it is sometimes thought to be — nowhere do you
find the note of friendship, of that companionableness
which is often so charming a trait in the young lives of
the poets. But within his own reserves — and perhaps
the more precious and refined for that very reason —
there was the same sensuous delight in the artistic things
of sense, in natural beauty, in romantic charm, in the
lines of the old poets, that there was in Spenser; and in
this he was, as we mark literary descent, the child of
Spenser, though of course his culture was fed from other
sources and in larger measure, too. For he was a better
scholar than Spenser — his times allowed him to be —
and he had a far more powerful intellect. But, in these
years of his milder and happier youth, when he was liv
ing in the country in his long studies — he was a student
at ease till thirty — and when he was traveling in Italy,
he was in the true path of Spenser and the Renaissance,
the path of beauty, with faith in its divine leading. How
permanent the doctrine of the divine leading of beauty
was in Milton's mind will appear later; but here its
early presence is to be observed, because it gives to
Milton the true quality and atmosphere of his lost youth,
and also marks the great difference in tone and temper
between the earlier poems — so golden phrased, so mellif
luous, so happy — and the poems of his age, the "Para
dise Lost" and "Regained" and the "Samson." In
"Comus," more particularly in "L'Allegro" and "II

io6 THE TORCH

Penseroso," is the young Milton — he that the fair-
haired boy grew into, the humanist student, the writer
of Italian sonnets, the "landscape-lover, lord of lan
guage" — before Cromwell's age laid its heavy and man
hood-enforcing hand on the poet who chose first to serve
his country.

But it is the poet of whom I am to speak; and, perhaps,
before entering on the subject of his verse, it may be well
first to endeavor to mark his place more precisely in
English poetry and to account, partially at least, for its
historical distinction. A poet, so great as Milton, you
may be sure, occupies some point of vantage in history;
he embodies some climax in the intellectual or artistic
affairs of the world; and in Milton's case there are,
I think, two historical considerations not commonly
brought forward. I have had a good deal to say about
allegory. It was the characteristic literary form of the
Middle Ages; and the substitution of the direct story of
human life in its place is one of the traits of modern
times. You remember that the English drama, begin
ning from miracle plays and moralities and passing
through the stage of historical plays, came finally in
Shakespeare to a representation of human life as it is in
the most direct manner. Those of you who have seen
the play of "Everyman" have a very vivid idea of
what allegory is in a drama, and how such a drama differs
from "Romeo and Juliet." In "Everyman" abstract
principles are personified, and their play in life illus
trated; in "Romeo and Juliet," the passions and virtues
are in the form of character, are humanized as we say,
are there not as abstract principles but as human forces.
The development of English drama from an allegorical
mode of presenting life and character to a human realiza-

MILTON 107

tion of them in men and women culminated in Shake
speare, who thus stood at a historic moment of climax in
the evolution of his art. Now, you easily recognize the
likeness of such an allegorical play as "Everyman" to
Spenser's "Faerie Queene," in its method of personifying
the virtues and the temptations. Religious narrative
poetry remained allegorical, and medieval in artistic
method, not only in Spenser, but in his successors, such
as the Fletchers. Milton was the first English poet to
humanize completely the characters and events of reli
gious story, to put the religious scheme and view of the
world into the form of human things, and to expel from
the work the abstract allegorical element wholly. Thus
he is related to previous narrative religious poetry in
England precisely as Shakespeare is to the moralities of
early drama. He stands at this point of climax in the
evolution of his particular branch of poetic art. Reli
gious poetry was sixty years later than dramatic poetry in
reaching this perfect humanization of its material; and
thus it happens that Milton, though so much younger
than the Elizabethans, is commonly thought of as belong
ing to their company and in fact the last late product of
the age of their genius.

Secondly, we are accustomed to think of the Renais
sance as on the whole an affair of the southern nations,
and especially of Italy; but it was a European move
ment, a wave of thought and peculiar passion that slowly
crept up the North, and it reached its furthest point in
England, and there, as I think, it reached its highest lit
erary development. Shakespeare was the climax of the\
Renaissance; its passion for individuality, for a free
career for the human soul, and its instinct of the dignity
of personal life, were the very forces to unlock most

io8 THE [TORCH

potently dramatic power; and in Shakespeare this was
accomplished, and you know how besides he used its
material and lived hi its atmosphere. Spenser, also, as
I said hi the last lecture, took the worship of beauty and
the idea of the courtier from the Renaissance, spiritual
ized the one and Christianized the other, and gave them a
new career in English Puritanism. Milton is to be asso
ciated with Shakespeare and Spenser, as a third and the
last great representative of the Renaissance in England,
and as there carrying its epic power to a degree of per
fection far beyond what it had reached in Italy, exceeding
both Ariosto and Tasso; in him were the learning
and taste of the Renaissance, its cultivation of individ
uality and respect for it — in both matter and spirit
he belonged fundamentally to that movement, and was
its latest climax. I therefore define his historical posi
tion as being the point at which religious poetry was com
pletely humanized in England, and at which the Renais
sance spirit generally as a European movement culmi
nated in epic poetry.

"Paradise Lost" is the poem by which Milton lives.
Fond as we may be of his younger verse, and apprecia
tive of the eloquence of "Paradise Regained" and of the
tragic simplicity of "Samson Agonistes," yet popular
judgment is to be followed in finding in "Paradise Lost"
the true center of Milton's genius. Every poet who
achieves a single great poem puts his whole mind into it,
empties his mind and tells all he knows; his felicity is to
find a subject which permits him to do this; such was the
course of Homer and Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Goethe, to
name a few, and Milton was no exception to the rule,
He included in his poem the entire history of the universe
from the heaven which was before creation to the millen-

MILTON 109

nium which shall be the consummation of all things;
and, in this great sphere of action he chose as the objec
tive point the moral relation of mankind to God, cer
tainly the highest subject in importance; and in elabor
ating his work he used all the wealth of his literary
knowledge and culture, the entire literary tradition of
the race, just as Spenser did — only more broadly; what
ever, either in matter or method, there was serviceable
in past literature — Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, and
English — all this Milton used. He grasped and con
structed the subject with great mental power and artistic
skill; although, in minor parts, his conventional machin
ery and devices have been attacked, the leading lines of
his construction stand clear of criticism. He really took
three great themes, any one of which would have fur
nished forth a poem, and blended them together with
such dexterity that they are seldom separated even in
analysis — so perfect is the unity of the resulting whole.
In the first place, you recognize at once in "Paradise
Lost" a Christian adaptation of the Titan Myth. The
rebellion of the angels is conceived as a war of the Titans
against the gods; and is treated in accordance with Greek
imagination as a conflict in which the mountains were
used as weapons: —

"From their foundations, loosening to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops
Uplifting, bore them in their hands. Amaze,
Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel host
When coming towards them so dread they saw
The bottom of the mountains upward turned . . .
Themselves invaded next, and on their heads
Main promontories flung, which in the air
Came shadowing . . .

no THE TORCH

So hills amid the air encountered hills,
. . . horrid confusion heaped
Upon confusion rose."

Satan on the flood of hell is conceived as of Titanic
form:

"With head uplift above the wave, and eyes
That sparkling blazed ; his other parts besides
Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a road, in bulk as huge
As whom the fables name of monstrous size,
Titanian or Earth-born, that warred on Jove,
Briareos or Typhon" —

and you recall how he reared himself from off the fiery
lake, and took his station on the shore, with the ponder
ous shield whose "broad circumference hung on his
shoulders like the moon," and stayed his steps with his
tall spear -

"To equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great ammiral, were but a wand;"

and there summoning his squadrons loomed over them
like the sun "in dim eclipse, disastrous twilight shed
ding on half the nations." Such is Satan's figure at the
first, and it is by such images of Titanic darkened gran
deur that his form is most vividly remembered. I have
spoken of the difficulty the poets have had in defining
the forms of the Titans to the eye. Milton solves the
problem by ascribing to the devil and his angels no deter
minate form; they are, so to speak, collapsible and ex
tensible at will; and they take the appropriate scales of
proportion in whatever scene they are placed.

It is common to think of Satan as the true hero of the

MILTON in

poem, and as an imaginative figure he certainly occupies
the foreground; yet to Milton he was a hateful being, and
I am convinced that familiarity with the poem takes
from him that admiration which properly should belong
to the hero, and at the end he is clearly felt as the object
of repulsive evil, whom Milton meant him to be. Mil
ton's method, after presenting Satan hi somber but ma
jestic form, is gradually to debase him to the eye as well
as to the mind. Here the treatment sets him apart from
any conception of the Titan Prometheus in bonds; for
Prometheus is never felt to be debased even physically
by the punishment of Zeus. The first revolt of the
reader's mind from its initial admiration for Satan takes
place, I think, acutely in the scene at the gate of hell
when he meets Sin and Death. The association of Satan
with such horrible beings as they are represented to be,
and the knowledge that his intimacy with them is that of
fatherhood, shocks the mind with ugliness — ugliness that
is almost bestial in its effect. When he reaches the new
earth, after his address to the Sun, he is seen trans
formed in countenance —

"Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his face
Thrice changed with pale — ire, envy and despair,
Which marred his borrowed visage — "

and soon he is "squat like a toad" at the ear of Eve;
whence touched by the young angel's spear, he rises
"the grisly King," so changed from his heavenly self
that he is unrecognized. Then, after one more grand Ti
tanic figuring of his might — the most impressive of all
— as he opposes Gabriel : —

"On the other side, Satan, alarmed,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,

ii2 THE TORCH

Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved:

His stature reached the sky, and on his crest

Sat Horror plumed ; — "

after this unforgetable and heroic figure, Milton dis
misses him from the poem in the scene in hell, where, re
turning after his triumph to take the applause of his host,
he is, in the moment of his highest boasting, transformed
into the serpent with all his followers in like forms — a
scene so repellent that perhaps none has been more ad
versely commented on. This gradual degradation of Sa
tan, in his form, is, it seems to me, a cardinal point in the
poem. It is to be associated with Milton's idea of beauty
— that Platonic idea which I mentioned. The first ob
servation of Satan in hell is the lost brightness of Beelze
bub whom he addresses:

"If thou beest he — but oh, how fallen! how changed
From him, who, in the happy realms of light
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright! — "

When he comes to the new creation, the radiance of the
sun reminds him of the same change in himself, and
when the young angel surprises him in Eden, it is his
lost beauty that he mourns.

"So spake the cherub: and his grave rebuke,
Severe in youthful beauty, added grace
Invincible. Abashed the Devil stood
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely — saw, and pined
His loss; but chiefly to find here observed
His luster visibly impaired."

The power of beauty over him is the last vestige of his
lost nobility. Thus in Eden gazing on Adam and Eve,
he says, —

MILTON 113

"Whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love: so lively shines
In them divine resemblance;"

and just before the temptation, in the presence of Eve,
he felt her beauty to be such that —

"That space the evil One abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge."

It is only by a recovery of his evil nature that he gains
power to go on with his deceit. Such relics of faded glory
as his brow wore, such relics of the sense of beauty also
remained in his spirit. The debasement of his form, cul
minating in the scorpion scene in hell, is — for Milton
— one and the same thing with the corruption of his
moral nature, and is in fact a principal means of charac
terization; for in each new act Satan takes a new form.
There is nothing elsewhere in literature quite like this.
It is, however, the peculiar meanness of his revenge
which most degrades Satan's character; in his rebellion
against God, in his unavailing courage, when powers felt
and depicted as great are matched against omnipo
tence, in the mere ruin of such tremendous power, there
are sublime elements; but in his triumph over mankind
there is no true joining of forces for equal encounter —
in fact Satan is never brought in contact with Adam di
rectly — and though Paradise is surrounded with guards
and watched over by Uriel in the sun, these are no real
defences; mankind is felt to be unsheltered, the power
of Adam and Eve to remain obedient is not so presented
as to seem a match for the power of the devil, and Satan
consequently appears to triumph over a weak and inno-

U4 THE TORCH

cent foe, harmless to him, whom he sacrifices in a malig
nant spirit of revenge by ignoble and secret ways. In
his own character, and apart from man, Satan embodies
the Renaissance ideal of the freedom of the individual,
of the affirmation of one's own life, of development of
one's powers and qualities and opportunities — he is like
a brilliant, unscrupulous, rebellious Italian prince having
his own way with the world he is born into; to conceive
of him as resembling an English rebel against the Crown,
or at all indebted to that character, except perhaps in the
point of resolute defiance, is, I think, to misconceive him
altogether, although it is a common view. He was, on
the contrary, the Renaissance prince seeking his free
career, valuing individual talent and force above every
thing, the concentration of personal faculty, pride, ambi
tion — and conscienceless in his determination to live all
his life out. In his struggle with omnipotence, he secures
respect for certain qualities of strength which in alliance
with virtue are great qualities, and even in wickedness
do not lose their impressiveness; but in his easy triumph
over Eve in the Garden, and in its consequence to man
kind, he becomes contemptible hi his aim, his method, and
his being.

Certain important differences in the Titan Myth as
treated by Milton should be noticed. You observe that
the Greek situation is reversed: the angels are the
younger race of beings, and according to Greek ideas
should have succeeded and thereby have asserted the
principle of progress. The angels, however, were de
feated. Of course, there is no room in the scheme of the
universe, as Milton conceived it, for any progress — the
being and the reign of God are already perfect, and
progress is only the salvation of man, that is, a restora-

MILTON 115

tion of things. Restoration, not Revolution, is Milton's
cardinal idea. It follows from this that hell is necessarily
the end of the angels; it is a cul-de-sac, a blind alley — it
leads nowhere — it has no future; the poem stops in that
direction as if it had run against a wall. The denial of
progress has brought everything to a standstill, with eter
nal damnation for the angels and ultimate restoration
for mankind. It is here, I think, that modern sympathy
parts company with this portion of the poem — that is,
with the conception of hell in it. Our thoughts are so
pledged to the idea of progress, to the thought of evolu
tion as the law of all created beings, that the notion of
hell as a kind of sink and prison of the universe finds no
place for itself in our minds. The only thing in civiliza
tion that resembles hell is the modern jail, and that we
desire most potently to eliminate, in the sense that it shall
not be a place that leads nowhere, even for the most hard
ened. I desire, however, only to set sharply over against
each other in your minds the Hebrew fixity of Milton's
thought and the Greek idea of progress, as they are
brought out by the mythic wars of heaven in each case;
and to suggest that the failure of the poem to interest the
modern mind hi hell, except as a spectacle, is connected
with the fundamental denial of progress in it, and its
departure from the thought of development.

The second great theme which Milton incorporated
into his poem is the Bowerof Bliss. This is the theme by
means of which love, which next to war is the great sub
ject of poetry, enters into the epic; the hero is with
drawn from battle, and tempted to forget his career in
the world, by love for a woman. The importance of the
theme, and its relative proportion of interest in the epic
as a whole, steadily increased — it was a convenient way

n6 THE TORCH

of withdrawing the leading character and giving the other
heroes an opportunity for display free from his rivalry,
it was interesting in itself as opening up the whole field
of the romance and tragedy of love, and it was the best
kind of an episode to vary the story. Thus the loves of
^Eneas for Dido, in the "^Eneid," and of Armida for Ri-
naldo in "Tasso," were represented. For Milton Eden is
a Bower of Bliss, in this sense. It freed his hand for de
scription of nature in her softest scenes and in the at
mosphere of love. You may recall Tennyson's summary
of it, in his lines on Milton —

"Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse, and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean
Where some refulgent sunset of India,
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean-isle,
And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
Whisper in odorous heights of even."

Here Milton had the characteristic scenery of the Bower
of Bliss, and he elaborated it with Renaissance richness
of luxurious natural detail. The situation was also char
acteristic, and the power of woman to weaken the moral
force of the hero through love was illustrated: the issue
only was different, for whereas in the normal epic the
hero breaks his bonds and goes back to his career —
to the founding of Rome or the capture of Jerusalem —
Adam was made the tragic victim of his fall, and with
him all mankind. Adam, from every point of view, holds
an unenviable position, for a hero: he never, as I have
said, is brought to a direct encounter with Satan, his
great enemy, and in this round-about conflict in which
he falls through the temptation of Eve his defeat is irrep-

MILTON 117

arable. It is singular to observe that in the only other
English poem of epical action — in Tennyson's "Idylls
of the King," Arthur is similarly a hero of defeat; the
breaking of the Round Table is the catastrophe, brought
about by the sin of Guinevere in the orthodox conven
tional way, and Arthur, when he sails away "to heal him
of his grievous wound" leaves a lost cause behind him in
the world. It would be a curious enquiry — could one
answer it — why the two great epic poems of the English
represent the cause of the higher life as suffering a tem
porary overthrow in this world. Not to enter upon that,
however, I have only time to point out that, as it seems
to me, modern sympathy also parts company with Mil
ton in this portion of the poem, inasmuch as it has
grown unnatural for us to regard womanhood as the pe
culiar means by which moral character is impaired, and
the world lost; rather we go with Spenser in his convic
tion that womanhood is the inspiration of noble life. The
character of Eve as Milton drew it is from a very an
cient world of myth and race- thought: the influence of
chivalry on the worldly side, and on the spiritual side
the influence of the beatification of motherhood in the
Virgin Mary, have profoundly affected and changed the
ancient thought, and though not unfelt in Milton they
have not sufficient power in him to modify essentially
the primitive conception of Eve. It is the more unfortu
nate that Milton's own temper, as a husband, was such
that he has vigorously emphasized in his poem the infe
riority of woman to man, her natural subjection to him,
and in general has left to her only that loveliness and
charm which most appealed to him as a poet.

The third great theme of Milton is a cosmogony —
that is, a story of creation: it is told by Raphael to Adam,

u8 THE TORCH

and it is supplemented by the history of mankind which
is shown to Adam prophetically by Michael. It has been
the fashion of science to ridicule, as Huxley did, Mil
ton's description of the origin of living creatures; but as
a tale of creation, his story is quite the most consistent /
and nobly imaginative of any that poets have told, and1
his panorama of history is effectively unrolled, with
comprehensiveness, vigor of thought and vividness of
scene. In two respects, nevertheless, modern sympathy
parts company with Milton here, too. He adopted as his
scheme of the universe of space, you remember, the
older or Ptolemaic idea, that the earth is the center, and
is surrounded by the spheres, one inside another, till you
reach the outermost or primum mobile. He knew, of
course, the Copernican scheme, which we now all hold,
when we think of the relation of the earth to the sun and
stars. It was, I think, the classical prepossession of his
mind — his desire for a world limited, closed and clear,
like a Greek temple — which led him to adopt this older
scheme of the universe. But the result is that the rest of
the poem is apt to seem as antiquated as its celestial
geography. Again, in his view of history, he necessarily
made human history unroll as a consequence of the fall
of Adam, and gave an importance to its Biblical events,
which they can only retain in a limited way. The center
and movement of history are now so differently con
ceived by the general modern mind that Milton's ac
count of history has little essential interest to the reader.
Such, as it lies in my mind, is the composition of the
"Paradise Lost" — a Titan Myth, a Bower of Bliss,
and a Cosmogony or story of creation and history,
blended into one unified poem in which the central
event is the fall of Adam. It is a poem of the Renais-

MILTON 119

sance, the last great product of that movement flowering
in the far and Puritan North; it is enriched with all the
treasures of the New Learning, softened with all the
imaginative graces of humanism; and in the great charac
ter of Satan, it presents, on his noble side, the most mag
nificent embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of free and
imperious individuality, and on his ignoble side it reflects
some of the fairest gleams of Platonic philosophy. I
have indicated in what important ways it seems dis
connected with the modern mind, in its scientific and his
toric schemes, in its primitive view of the evil of woman
hood, and in its opposition to the idea of progress. I
should perhaps sum this last idea to a point, and say that
in the poem the charter of free-will which the Creator
gives to the angels and to Adam operates as a limitation
on omnipotence; it is impossible for the modern mind to
look on the Creator except as the giver of good; and yet
his gift in this poem so operates as to make his omnipo
tence continually manifest in the act of damnation; it
operates to damn the angels through their revolt, to
damn Adam through his fall, and to damn mankind
through Adam. Within the limits of the action described,
the poem is thus from the first line to the last a poem of
the damnation of things, in which the fact of final partial
restoration is present as an intention and promise only.
This is what makes it a poem of past time, and removes
it far from the modern mind. For the democratic idea
— which is the modern mind — is a power to save: it will
have no prisons of vengeance, no servile nor outcast
races, no closed gates of hopeless being. "Paradise
Lost" is thus set behind us, as an embodiment of a his
torical phase of the Christian idea — like Dante.
I am aware that the verdict seems adverse to Milton;

120 THE TORCH

but it is not so in reality, though I desire to make plain
the fact that " Paradise Lost" is now a historical poem,\
a past event in the imaginative life of the race. But no
words I can use would sufficiently express the admira
tion which this poem excites hi me — not merely for its
unrivalled-music, nor for its sJLyJe which Matthew Ar
nold thought keeps it alive, but for its construction as an
act of intellect, for its sublime imagination in dealing
with infinite space, infinite time, and eternity and the
beings of eternity; for its beautiful surface in the scenes
in Paradise, its idyllic sweetness and charm, the habitual
eloquence and noble demeanor in the characters; nor
do I find its later books less excellent, in which austere
thought and nakedness of idea more appear — the char
acteristics of the poet coming into his own, and content
with truth unadorned, simple and plain — the sign and
proof, of which "Paradise Regained" and "Samson
Agonistes" are greater examples, that as a poet he was
perfected. Small in amount, indeed, is the verse that I
have read more often; such strength, such exquisiteness,
such elevation, he has no rival in, for power and grace,
for refinement; his voice is master of his theme; and he is
seated in the heavens of poetry where Shelley saw him —

"The third among the sons of light."

VII
WORDSWORTH

WE approach our own times; and if, hitherto, litera
ture has seemed to us a somewhat far-off thing, a thing
of the Greek Myth, of chivalric allegory, of the Renais
sance hero, it should now grow near and fast to us as our
chief present aid in leading that large race-life of the
mind whose end, as I have said, is to free the individual
soul. The notion that poetry is a thing remote from life
is a singular delusion; it is more truly to be described
as the highway of our days, though we tread it, as chil
dren tread the path of innocence, without knowing it.
Nothing is more constant in the life of boy or man than
the outgoing of his soul into the world about him, and
this outgoing, however it be achieved, is the act of poetry.
It is in the realmjof nature that these journeys first take
place; nature is a medium by which the soul passes out
into a larger existence; and as nature is very close to all
men, perhaps our experience with her offers the most
universal, certainly it offers the most elementary, illus
tration of the poetical life which all men in some meas
ure lead. Wordsworth is, pre-eminently, a guide in this
region; and, as he was less indebted than poets usually
are to the great tradition of literature in past ages,
poetry in him seems more exclusively a thing of the pres
ent life, contemporary and altogether our own. Such a
poet, endeavoring by a conscious reform to renew poetry

121

122 THE TORCH

in his age and bring it home to man's bosom, eliminating
the conventional ways, images, and language even of
the poetic past, is necessarily thrown back on nature,
in the external world, and on character, in the internal
world, for his subject-matter; history, except in con
temporary forms, will be far from him, and of myth and
chivalry, of Plato and the Italians, though he will have
his share, he will have the least possible. This may
leave his verse bare and monotonous in quality, but what
substance it does contain will have great vitality, for
it comes directly from the man. You will observe, how
ever, that his narrower scope of learning, treatment, and
theme makes no difference in the essential point of
interest. His longest and most deliberate poem — that
one into which he tried to empty his entire mind, as I
said is a great poet's way — "The Prelude," is the his
tory of the formation of his mind; that is, plainly, his
subject is the same as Spenser's — how in our days is a
human soul brought to its fullness of power and grace?
The manner, the story, the accessories, the entire color
and atmosphere, are changed from what they were in
the Elizabethan times, but the question abides. Spenser
is hardly aware that nature has anything to do with
forming the soul; to Wordsworth, nature seems its chief
nourishment and fosterer, almost its creator. I desire to
illustrate how Wordsworth represented the outgoing of
the soul in nature, as a part of its discipline, its educa
tion in life, like the quest of the Knights in Spenser.

When you go out to walk alone in a scene of natural
beauty, your senses are first excited and interested; but
often there arise in consequence feelings and ideas har
monious with the scene, and emotionally touched with
it, which gradually absorb your consciousness; and at

WORDSWORTH 123

last you find yourself engaged in a mood — perhaps of
memory — from which the external scene has entirely
dropped away or round which it is felt only as a nimbus
or halo of beauty, or mystery or calm. This happens con
stantly and normally to all of ns, and it is an act of
poetry; for it is the very method and secret of the lyric.
The poet receiving some impulse through his senses
delights in it, and rises by natural harmony to feelings
and ideas that belong with such joy, and ends in the
higher pleasure to which his senses have served him as
the stairway of divine surprise. Such a poem is Burns's
"Highland Mary"; he begins with the outer scene,
woods and the summer, and you will notice how at the
end all has dropped away except the love in his heart:

"Ye banks, and braes, and streams around

The castle o' Montgomery,
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,

Your waters never drumlie!
There simmer first unfauld her robes,

And there the langest tarry;
For there I took my last fareweel

O' my sweet Highland Mary.

How sweetly bloom'd the gay green birk,

How rich the hawthorn's blossom,
As underneath their fragrant shade,

I clasp 'd her to my bosom!
The golden hours, on angel wings,

Flew o'er me and my dearie;
For dear to me, as light and life,

Was my sweet Highland Mary.

WP mony a vow, and lock'd embrace,

Our parting was fu' tender;
And, pledging aft to meet again,

We tore oursels asunder;

124 THE TORCH

But oh! fell Death's untimely frost,

That nipt my flower sae early!
Now green ;s the sod, and cauld 's the clay,

That wraps my Highland Mary.

Oh, pale, pale now, those rosy lips,

I aft hae kiss'd sae fondly;
And closed for aye the sparkling glance,

That dwelt on me sae kindly!
And mouldering now in silent dust,

That heart that lo'ed me dearly!
But still within my bosom's core

Shall live my Highland Mary."

His heart has taken the place of all the world as
Mary's dwelling.

This experience, this course of emotional thought, is
the habit of the human heart; it is repeated countless
times in any man's life. In each case the poem depends
only on where we stop our minds. We may stop in the
outer scene, and have only beautiful description: we may
go on into the mood of imagination or memory, and end
there; we may go further, and reach some contact with
divine things, with God in nature. It is easy to illustrate
the matter from Wordsworth, for he has himself defined
these stages. You remember his account of his boyish
skating on the ice:

«_ All shod with steel
We hissed along the polished ice, in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures, — the resounding horn,
The pack loud-bellowing, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle: with the din
Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag

WORDSWORTH 125

Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, — or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star;
Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me — even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a summer sea."

Any boy, who has skated on the river, has lived that
poem: has had the physical sense of the scene, which
arouses in him a certain reverberation of feeling. The
second stage — that of youth — is as usual, though in
Wordsworth it was uncommonly prolonged and intense:

"Though changed, no doubt from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)

126 THE TORCH

To me was all in all. — I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. — That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures."

Here the physical scene is less felt — the excitement, the
reverberation, is greater. There is the third stage, to
which in this poem he immediately passed on:

"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things."

Here the physical scene has become abstract and ele
mental — diaphanous beauty — and he is in the pres
ence of the divine power shining through its veils. Na
ture, beginning with the awe of boyhood, ripening into
the passion and high delight of youth, matures in man
hood in the spiritual insight which makes the daily

WORDSWORTH 127

process of life in merely living under the sky and in sight
of earthly beauty an act of worship. It is plain, as I said,
that the degree to which any man may live Wordsworth's
poem depends only on where his mind stops in its ordi
nary human process, whether with the boy on the ice, the
youth on the mountains or the man with "the light of
setting suns." In all these cases, you will notice, Words
worth represents the soul as going out from him into
the large material sphere.

Wordsworth, however, was acutely conscious of the
reaction of nature on mankind, of its formative power
over men and their lives. The idea is most familiar to us
as the influence of the environment; and we think of a
sea-coast people, like the Greeks, as differing from a
mountaineer people, like the Swiss, because of their
natural surroundings. The idea, however, is more pre
cise than that. The field which the farmer tills slowly
bends his form to itself. You remember Millet's famous
painting "The Angelus." The peasant who is its center
has been physically formed by toiling in the fields where
he stands; you feel as you look, that the landscape itself
is summed up, and almost embodied in him, its crea
ture, and the picture is spiritualized, and made a type of
our common humanity, by the sound of the Angelus
reflected in his prayerful attitude. That is the way that
Wordsworth conceived of nature as forming his dales
men and shepherds. There is this landscape quality in
all his memorable characters; you think of them, you see
them, in connection with the soil. Thus you recall the
figure of the Reaper; you see her at her task in the field,
and the song she sings:

"The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more" —

128 THE TORCH

that song unifies the poem and spiritualizes it, precisely
as the prayer does in "The Angelus." So you see
"The Leech-Gatherers":

"In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually
Wandering about alone and silently;" —

So, too, Simon Lee, the old huntsman, and Matthew
at his daughter's grave, and Michael, the builder of the
sheep-fold, and Ruth, and good Lord Clifford, are
landscape figures.

Wordsworth carried his thought of the formative
power of nature beyond this point, and to take at once
the characteristic poem, he saw nature forming the soul
of a woman:

"Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own.

'Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse: and with me

The Girl, in rock and plain,

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,

Shall feel an overseeing power

To kindle or restrain.

'She shall be sportive as the Fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things

WORDSWORTH 129

'The floating Clouds their state shall lend

To her; for her the willow bend;

Nor shall she fail to see

Even in the motions of the Storm

Grace that should mold the Maiden's form

By silent sympathy.

The Stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In every secret place

Where Rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

'And vital feelings of delight

Shall rear her form to stately height,

Her virgin bosom swell;

Such thoughts to Lucy I will give

While she and I together live

Here in this happy Dell/ "

The poem comes to its climax in the thought that
"beauty born of murmuring sound, shall pass into her
face." There is nothing extravagant in the idea. You
have all seen a face transfigured while listening to mu
sic, or to the sea; and the thought is that such listening
being habitual, the expression becomes habitual, and
not only that but the peace and joy and inner harmony,
which the expression denotes, have become habitual,
that is, parts of character. Wordsworth displays his
thought more at length in the "Tintern Abbey" lines, in
his counsel to his sister and his confessions of his own
life with nature. In consequence of this general attitude
of mind toward the educating power of nature, Words
worth held his maxim, that we "can feed this mind of
ours with wise passiveness."

i3o THE TORCH

He had a faith as perfect as that of the Concord phil
osophers in the alms of the idle 'hour. And he did not
mean merely that thoughts and impressions stream in on
one, who expands his petals to the flying pollen of
heaven, or that moral instances like the lesson of the
Celandine will store his collector's box, but that inti
macy — habitual intimacy with the highest truths of
the soul — is reached in this way. He had the impres
sion that childhood was especially susceptible to these
influences and revelations; and the glorification of
childhood which is a marked trait of his most deeply-
felt verse, lies in this neighborhood of its being to nature
and nature's revelations. In his ode on the intimations
of Immortality" in childhood he pours forth, in the
most passionate and eloquent phrase, his clearest,
most vivid and most penetrating intuitions of the
power of nature in these ways, on the boy and the
man.

Such are some of the moods in which Wordsworth
conceived the operation of nature on man as molding
both general and individual life, the thoughts and emo
tions of men and women, and the soul of childhood, as if
nature were the delegated hand of God to shape our
lives, and carried with its touch some power to impart
heavenly wisdom. Wordsworth, you observe, had a very
primitive mind; in that act of gazing on setting suns he is
not far from being a sun-worshipper: he still can believe
that "every flower enjoys the air it breathes." He
conceives of nature, as an element, in grand lines; and
he thinks of the phases of human life even — of its great
occupations, its affections and sorrows, almost as if they
were parts of nature — even more closely united to it
and with greater kindliness than Virgil represented

WORDSWORTH 131

them in the Georgics. This simple, primitive, elemen
tary mind underlies his thought of childhood, too, and
it appears, perhaps, most significantly in the fact that
when through nature he touches on the boundaries of
divine being, he achieves no more than a sense of the
presence of God in nature — it is only a silent presence
— he does not find, so far as I can see, at any time
the voice of God there. This is the primitive mood of
savage and pagan man.

Perhaps it may be well to consider for a moment the
place of nature in modern life, apart from Wordsworth.
Lucretius, who first took a scientific view of the world,
as a poet, found in nature the inveterate hard foe of
mankind: he it was who first saw the careless gods look
down upon

"An ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine, and oil,
Till they perish."

Virgil, as I have said, felt rather the kindly cooperation
of nature with man in producing the fruits of the field,
and the flocks and herds of the hills, to feed and clothe
us. Our view is not so much that of Lucretius, of the
opposition, but rather of the indifference of nature. She
knows not mercy, nor justice, nor chastity, nor any
human virtue; and man in emerging from her world lives
in a sphere of thought, conduct, and aspiration to which
she is a stranger. Yet, that kindly cooperation that Virgil
saw, still continues on the lower levels of life, and the
great change is that, whereas of old and in his day the
sense of dependence on nature, that is to say on the gods,
was habitual and daily, now through the growth of the

i32 THE TORCH

world, that dependence is no longer felt as at all super
natural; the harvest ripens or fails, but we have little
thought of the gods therewith; and, in fact, the habitual
sense of the dependence of our own bodies on the favor
of heaven is a vanishing quality. It is a consequence of
this that our life necessarily grows more purely spiritual,
and such dependence on the divine as is recognized is a
dependence of the soul itself, felt in the contemplative
mind and much more in the life of the affections. Na
ture as an intermediary between God and man has lost
in importance, through the growth and spread of the
idea of the order obtaining in nature as against the idea
of nature as a series of special providences in relation to
our daily lives. I count this loss as a gain, inasmuch as it
throws the soul back on its own higher nature and essen
tial life. But there is another change. Of old the thought
was of the earth and toil upon it; that was nature; now
our thought of nature is of a force, which we subdue. It
has come about through the extraordinary development
of mechanical skill. Of old we taught the winds to waft
our ships, and the waters to drive our mills; but now —
to take the significant example — we have enslaved the
lightning. Nature has become in our thoughts a Cali
ban reduced to civility by being put in bonds. I have
much sympathy with theoretic science; with the mind's
view of the world — and I recognize its noble results,
not only in philosophic thought, but in much impres
sionistic art. But I have all of a poet's impatience of ap
plied science. I remember hearing a story years ago of a
snail who got mounted on a tortoise: "My!" he said,
"how the grass whistles by!" And when I hear people
in trolley-cars talk of riding on the wings of the lightning
I think of the snail. What is the speed of the lightning to

WORDSWORTH 133

the swiftness of the "wings of meditation and the
thoughts of love" that the soul of Hamlet knew? Is Ni
agara essentially an electric-lighting plant? I have
heard men of science — the same men who told me that
Homer never did anything of half the importance of a
theorem in mechanics — I have heard them sneer at the
old Greek idea that man was the center of the universe
— the Christian idea that Milton had — the idea of
George Herbert:

"Man is one world,
And hath another to attend him: — "

this idea was man's foolish egoism. But is it a larger
idea to think of nature as man's Jack-of -all-trades?
For me, I must say, science — applied science — de
grades the conception of nature in narrowing it to the
grooves of material use. Yet this is, in general, our mod
ern idea — the prevailing idea — of nature. What poem
of recent years has been more acclaimed than that in
which a Scotch Presbyterian engineer found in his en
gine the idea of God? It is well that he should find the
idea there, as it was well in the eighteenth century that
the clock-maker should find his idea of God as a clock-
maker, since that was the measure of his knowledge of
God; but, for all that, the narrowing influence of these
scientific conceptions is no less. Hence it is that we fall
into the commonest error of men — the error of per
spective, a wrong sense of the proportion of things. Our
eyes are fixed on the material uses of nature, and he is
great among us who sets her to some new task in cheap
ening steel or facilitating transportation. Now in Words
worth there is nothing of this; he hardly notices, indeed,
what to Virgil was so important, her cooperation in

134 THE TORCH

agriculture and the life of the farm. Wordsworth restores
to us the spiritual use of nature; and the spiritual use
that man makes of the world is the really important
thing. With that primitive mind of his, he realizes at
once the closeness with which we are cradled in nature,
the universality of her life round about us:

"He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth;
Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
The hills were round about us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sunlit fields again:
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain."

For the least conscious, for the semi-vital among men,
nature is the blanket of God round about them; for the
most spiritually-minded, nature is the ante-room to His
presence, and our way to a higher life. In poem after
poem Wordsworth illustrates all modes of approach by
which on the threshold of nature the soul grows con
scious of itself; especially he shows how nature feeds the
mind with beauty through the senses:

"Sensations sweet

Felt in the blood and felt along the heart
And passing even into my purer mind;"

and thus is a chief minister to us in that building of our
own world — physical, emotional, moral — each one of
us for himself, which is the necessary task of all. It is not
a machine that we have to make, to hew wood and draw
water for us, and carry us from place to place at elec
trical speed; it is a world that we have to build for our
souls to live in and grow through, a world of happy
memory, of pure hope, of daily beauty, the world of our
habitual selves, and Wordsworth shows what elements

WORDSWORTH 135

for such a world of the soul — for such a daily self —
nature provides and what is the art of its construction.
To Wordsworth, however, no more than to other poets
was nature the whole of life: and even to him, if you stop
to think about it, nature has no life of her own, but is
only one mode of the soul's existence and self-con
sciousness. He came back at last, as all do, to man as
the only subject that finally interests men. I said that in
nature he found only the presence, but not the voice, of
God. The voice of God he found in his own bosom, in
conscience, in duty, as you remember in his "Ode to
Duty" he begins:

"Stern daughter of the voice of God,
O Duty — if that name thou love — "

The second great root of his poetry is character —
moral character, and in defining and enforcing its ideals
none of our poets is more truly English, more truly of
the race to which character is always an engrossing and
primary interest. In the poem, called "The Happy
Warrior" he delineated both the public and private as
pects of character, as conceived by the English, with a
felicity of phrase and solidity of thought, and also with
eloquent distinction, such as to place the poem apart by
itself as unique in our literature. The better example,
however, for my purposes, is the portrait of a woman —
"She was a phantom of delight," — the companion-piece
to that I have already read — in which he begins from
the things of sense, and goes on, in the way I have de
scribed, to the moral, and finally to the spiritual sphere.
Here the lyric method of poetry is again illustrated —
how, starting from the external world it becomes at last
purely internal — which is the method, as you recognize,

136 THE TORCH

of all poetical life in essence. Apart from abstract char
acter, the sphere of human life which Wordsworth most
attended to was of course that humble life of the poor
in which he was most interested because they were near
to the soil, and, as he thought, nearer on that account to
nature's hand. It is, however, a transparent error to
think of dalesmen and shepherds as nearer to nature in
this sense; it is one of the fallacies of civilized life; for
Wordsworth himself is the shining example how much
more, in both intimacy and fullness, was his life with
nature than that of any other in his generation. Nature
is not to be thought of as a kind of agricultural-school
education, a thing for children and dalesmen; but the
same rule that holds of all the gift of life holds here, that
the beneficence, the splendor and mystery of the gift, in
creases with the power of him who receives it. Words
worth was the true and faithful poet of lowly lives, and
as such he is endeared to humanity; he was the second
great democratic poet, succeeding Burns, from whom he
learned to be such, as he says; but he comes more di
rectly and intimately into our own lives through his per
sonal force — through his own experience of what nature
meant to him.

In what sense, then, is Wordsworth a race-exponent?
Principally and distinctively in the fact that he sums up,
illustrates, and amplifies the experience of the race in its
direct relation to nature. With that primitive mind on
which I have dwelt, he spanned the difference between
the earliest and the latest thought of the race; to him, in
certain moods, nature was animated with a life like our
own, he believed it enjoyed its life as we do, and this is
primeval belief; at the other end of progress he was as
pantheistic as he was animistic here, and saw nature

WORDSWORTH 137

only as another form of divine being. Thus he contem
plated nature almost as the savage and almost as the
philosopher, and commanded the whole scope of hu
man thought with relation thereto. He presented nature
through this wide range as a discipline of the soul in its
development; it is, first, a discipline in beauty, in the
power to see and appreciate loveliness, and he especially
values this as a means of building up a beautiful mem
ory — perhaps the chief consolation of advancing life.
So, in the lines to the "Highland Girl," he writes:

"In spots like these it is we prize
Our Memory; feel that she hath eyes:"

So he wrote again of that inward eye

"Which is the bliss of solitude" —

and illustrates it by the vision of the daffodils; and in the
same spirit counsels his sister:

"Thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies."

Secondly, it is a discipline of the emotions, which nature
evokes and exercises. The emotion is represented, nearly
always I think, as that reverberation of feeling which I
spoke of. Perhaps its most spiritualized example is in
Tennyson:

"Tears, idle tears: I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair,
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more."

138 THE TORCH

The reverberation of emotion, here, is the poem. It is
this reverberation, truly speaking, which Wordsworth
interprets as the sense of the divine presence in nature:

"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts" -

Thirdly, it is a discipline of the moral sense. Heie, per
haps, we have most difficulty in going along with Words
worth. When he says:

"One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can:"

when he writes of himself as

"Well pleased to recognize
In nature, and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being" —

we do not readily understand his meaning. Yet if you rec
ollect his life, as his poems disclose it like a series of an
ecdotes of what happened to him, you see not only how
often he returned from his rambles in the hills with a
strengthened moral mind in consequence of some lesson
he may have derived from some flower or cloud, which
spelled out for him in an image of beauty his secret
thought, or set up by an initial impulse that train of feel
ing which resulted in meditative moral thought, but how
much more often he returned so strengthened by the
sight of some human incident, history or character which
to him wore the aspect of a fact of nature; for he did not
discriminate between nature and its operation in the

WORDSWORTH 139

lives of common folk; all life is necessarily moral, and
nature by passing influentially into the lives of his dales
men and shepherds became thereby moral in essence;
nature exceeded its bounds here, in the moral sphere,
just as in becoming divine it exceeded its bounds in the
spiritual sphere. Wordsworth was no pantheist; he had
the dews of baptism upon him and remained in the pews
of the establishment all his life; but, both in his panthe
istic verse, and in his verse ascribing moral wisdom to
nature, he sincerely described certain experiences of his
own in which he derived religious emotion and moral
strengthening and enlightenment through his contact
with nature and the natural lives of his neighbors on the
moors and hills. Emotion was always mainly fed in
him, imaginatively, from the forms of nature; and the
strengthening of emotion, and the habit of it, necessa
rily builds up the moral nature of man — it is the mode
of its nurture. I am accustomed to say that Keats is a
poet to be young with, and that Wordsworth is a poet to
grow old with. The element of habit counts for much in
such communion with nature as Wordsworth illustrates;
for it is not any flash of thought he brings, any revela
tion of emotional power as a sudden discovery of the
soul; the power of nature has begun to steal upon the
boy, in his skating or his nutting, or his whistling to the
owls, and thereafter it only grows. Meditation, too, is a
large element in the habit Wordsworth establishes to
ward nature, and memory, as we have seen, bears a part
in it. It follows that, not only is his power over his read
ers cumulative with years, but his attitude toward na
ture must have the force of habit with us before it can
render to us what it rendered to him. With the formation
of this habit comes that consoling power which lovers

i4o THE TORCH

of Wordsworth find in his verse, what Arnold called the
healing power of nature. I do not myself see any healing
power of nature in such instances as Michael, or Ruth,
or the affliction of Margaret; there are wounds which na
ture cannot heal, and Wordsworth was sensible of this:
he did not, as Arnold says he did, look on "the cloud of
mortal destiny" and put it by; no English poet can. But
it is true that in the life-long appeal that Wordsworth's
verse makes especially to the sober and aging mind by
virtue of its equable temper, its moral strength, its
simple human breadth of sympathy, as well as by its su
preme rendering of the spiritual uses of nature in our
daily lives, its tranquillizing power is also a main source
of its hold on the general heart.

Such, in its phases, is the discipline of nature for the
soul as Wordsworth presents it. The poetic act, as I have
said, is the going out of the soul. If we do not fare forth
on any quest of the old knightly days, yet all life consists
in such a faring forth, in going out of ourselves into
some larger world, practically into a club or a church or
a college or a political party or a nation — in litera
ture it consists in going out into the race-mind, in any
or all its forms, into the life of the race as an idealized
past, or as a part of present nature or present humanity.
I have illustrated, hitherto, the imaginative or spiritual
forms of history, and to-night the imaginative or spiritual
forms of nature, in either of which the soul may take its
course in the larger life, and going out of itself find the
freedom of the universe its own — in beauty, reason,
liberty, righteousness, love — the ideal elements to
which all paths, whether of history or nature, lead, when
imagination is die guide. It remains only to illustrate the

WORDSWORTH 141

same general theory by the example of the poet who
dealt most powerfully with human life as a thing of the
present as Wordsworth dealt most powerfully with
nature in the same way. That is the next, and final,
lecture.

VIII

SHELLEY

IN lecturing on Wordsworth I did not refer to his best-
known verses, the half-dozen lines which have more lu-
minousness of language, I think, than any other English
words:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home."

"Magnificent poetry," said John Stuart Mill, "but
very bad philosophy." However that may be, the lines
express the idea, natural to all of us, that we are in some
sense heirs of past glory. We are accustomed to think of
heredity, as something founded as it were in past time
under the operation of the laws of natural selection, and
stored in us physically; and embryologists say that the
long series of physical changes, in consequence of which
man finally became in his body the lord of living crea
tures, is reflected with great rapidity in the human em
bryo, so that when the body is born it has in fact passed
through the entire race-history in a physical sense. We
are no sooner born, however, than we enter at once on a
new period of heredity, and acquire also with great ra-

143

144 THE TORCH

pidity the mental and moral powers which originally
arose slowly in the race through long ages of growth,
and we become civilized men by thus appropriating
swiftly funds of knowledge and habits of thinking, feel
ing and acting; this is the education which makes a man
contemporary with his time, and perhaps it normally
ends in the fact, for most men, that he does what is
expected of him, and also feels and thinks what is ex
pected of him. That is the conventional, well brought
up, civilized man.

There is a third sphere of heredity, with which these
lectures have been concerned, in which it is more a mat
ter of choice, of temperament and vitality, whether a
man will avail himself of it, and appreciate it. Men,
generally speaking, are but dimly aware of their powers
and capacities outside of the practical sphere; in our
growing years we require aid in discovering these ca
pacities and exercising these powers; we require, as it
were, some introduction to ourselves, some encourage
ment to believe we really are the power of man that we
are, and some training in finding out vitally what that
power of man in us is. This is our use — the earliest — •
of literature; it interprets us to ourselves. It does this by
fixing our attention on some things that we might not
have noticed — on natural things of beauty, and by pro
viding appropriate thoughts and stimulating delightful
emotion in respect to these things; or it helps us by
arousing feeling for the first time, perhaps, with regard
to some part of life, and by giving noble expression to
such new feeling or to some emotion hitherto vague and
indeterminate in our bosom; and it especially aids us by
giving play to our forces in an imaginary world, where
both thought and feeling may have a career which

SHELLEY 145

would be impossible to us in our narrow world of fact.
The poverty of not only the young, but of most men, in
spiritual experience, is probably far greater than men
of maturity and culture readily conceive; it is possible
that the forms of the church even far exceed the capacity
of the people to interpret them, just as Dante, or any
high work of imagination would. The poets interpret
what is forming in us, and offer new objects of contem
plation and emotion in the imaginary world; they go but
a little way before us, for they can be read and under
stood only by the light of our own experience; but
hand by hand, one leads us to another till we are in the
presence of the greatest. I do not know whether Shake
speare unlocked his heart, as Wordsworth said, with the
key of the sonnet; but I know literature is the key which
unlocks our own bosoms to ourselves; though, in con
sequence of that respect for the individual life of the
soul, which is one of the mysterious marks of man's
nature, no hand but our own can turn the lock in its
wards. What I described the other night as the poetic
act — the going forth of the soul — must be the act of
the man himself; but it is through literature that the
paths make out — the highways trodden by many feet.
As you go out on these great highways of the soul,
in Dante, in Shakespeare, in Goethe, a strange thing will
happen to you: it will seem, in the variety of new ideas,
in the flood of a new feeling arising in you, that you are
changed within, that you have found almost a new self.
I remember once when I was studying the now lost art
of wood-engraving, looking as I was at hundreds of
woodcuts constantly, it happened that when I went out
to walk, I saw woodcuts in the landscape; my eye hav
ing grown accustomed to certain line and form-arrange-

146 THE TORCH

ments of an artistic sort, naturally picked out of the gen
eral landscape such arrangements, as you make pic
tures in the fire; that is to say, my eye, dwelling on this
feature and neglecting that, composed the landscape,
made a picture of it. Now that is the constant act of life.
The human soul finds the world a heterogeneous mass
of impressions; and it attends to certain things, and
neglects others, and composes its picture of life that
way; prefers certain memories, certain desires, and so
builds its own world, as I have constantly said. It
applies this method of composition even to itself. You
read Byron, and before you know it you see
yourself in Byron's ways, you pick out and favor
your Byronic traits, you find you are Byron in your
self-portrait; or you read Thackeray and you find your
self in "Arthur Pendennis"; or, on the broader scale, you
read Greek a good deal, Greek history and art as well
as literature, and you find you see the world as a Greek
world — or, again, as a French world, as the case
may be. The change is a great one, amounting almost to
the discovery of a new world and yourself a new self in it.
So, in Goethe's life, the Italian journey and the study of
the antique made a new and greater Goethe of him. So
the mind of Milton, originally English, was Hebraized,
Hellenized and Italianized. The discovery of the new
self may often be repeated, and each new self enters into
and blends with the old selves, and makes your personal
ity, or, at least, gives form to it. So the young Roman
poet was Homer and Lucretius and the Alexandrians,
and is Virgil; so the young Italian was Virgil, and is
Dante; so the young Englishman was Theocritus, was
Catullus, was Keats, and is Tennyson. What is involved,
you see, is a kind of mental embryology; just as the phy-

SHELLEY 147

sical man sums up rapidly the age-long change from the
lowest to the highest creature-life, just as the conven
tional man sums up in the same way the ages from bar
barism to civilization and spans them in his education, so
here the soul in its highest life — that free soul that I
have spoken of — sums up and spans the difference be
tween the ordinary man and the highest culture the race
has ever known, and now holds in his own spirit that ac
cumulation, that power of man, which (by heredity en
tered into of his own choice) makes him an heir of past
glory — for the splendor, the leading light, the birth-
light of which Wordsworth's verse is none too extrava
gant an expression.

Literature, then, is the key to your own hearts; and
going out with the poets you slowly or swiftly evolve new
life after new life, and enter partially or fully on that
race-inheritance which is not the less real and sure be
cause you must reach out your hand and take it instead
of having it stored in your nerves and senses at birth;
predispositions to appropriate it are stored even there,
but it is a thing of the spirit and must be gathered by the
spirit itself. You will, perhaps, pardon one word of
warning. This process that I have described is a vital
process, a thing of life, and it must be real. There is al
ways at work that selective principle by virtue of which
you compose life in the ways most natural to you. It
may well happen that some great author does not appeal
to you, and the reason is that you have not in yourself
the experience to read him by; moreover, being a process
of life, this process is one of joy, and if any author, no
matter how great, does not give you pleasure, the process
is not taking place. Therefore, do not read books that,
after a fair trial, give no pleasure; do not read books

148 THE TORCH

that are too old, too far in advance of you. If they are
really great, they will come in time; but if, for example,
Dante's "Inferno" is a weary place to your feet and
your soul feels its thousand contaminations, do not stay
in such a place; and so of all other books with names
of awe. Honesty is nowhere more essential than in
literary study; hypocrisy, there, may have terrible penal
ties, not merely in foolishness, but in misfortune; and
to lie to oneself about oneself is the most fatal lie. The
stages of life must be taken in their order; but finally you
will discover the blessed fact that the world of literature
is one of diminishing books — since the greater are found
to contain the less, for which reason time itself sifts the
relics of the past and leaves at last only a Homer for
centuries of early Greece, a Dante for his entire age, a
Milton for a whole system of thought. To understand
and appreciate such great writers is the goal; but the
way is by making honest use of the authors that appeal
to us in the most living ways. The process that I have
described is the one by which all men advance and come
into their own — men of genius no less than others : for I
cannot too often repeat the fundamental truth that the
nature and power of the soul, its habits, its laws and
growth, are the same in all men; it sometimes happens
that a man who goes through the process of this high
spiritual life, becoming more and more deeply, vari
ously and potently human, developing this power of man
in him, has also a passion for accomplishment — and
that is one of the marks of a man of genius. Shelley
was such a man; and I desire to present him, as a man
with a passion for accomplishment, but also as an extraor
dinarily good illustration of the mode in which a man,
through literature, evolves the highest self of which man-

SHELLEY 149

kind is capable, summing up in his own soul the final re
sults and forward hopes of the race.

At the outset let me guard against a common mis
conception. Shelley is too often thought of as having
something effeminate in his nature. This is due, in great
part, to his portrait which with all its beauty, gives an
impression of softness, dreaminess and languor; in it there
is little characteristically masculine. It is also due,
in some measure, to the preponderance of feeling over
thought in his verse, of imagery over idea, and in general
of atmosphere over form; his is what we may call a
color-mind. The misconception of Shelley to which I
refer is most boldly stated by Matthew Arnold, who
called him an "ineffectual angel beating his beautiful
wings in the void." Now nothing could be said of Shel
ley that is more wrong than that. Shelley was a high-
spirited, imaginative child; he was a resolute Eton boy
— who would not fag, you remember, and being always
persistent in rebellion, carried his point; he rode, and
shot the covers in his younger days, and was a good
pistol-shot, all his life delighting in the practice. He was
a very practical man, in business affairs, after he came of
age and had learned something of human nature. He
was the only man who could handle Byron with tact and
reason. He made a very good will. In fact, his practi
cal instinct developed equally with his other qualities.
Neither was he a moping poet. He had fits of high
spirits — of gaiety; he used habitually to sing to him
self going about the house. As boy and man, both, he
was typically English, aristocratically gentle in all his
ways and behavior, only nervous, impulsive, strong,
willful, quick to see, quick to respond — a very deter
mined and active person; and, in fact, manly to the full

150 THE TORCH

limit of English manhood. Perhaps there is always some
thing feminine in poetic beauty — the expression that
we see typically in the pictures of St. John the Beloved;
but, apart from that light on his face and that grace in
all his ways, Shelley was as manly a man as they ever
make in England.

This being premised, then, one reason why Shelley is
so good an illustration of the development of a modern
soul is the fact that the record with respect to him is so
\ complete. No human life, with the exception possibly of
I Lincoln's, has been so entirely exposed to our knowl-
' edge, from his earliest days: it seems as if nothing of
him could ever die, no matter how slight, boyish and
trivial it might be. Thus it comes about that we see his
forming mind in its first crudities. He was an eager boy,
alive, awake, interested, voracious, pressing against the
barrier of life for his career. He began with a taste for
the most extravagant, melodramatic romance — what
was then known as the German tale of wonder, in which
the young Sir Walter Scott had also taken much in
terest; it was what we should describe as a dime-novel
taste, except that its characters were monks and nuns
and alchemists and wandering Jews; Shelley himself
wrote two romances and many short poems and one long
of this sort by the time he was sixteen years old, and
published them moreover. He was always impatient,
pick to act, to be doing something. His imagination
vas first fed by this sensationalism, and it was also scien
tifically excited by the spectacular side of chemical ex
periments; and then he began to think — at first it was
politics — such things as the freedom of the press, the
rights of Catholics, reform; or it was morals — such
things as property, marriage; or it was metaphysics—-

SHELLEY 151

such things as Locke's sensational philosophy, and the
ideas of the age. Radical ideas in all their imperfection
of newness filled his mind, reform took hold of him. He
went to Ireland to make speeches, and made them, dis
tributed tracts, subscribed to funds, helped men who
were prosecuted, especially editors, got himself put under
observation as a dangerous character: and he was not yet
twenty-one years old.

There was then little sign of poetic genius in him; he
had always written verses, of course, but there is no line
of his early writing that indicates any talent even for
good verse. But his mind had dipped in life, in thought,
in action, and was impregnated with all kinds of power;
especially his mind had dipped in ideas — the ideas of
the perfectibility of mankind, of experimental method in
science, of immediate social change in England in such
fundamental things as wealth and marriage. He was
always a person of convictions rather than opinions; he
wanted to live his thoughts, and together with his great
causes he carried about a full assortment of minor mat
ters, such as vegetarianism, for example. In a word, he
began as a Reformer, and he was as complete an in
stance of the type as ever walked even the streets of
Boston. But he found language more generally useful
than action in standing forth for his ideas; and great
command of language having already accrued to him
through the incessant hammering of his brains on these
ideas, making them malleable and portable and efficient
for human use, there came to him also that intenser
power of language, that passion of expression which finds
its element in noble cadences and vital images of poetry
as naturally as a bird flies in the air. Yet the passage
from the power of prose to the power of poetry in

152 THE TORCH

Shelley is not a very marked advance. What he dis
covered, in writing "Queen Mab," his first real poem,
was the opportunity that poetry gives for unfolding a
great deal of matter with logical clearness and eloquent
effect, with immense concentration and intensity; what
he discovered was the economy of poetry, the economy,
that is, of art, as a mode of expression; and, in fact, when
he had written "Queen Mab" he found — to use the
words I have habitually employed — that in its few hun
dred lines he had emptied his mind; he had done what
genius always does. The poem, however, was a Reform
er's poem; it contained a striking rendering of the image
of the starry universe, an account of the history of man's
progress, and some delicate poetical /machinery in the
mere setting of the piece. Its true subject was social
reform. Five years later he emptied his mind a second
time in the poem called "The Revolt of Islam"; in the
interval he had withdrawn more from individual enter
prise and special causes in the contemporary world, and
had come to realize the power of literature, as greater
than any he could exercise otherwise, in the bringing of
a better world on earth; but he still held to political and
social reform, and wrote, under the example and in the
stanza of Spenser, this allegorical tale of the Revolution
and the successful reaction against it then displayed in
Europe; the poem remains an inferior poem, in conse
quence of its material and method; but it contained all
that was in Shelley's mind at the time, and was written
in the model and method of what was then to him the
highest art. Five years again went by, and he again
emptied his mind in the "Prometheus Unbound."

In the interval great changes had taken place in him.
He was still further removed from practical measures of

SHELLEY 153

reform — not that he ever lost interest in them — but
practical reform requires a machinery that he could not
provide; and he now more fully recognized the power of
ideas, of eloquence to stir men's hearts, of poetry to em
body images of the ideal with mastering force; and es
pecially he recognized the fact that practical reform is a
thing that from moment to moment results from ab
stract principles which have an eternal being. More
over, he had fallen in with Greek, in this interval, with
Greek choral poetry on the one hand, and with Greek
Platonic philosophy on the other. His mind was Hellen-
ized; like a dark cloud, his soul approached the dark
clouds of ^schylus and Plato; and the contact was an
electrical discharge of power: the flash of that discharge
was the "Prometheus Unbound." Furthermore, Shelley's
poetical faculty had developed marvelous brilliancy, sen
sitiveness, color, atmosphere, sublimity of form, suf
fusion of beauty, and, all this, with a lyrical volume, in
tensity and penetration of tone, which his earlier verse
had not shown. He had become, under the play of life
upon him, a poet, so throbbing with the high lif^ of the
soul that he seemed like an imprisoned spirrf, with
the voice of the spirit, calling to men like deep unto deep;
and the world seemed to lie before him transfigured,
wearing a garment of outward beauty like a new morn
ing, and, in the human breast clothed with freedom,
nobility, hope, such as belongs to the forms of millennial
days. Shelley had gathered into his heart the power of
man that I have been speaking of, and stands forth as its
transcendent example in his age. He had dropped from
him, like hour-glass sand, the specific things of earlier
days, things of the free press, of Catholic rights, of put
ting reform to the vote, of national association, of

154 THE TORCH

Welsh embankments — all things of detail; and also all
lesser principles of property or marriage laws; he had
reached the fountains of all these in the single prin
ciple of the love of man for man, which alone he was

I now interested to preach and spread. He had let go,
too, of all revolutionary violence, as anything more than
a secondary means of reform, and he clung to the prin
ciple of patience, of forgiveness, of non-resistance, as
the appointed means of triumph, as I have already il
lustrated in treating of the "Prometheus." "I have,"
he wrote, in his preface, "a passion for reforming the
world": it was his fundamental energy of life; but re
form for him was not now to be discriminated from the
preaching of Christ's Gospel. The boy who had begun
with a dime-novel taste had come into such etherealized
powers of imagination that the poem of "Epipsychid-
ion" is, perhaps, the extreme instance of ideal purity in
English; the boy who had begun with Locke's sensa
tionalism had come to be the most Platonic man of his
age in his spirituality: the boy who had begun with an
indignant challenge to orthodoxy had come to be the
voice of Christianity itself in its highest forms of moral
command; the boy who began as the practical reformer
had come to be the poet, smiting the source of all re-

* form in the spirit itself, and using all his powers of
thought, imagination, learning, and all the means of art,
to set forth the ideals of the spirit in their eternal forms.
He had passed through politics, philosophy, religion —
through English and French and Greek ideas — through

' Italian and Spanish imaginative art, and he now summed
in himself that power of man which he had lived through
in others — it had become his, it had become himself.
In the whole course of this development no trait is more

SHELLEY 155

important to observe, than Jiis jmarvelous_inlfillectual__
honesty; he took only what at any moment was capable
of living in him; he gave it free course in his life, outlived
it, transmigrated from it, and came to the next stage of
higher life, and so won on to the end.

The development of Shelley was as rapid as it was
complete; he was not yet thirty years old when he had
become the center of human power that he was, a center
so mighty that it would be two generations before its
influence in the world, and its comparative brilliancy
among English poets, could begin to be measured. His
genius, we now see, was that of a double personality; he
had, so to speak, two selves. First, and primary in him
was his social self, his public self, that by which he was
a part of mankind, was interested in man, felt for man,
suffered in man's general wretchedness in Europe, brooded
over his destiny, formulated principles for his regenera
tion, and lived in the hopes, the faith, the struggle of
mankind. The greater works of his mind, which he
elaborated with most conscious aim to serve the world,
were the ones I have named, "Queen Mab," "The Re
volt of Islam" and "Prometheus Unbound," with the
later, almost episodical choric drama, called "Hellas,"
whose subject was the Greek Revolution then going on:
all these were the expression of his social self. In early
life, so absorbed was he in politics, morals, and phil
osophy, that he hardly realized he had any life except in
these; but, as years came on him with their load, he de
veloped a personal self, private and individual, the Shel
ley who was alone in the world, on whom fell the burden
of discouragement, the penalty of error, the blows of
fortune and circumstance, the wounds of the heart; and it
was in this self that his poetic power was first put forthp

156 THE TORCH

his sensitiveness, his response to nature, his lyrical en
thusiasm, his aspiration, his melancholy; and he carried
over these powers to the expression of his social self, as
he carried over all his faculties and resources to that
cause. But the home of his poetic genius was in his per
sonal life; and the poems by which he is known as an
artist, as a mere human spirit without reference to any
special application of its life-work, are those in which the
personal self is directly and spontaneously expressed, the
"Alastor" being the first, and after it the "Adonais"
and the "Epipsychidion" ; and in addition to these longer
pieces, the short lyrics, odes and stanzas, and the frag
ments, all of which are effusions, overflowings of his
own heart. If the sense of his greatness is most sup
ported by the larger creative works of his imagination, he
is most endeared to men by these little poems of love and

(sorrow, of affection, of joy in nature, and of human regret.
The most poignant of them are those in which the aspi
ration is itself a lament — and in them is the intimacy of
the poet's heart. It is impossible to close one's eyes to
the fact that Shelley, wholly unappreciated as he was
by the public, or in private for that matter, was deeply
dejected in his last years; the personal, the artistic self,
was always a relatively increasing part of his life, and he
occasionally attempted great works, like the "Cenci" or
"Charles II," which had no social significance. Had he
lived, it can hardly be doubted he would have become
more purely an artist, a creative poet, conceiving the
cause of mankind more and more largely as a spiritual
rather than an institutional cause, a cause of the re
birth of the soul itself rather than of the re-birth of na-
y tions. In his personal self one principle reigned supreme
\ — the idea of love; love guided all his actions, and was

SHELLEY 157

the impulse of his being — love in all its forms, personal,
friendly, humane; by that selective principle that I spoke
of he saw life as a form of love. It is here that the true
contact occurs between his personal and his social self,
for he made love — the love of man for man — the
principle of society regenerated as he pictured it in the
"Prometheus." And again, he made love, in the "Ad-
onais" the principle of Divine being — that Power,

"Which wields the world with never- wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above."

Wordsworth found the presence of God in

"The light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air" —

primarily as something external; Shelley found it pri
marily as something known most intimately and clearly
in his own heart.

A poet of really high rank is seldom a very simple
being; he is made up of many elements, some one of
which usually has the power of genius, and when that is
at work in him, he is great. In Shelley there are at least
three such elements; he was a poet of nature, and es- j
pecially he had the power to vivify nature almost as the j
Greeks did, to give it new mythological being, as in "The \
Cloud." He was also a poet of man — the thought of
man was like a flame in his bosom. And he was a poet of
his own heart, putting his own private life into song. A
poet is greatest when he can bring all his powers to bear
in one act — then he gives all of himself at once. Shel
ley most nearly did this, I think, in the "Ode to the West
Wind." The poem arises out of nature, in the triple as
pect of earth, air and ocean, held in artistic unity by the

1 58 THE TORCH

West Wind blowing through them; and it becomes at its
climax a poem of the hopes of mankind, and Shelley
himself as the center of them, like a priest. So he
invokes the West Wind to which by his act he has given
an imaginative being as if it were the spirit of the whole
visible world of air, earth and sea:

"Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit, — Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth,
Ashes and sparks, — my words among mankind."

"My words among mankind." That is not the voice of
an ineffectual angel. It is the rallying cry of a great and
gallant soul on the field of our conflict. When you read
the "Ode to the West Wind," see in it the great ele
ments of nature grandly presented and the cause of man
kind in its large passion, and the spirit of Shelley like
the creative plastic stress itself that

"Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the form they wear."

Such are some of the ways in which Shelley entered into
the life of men as Wordsworth entered into the life of
nature, and leads the way for those who have hearts to
follow. Dip in life, as he did, with honesty, with enthusi
asm, with faith, and whatever be the starting point at
last you emerge on those craggy uplands of abstract and
austere beauty and reason and righteousness and liberty
and love —

"Whereto our God himself is sun and moon;" —

SHELLEY 159

•*

the fountain-heads whence flow all the streams of the
ordered life of the vale. I have illustrated this process of
life by the idea of the eye composing a picture; so the
soul selects its most cherished desires and memories,
and comes to be the soul of an artist, or a soldier, or an
engineer, as the case may be. Let me vary the illustra
tion, and say that our problem is, in the presence of the
world before us lying dull and crude and meaningless at
first, to charge certain things in it with our own thought
and feeling, and so to give them meaning; thus our
familiar rooms of the house, and the fields round about it,
for example, gain a power and meaning which is for us
only; the stranger does not feel the welcome that the
trees of the dooryard give to him who was born under
them. But we find, as our minds go out into life, things
already charged with emotion and thought, like the flag
or the cross; and when the flag is brought to our lips and
the cross to our breast, we feel the stored emotion of the
nation's life, the stored emotion of Christian sorrow, in
the very touch of the symbol; life — the life of the world
pours into us with power. And we find, again, ideas that
are similarly already clothed with might — charged with
the hearts of whole nations that have prayed for them,
with precious lives that have died for them:

"Names are there, nature's sacred watchwords" —

liberty, truth, justice; and, if we possess our souls of
them, the power of man flows into us as if we held elec
tric handles in our palms; beaded on the poet's verse,
dropt from the lips of some rapt orator, they thrill us —
and the instancy, the fervor, the inspired power that
then wakes along our nerves is, we feel, the most au
thentic sign that we are immortal spirits. And men

160 THE TORCH

there are, who seem like nuclei and central ganglions of
these ideas, whose personality is so charged with their
power that we idolize and almost worship them — what
we call hero-worship. Such a man Shelley was, and is,
to me. I remember as it were yesterday, when I was a
freshman at Harvard, the very hour in that cold library
when my hand first closed round the precious volume;
and to this day the fragrant beauty of that blossomed
May is as the birth of a new life; and when I read Words
worth's ode, —

"Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come" —

I think of those first days with Shelley. To others it is
some other book, some other man — Carlyle, Emerson,
Goethe — whoever it may be : for the selective principle
always operates to bring a man to his own; but in
whatever way it comes about, the seeking mind gets con
nected with these men, books, ideas, symbols, through
which it receives the stored race-force of mankind; so
each of us, passing through the forms of developing life,
receives the revelation of the world and of himself, grasps
the world and is able to express himself through it, to
utter his nature, not in language, but in being, in idea
and emotion, and becomes more and more completely
man, working toward that consummation, which I began
by placing before you, of the time when the best that has
anywhere been in the world shall be the portion of every
man born into it.

I must crave your patience for yet a final thought,
which, though it may be hard to realize, yet, if it be re
alized only at moments, sheds light upon our days. Of

SHELLEY 161

•«.

all the webs of illusion in which our mortality is en
meshed, time is the greatest illusion. This race-store,
our inheritance, of which I have been speaking, which
vitalized in our lives is race-power, is not a dead thing, a
thing of the past; all that it has of life with us is living.
Plato is not a thing of the past, twenty centuries ago;
but a mood, a spirit, an approach to supreme beauty, by
the pathway of human love; Spenser's "Red Cross
Knight" is not an Elizabethan legend, but the image of
the Christian life to-day; and the hopes of man were not
burnt away in the fire that consumed Shelley's mortal
remains by the bright Mediterranean waves, nor do they
sleep with his ashes by the Roman wall; they live in us.
I have made much of the idea that all history is at last
absorbed in imagination, and takes the form of the ideal
in literature; it is a present ideal. We dip in life, as
Shelley did, and we put on in our own personality these
forms of which I have been speaking all along — forms
of liberty, forms of beauty, forms of reason — of right
eousness, of kindliness, of love, of courtesy, of charity,
of joy in nature, of approach to God — and these forms
being present with us, eternity is with us; they have been
shaped in past ages by the chosen among men — by poets,
by saints, by dreamers — by Plato, by Virgil, and Dante,
by Shakespeare and Goethe, who live through them in us;
except in so far as they so live in us, they are dust and
ashes: Babylon is not more a grave. But these ideal
forms of thought and emotion, charged with the life of
the human spirit through ages, are here and now, a
part of present life, of our lives, as our lives take on these
forms; casting their shadows on time, they raise us, as by
the hands of angels, up the paths of being — we are re
leased from the temporal, we lay hold on eternity, and

1 62 THE TORCH

entering on our inheritance as heirs of man's past glory,
we begin to lead that life of the free soul among the things
of the spirit, which is the climax of man's race-life and
the culmination of the soul's long progress through
time.

THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Eight lectures on Poetic Energy, delivered
before the Lowell Institute of Boston, 1906

I

POETIC MADNESS

THROUGH all the space of years, from the morning
of the world almost till yesterday, the poets were a race
apart; mortal, they yet shed a celestial gleam; dying,
they remained deathless; more than any other class of
men they typified immortality. The Greeks, those origi
nators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of
the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the
priest, who was at best an intermediary between men
and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and
spoke. "For," said Socrates to Ion, "not by art does
the poet sing, but by power divine. . . . God takes
away the minds of poets and uses them as His ministers,
as He also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that
we who hear them may know them to be speaking not
of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state
of unconsciousness, but that God Himself is the speaker,
and that through them He is conversing with us." The
poets themselves give the same testimony. Spenser says
that poetry is "no art, but a divine gift and heavenly
instinct, not to be gotten by labour and learning, but
adorned with both; and poured into the witte by a cer
tain Enthousiasmos and celestiall inspiration." Shelley
has the same doctrine in mind when he says, "Poetry
redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in
man." Poetic energy, according to this view, is inspira-

165

1 66 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

tion, anciently conceived as a madness taking possession
of the poet, and in more modern times as a divine prompt
ing of the reasonable soul. This is the unbroken tradi
tion of literature from the beginning with respect to the
nature of poetic power.

It is to be feared, however, that this doctrine to-day
has little convincing force. Even in the words of Soc
rates there is a suspicion of irony, and perhaps Spenser
and Shelley put more faith in their own words than ever
their readers have done. Yet when all reservations have
been made, there remain in the thoughts of all of us
respecting poetry some glimmerings and decays, at least,
of the idea of inspiration. It is the vogue nowadays,
when any question is asked with regard to the soul,
to apply first to the anthropologist; and, indeed, to
inquire concerning the history of an idea is one of the
best means to inform ourselves of its meaning. It might
be pleasant to enter the charmed circle of the Greek
myth, to listen for snatches of Lityerses' song like music
before dawn, and have sight of Orpheus, a shining figure
on the border of the morning; but such a procedure
would only discredit our argument. It is necessary to
go to the anthropologist and be wise.

What does the student of primitive man tell of poetry
at her birth? In place of the divine child, upon whose
mouth bees clung in the cradle, what does the anthro
pologist show us? He shows us the dancing horde.
"On festal occasions," says a recent writer, "the whole
horde meets by night round the camp-fire for a dance.
Men and women alternating form a circle; each dancer
lays his arms about the necks of his two neighbors, and
the entire ring begins to turn to the right or to the left,
while all the dancers stamp strongly and in rhythm the

POETIC MADNESS 167

foot that is advanced, and drag after it the other foot.
Now with drooping heads they press closer and closer
together; now they widen the circle. Throughout the
dance resounds a monotonous song." The song is some
times one sound interminably repeated; sometimes it
is more extended, as, ' for example, the words "Good
hunting," or "Now we have something to eat," or
"Brandy is good." In the undifferentiated, homogene
ous social state called the horde, there was no poet,
just as there were no other men with particular callings;
but all the horde were poets; and this, which I have
read, was their poetry. Such is the anthropologist's ac
count, and it is a true account. Indeed, it is plain from
the evidence that primitive men found many utilities
in rhythmical expression. Rhythm was used to mark
time in joint labor and on the march, as it is still
employed by sailors, boatmen, and soldiers; the songs
of labor and of war have this origin; and in that prime
val time, when language was hardly formed upon the
lips of men, rhythm was the means by which the joint
expression of emotion was effected on festive occasions.
Rhythm was, so far as expression was concerned, the
social bond. Lying on the sands at the base of the
pyramids, or amid the ruins of Luxor, as the afternoon
wore on, I have heard the chant begin among the throng
of workmen, and as they hurried by with their baskets
of earth it was no fancy for me to believe that in their
shrill, unceasing, and ever louder cry I listened to the
cradle hymn of poetry.

If one looks at the matter more closely, the seeming
gap between these sharply opposed conceptions of the
divine poet and the singing and dancing horde begins
to disappear. Greek tradition itself gives the clew to

1 68 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

their reconciliation. Socrates, in the passage which I
have quoted, compares the poet to the wild Bacchic
revellers in their frenzy — that is, to what is no more
nor less than the singing horde of Dionysus in their
sacred orgy. The history of the Greek stage shows
clearly how tragedy was developed from an original joint
exercise about the altar of Dionysus, in which all united;
it was only by the gradual change of time that the
assembly fell apart into the audience on one side and
the performers on the other, and even then, you know,
the chorus remained as the delegate of the whole as
sembly until in turn it also yielded to the ever increas
ing function of the actors, and theatrical individuality
in dramatic performances was fully developed. With
out entering upon detail, the Greek tradition indicates
the evolution of poetry from its social form as the joint
rhythm of the horde to its individual form as the song
of the divine poet who held all others silent when he
discoursed. In this evolution the poetic energy itself
remains the same, however much its form may change;
whatever explanation may be given, whether it be re
garded as divine or human, the phenomenon is continuous
and identical.

The first radical trait of poetry throughout is the
presence of emotion; and this to so marked a degree
that it is characteristically described as madness. Civi
lized men sometimes forget the immense sphere of emo
tion in the history of the race. It is still familiar to us
in the actions of mobs, in the blind fury or blind panic
to wliich swarms of men are subject. In history we
read of such emotion seizing on the people as in the
time of the Flagellants, who went about scourging them
selves in the streets, or generally in periods of revolu-

POETIC MADNESS 169

tionary enthusiasm. Such emotion is known to us, also,
in orgiastic or devotional dances, in the old-fashioned
revivals, and in the fury of battle that possesses every
nation when its chiefs have declared war. This is the
broad emotional power in the race that is the fountain
of poetry. Emotion is far older than intellect in human
life; and even now reason plays but a faint and falter
ing part in human affairs. If in the civilized portions
of the world the ungoverned outburst is less than it was,
or seems less, it is mainly because in civilization emotion
has found fixed channels.

This emotion, which is the fountain of poetry, it should
be observed, is the broad fund of life; it is nothing
individual; it is always shared emotion. The second
radical trait of poetic energy, therefore, is that it is social.
The poet, however aloof he may be, is always in com
pany with the hearts that beat with his own heart, and
like Saadi —

"He wants them all,
Nor can dispense
With Persia for his audience:"

for he is the voice of his people. In times past, and on
the great scale of literary history, this is evident; nor
is it less true of the most solitary lyrical poet of modern
days than of the old dramatist or epic bard; for even
that most secretive poetry, which we fitly say is "over
heard," has its value in proportion to its being overheard
by the like-minded, whose minds it fills. The third trait
of poetic energy, as seen in its continuous phenomena,
is that it is controlled emotion. Rhythm is used from
the beginning to control movement, as when two men
strike alternately in a common work; or, as when rowers

iyo THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

dip their oars together; or, as when the throng dances
in chorus; and at the same time it governs the unisons
of the emotional cries. Rhythm is the germ of art, its
simplest form; and poetic art as distinguished from
poetic energy may be defined as the principle of con
trol in the emotion in play. Poetic energy, then, as it
appears historically, is shared and controlled emotion;
it is primordial energy rising out of the vague of feeling;
it is social; and for the principle of its control in general
there is no better word than music, or harmony in the
old, broad sense of that term.

It is one of the difficulties, I fancy, of the staid New
England folk who sit at the feet of Emerson, to find the
sage affirming that the perfect state of life is ecstasy.
From the beginning to the end he repeatedly announced
this law; and by ecstasy he meant precisely what the
Greeks meant by poetic madness. In his essay on poetry
he puts his finger on the ailing place when he says
that American poetry lacks abandonment, and he ex
tends the diagnosis to all American life when he exclaims:
"O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad — this multitude
of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry,
starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity
to vitalize this too much pasture, and in the long delay
indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol,
of politics, or of money." In many passages Emerson
thus pleads for the principle of the dervish, the maenad,
the god-intoxicated man, in whatever sphere of life; the
man who is self-abandoned to the energy of life that
wells up within him, and in being "passion's slave" finds
his illumination and his enfranchisement.

I know that it is common when the masters give ex
pression to such bewildering ideas to say that they did

POETIC MADNESS 171

not mean what they said, and to explain away the words
by a liberal application of common sense. But it is
more likely that the masters do not say half what they
mean; for in such souls, living in a white heat of convic
tion, expression lags far behind their faith. It is but just
to Emerson, however, to add that he had adopted the
idea from others, and he naively remarks that it is singu
lar that our faith in ecstasy exists in spite of our almost
total inexperience of it. The doctrine itself, neverthe
less, is one of the most persistent of human beliefs, ,and
is always springing up in some quarter of the world.

We have to do only with the fact that from the begin
ning to a late period of civilization poetic genius was
identified with a certain madness. The poet was the
heir of the wild and frenzied bands of Dionysus. In
this case, however, the madness is slowly qualified.
Whether poetic ecstasy is divinely inspired, whether it
be the most perfect state of life, or whether it is only
a survival from that period of exaltation which may
have accompanied man's escape from brutish life, is
not at present the question. It is not characterized by
an unbalanced or diseased reason or by any temporary
fury and aberration; it is characterized rather by a
suspension of reason. The plain truth appears to be
no more than that, in proportion to the degree of emo
tional excitement, the operation of the mind tends to
become instinctive, and in the crisis of passion becomes
wholly so. The two traits that most struck observers
of poetic inspiration were its involuntary and its un
conscious character. The will is laid to sleep, and the
mind works without conscious self-direction. Any lyri
cal poet, like Goethe, for example, is familiar with the
process; he looks upon some scene with no thought of writ-

172 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

ing verses, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the song sings
itself in his brain, and his only part in it is to remember
and write it down. It is not more strange in the case of
a poet, whose brain is beat into rhythm, that a mood
should so discharge itself in musical images than that
when you sit down before the fire, vivid pictures should
of themselves rise before your mind in revery. The
spontaneous action of the mind, carrying with it oblivion
of self, seems the essential factor in poetic inspiration,
as it is known to us from the poets' autobiographies.
Emotion is the unloosed force; and always emotion tends
to obliterate the reason, not only by dulling and destroy
ing the principle of caution, but also to such a degree
that after the access of emotion has passed, words and
even acts are brokenly, and sometimes not at all, re
called.

It is to be borne in mind that emotion of this drifting
and possessing sort is primary in human nature. It
may well be that the state of primitive man was more
dreamlike than we easily fancy, that as he emerged
from the brute his mental state was still casual, lax,
uncertain, subject to torpid intervals, and coursed by
waves of panic fear and strange expectancy. The great
effort of civilization has been, and still is, the attempt
to introduce a principle of control into that casual swarm
of impressions which makes up men's thought and of
which, especially when swayed by emotion, spontaneous
action is the law. The poet, then, under excitement,
seems to present the phenomenon of a highly developed
mind working in a primitive way; what is called his
madness denotes nothing abnormal, but is rather an un
usually perfect illustration of the normal action of emo
tion in a pure form; he is mad in so far as he does not

POETIC MADNESS 173

call either will or reason to his aid, but allows unimpeded
course to the instinctive expression of passion.

Passion, then, is the birthright of the poet; without
it he is nothing. That is why the poet works himself
into the hearts of men; for emotion is fundamental in
life; as a possession, as an energy, life has its value in
its emotional moments. It is true that now for a long
whilfTwe have tried to intellectualize life; it is the great
aim of literary education. But the life that is led in
thought, from history and travel and learning through
all its compass, is life at secondhand. The reality lies,
in general, in emotional contact. If two men exchange
thoughts, they are fellow-beings; if they share an emo
tion, they are brother men. The poet comes, and either
reflects or arouses emotion and shares the gift he brings,
and is thus always and in all lands the dear comrade
of men. Emotion is the fusing force which unites the
poet with his fellow-men; but first in his own career it
has united him with life.

The mode in which it does so is simple. It is most
plain in that part of experience which directly addresses
the senses and is absorbed therein. The poet who is
especially open to the things of nature, for example,
to color and bloom and weather, to the motion of the
seas and the infinity of the stars, to the exhilaration of
a swim or a ride, does with his body drink the light of the
world and the joy of existence. How many pages of the
most welcome verse simply reflect this natural joy of
living! It is not the image but the delight of the
image, not the event but the joy of the event that
exalts sensation into poetry. In a similar way emotion
fuses the poet with ideas. The type is, of course, the
fanatic who is so possessed with the idea that he becomes

174 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

no more than its instrument and living embodiment.
The revolutionary poets display this power with clear
ness; in the great songs of the French Revolution the
Dionysiac quality, the presence of the mad throng, the
singing horde, had its last great literary illustration;
and wherever a poet sings the causes of mankind, there
is this fanatical blending of his own soul with the idea.
But whether in the senses or in the soul, emotion through
out the field is the life itself; thought is only the means
of life; and even in the case where great thoughts, such
as scientific conceptions, of themselves generate sublime
emotion, the consummation of the thought is not in the
knowledge but in the emotion.

The sign of the poet, then, is that by passion he enters
into life more than other men. That is his gift — the
power to live. The lives of poets are but little known;
but from the fragments of their Jives that come down
to us, the characteristic legend is that they have been
singularly creatures of passion. They lived before they
sang. Emotion is the condition of their existence; pas
sion is the element of their being; and, moreover, the
intensifying power of such a state of passion must also
be remembered, for emotion of itself naturally heightens
all the faculties, and genius burns the brighter in its own
flames. The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that
consumes him, and only under this condition is he bap
tized with creative power. It is to be expected, there
fore, that the tradition of the poet's life should have an
element of strangeness in it; and, in fact, to neglect those
cases where genius has touched the border of actual
madness, every poet has this stamp of destiny set upon
him. There is always some wildness in his nature; he
is apt to be roving, adventurous, unforeseen; he is with-

POETIC MADNESS 175

•*

out fear, he is careless of his life, he is not to be com
manded; freedom is what he most dearly loves, and he
will have it at any peril; that from which he will not be
divided is the primeval heritage, the Dionysiac madness
that resides not only in the instincts, but in all the facul
ties of man — the power and the passion to live. It
is a widespread error, and due only to the academic
second-hand practice of poetry, to oppose the poet to
the man of action, or assign to him a merely contem
plative role in life, or in other ways deny reality to the
poet's experience; intensity of living is preliminary to
all great expression. From the beginning, about the
rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi,
and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance
of life ; and the phrase by which we name his singularity,
the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that pas
sion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less
richly charged.

The poet seems always a lonely figure; but this is
the paradox that the more lonely he is, the more he is a
leader. The second trait of poetic energy is that it is
a social power, and this is no whit less essential than its
emotional basis. It is true that in early times poetic
energy in its rude forms, as the rhythm of labor, of war,
of the feast, had a larger social place and extended more
widely over primitive life; it was not then individualized
at all. Rhythm originally was more obviously the social
bond, in joint movements of the throng, than it is now
in the arts developed out of it — sculpture, music, and
poetry. The greatness of all the arts, it has been widely
and justly proclaimed, lies in their social character; in
so far as they minister only to individuals they are steri
lized. Literature is the greatest of the arts because its

176 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

social scope is most extended and most penetrating.
What holy cities are to nomadic tribes — a symbol of
race and a bond of union — great books are to the wan
dering souls of men; they are the Meccas of the mind.
Homer was to Greece another Delphi. In the geography
of the mind national literatures stand like mountain
ranges, marking the great emotional upheavals of the
race; such are the sacred books of all peoples; such was
the literature of Greece, the glory that shone when rea
son came to birth among men; such were the outburst
of Italian poetry and the particular periods of greatness
in the modern literatures of Europe. Great literatures,
in other words, are formed along the lines of fracture in
the social advance of the race. It is true that supreme
social value seems to belong rather to the books of past
ages; but this is largely an error of perspective, for
distance is essential to the measurement. The race is
content to live long on the memory of such achievement;
and the channels of social emotion on the great scale
having been once worked out, the moods of men flow
therein for a long age.

/The fixity of these ancient channels, too, is an essen
tial factor in the problem of poetic energy. Plato recom
mended that no poetry be allowed in the state except
hymns of a fixed ceremonial character; and curiously
the fact is that literature always tends to approach that
state of tradition. Life everywhere hardens into formu
las; and thus in literature books become established
as classics, schools of poetry become academic, expres
sion becomes formulistic. Emotion, that is, discharges
itself through accustomed channels, through images and
phrases and cadences that have become its known lan
guage; as, for example, was the case with that special

POETIC MADNESS 177

•*

form of poetry known as Petrarchan. The emotion is
genuine, but the form is old. When it has been shown
that Shakespeare employed in his sonnets the conven
tional European expression of emotion, it has not been
shown that the emotion was not genuine, but merely
that the poet used a conventionalized art. How much
of reality can exist in conventionalized art the whole
early history of painting and sculpture shows. The ex
pression of emotion is generally conventional, and the
more social it is, the more is it conventionalized.

The poet, therefore, new born in the world, finds the
field preoccupied. Religion, for example, is supplied
with literary expression in its Bibles and hymns, and
besides has the works of the other arts, architecture,
sculpture, painting, and music, and in addition, the splen
dor and awe of its ritual. The national passion, patri
otism, finds embodiment for itself in long-established
literature as well as in other ways. In fact, the poet
finds social emotion already ritualized, if I may say so,
in every part of life. He enters into no rivalry with the
work which has already been accomplished by his pre
decessors; he rejoices in it, but it is not his work. It
follows that the new poet is necessarily the exponent of
emotion in new fields or turned toward new objects; he
is an experimenter, as it were, in life; and this accounts
often for his hard fate. If he is to be great, he is already
on that line of fracture in social evolution of which I
have just spoken. He sometimes stands in the light of
an unrisen day. Hence, in his own time, he may appear
even antisocial. How often has the poet been denounced
as an atheist, as a revolutionist, an innovator, a wild
thinker and rash actor, and always as a dreamer! It
it because his natural habitat is there, in the new and

178 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

unknown stir of the world coming to birth. It is al
together natural that he should be discredited, unrecog
nized or disowned, that he should go hungry and often
starve, that he should die in poverty and neglect, that
the very name of the poet in history should be a
synonym for sorrow and want. This has been his
lot in all ages, and if any poet has escaped it, he
has done so by a miracle. The contrast between his
poor and solitary state and his after fame is one of the
fascinations that fasten the eyes of men upon him. It
seems strange that a great social force should have resided
in so despised an individual. But the world's work is
not done in crowds, though crowds are the instruments
and beneficiaries of it. Where the man of science in
his lonely study or silent laboratory toils in secret, where
Newton or Pasteur works, there the brain of the race
thinks, and wins its slow advance on the unknown; and
where the poet is though he be in the wilderness, there
the heart of the race beats. The poet, born for the future,
will be found always in the thick of ideas and in the heat
of the glowing world of change; he takes into his single
breast the rising mass, and shapes upon his lips in silence
the master words of many thousand men.

It might appear that the poet, who is thus a creature
of passion and in the whirl of new social forces, is doomed
to abide in a state of chaos; and the poet, in a certain
sense, is the most lawless of men. Yet, as I have indi
cated, there is a principle of control; it is art. The
original element of art is rhythm, that very measure of
which the primitive cadence still times the poet's utter
ance; and it is true that the mere music of verse has a
power of itself "in the very torrent, tempest, and whirl
wind of passion" to beget a temperance that gives it

POETIC MADNESS 179

•*

smoothness. But art, though growing historically out
of mere rhythm, is a broader principle, and as it grows,
it becomes more and more an intellectual thing. In
Nietzsche's phrase, this is Apollo's domain, the realm
of intellect; for form is an intellectual thing. The
dream, which accompanies emotion, is hi truth its other
and finite incarnation; it is the woof of color and image
— all that is especially taken note of by the eye, which
is the most intellectual of the senses, and by the under
standing, which is the eye of the mind; whether in its
physical representation, which is woven of the senses,
or in its bodiless conception, which belongs to the higher
life of moral contemplation and abstract truth, it is the
idea; and it is this accompanying dream, this idea, this
form of art, which gives relief to the emotion, disburdens,
and quiets it.

The idea in this sense is the sphere of form; it is in
this dream that the mind works, that art resides. It
is this, too, that gives character to the emotion; for
emotion is noble or base, wise or foolish, a power to
save or a power to ruin, according to the objects and
events toward which it is directed and the mode in which
it envelops them. The development of the idea, the
arrangement of its parts and phases, the order of the
ode or the drama or the epic in unfolding its theme, is in
poetry the labor of art; it is what composition is in sculp
ture or painting. This art, however, in the sense of a prin
ciple of control, has two modes; one lies in the dream it
self, in its original emanation from the mind, in its sub
stance; the other lies in its handling. The substance of the
dream is one thing; the handling of it is another; and
it is to the handling that what is called technique, the
most conscious form of art, specially refers. It is to

i So THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

be borne in mind, however, that just as poetic energy
is not something brought down from heaven, but is the
fire and motion of life itself, so the dream that attends
emotion is not something artificially and arbitrarily
united with it, but is given forth from it, and as natu
rally joined there as the flower to the root. Try as one
may, one cannot in poetry — not even in its art — escape
from the omnipresence of this secret power, the mystery
that gives forth life, of that which is beneath all. It
is one great use of works of art that they teach our eyes
to see, even in nature and human life as they are, the
beauty with which they are clothed in their actuality.
Emotion, in its own natural expression, is a beautiful
or pathetic or terrifying sight. There is an unconscious
power in life itself to clothe its own emanation so; and
of this power art is the follower in imagination. In the
poet this instinctive power in himself gives the dream,
the substance; he cannot tell how it arises in him; it
comes as the smile comes to the lips or tears to the eyes
— he knows not whence they are; and, furthermore, he
is not yet the poet, but only the novice, if his technical
skill is not also instinctively applied and the arrange
ment of the theme instinctively accomplished. In the
stroke of genius there is no calculation. The poet does
not scan his verses nor hunt his rhymes, any more than
the musical composer seeks for concords; still less does
he search for color and image and idea. He is as un
conscious of his processes, even when originally acquired
with difficulty, as the athlete is of the play of his
muscles. The mastery of technique is, indeed, necessary
to the novice, but it is only the tuning of the instru
ment; conscious art must pass into the hand, the eye,
the brain, the heart, and there be forgotten, nor does it

POETIC MADNESS 181

become true power until it is so forgotten. The dream,
the idea, both in its substance and its handling, its con
stituting form and its technique, is, in the work of genius,
instinctive; unless it be so, it is flawed and incomplete.
Art is a perfect principle of control only when it thus
operates, as rhythm does, like a law of nature, from
which, hi fact, it is not to be distinguished; for it is that
secret law of harmony unveiled in man's nature.

Poetic energy, so conceived, is a phenomenon of the
spiritual nature of man, and is ruled, both in emotion and
in idea, by its own inward law. The passion of life em
bodies itself in all men according as they have the power
to live, in experience ; and in the poets it embodies itself in
imagination. The passion of life, which is the great
mystery of the universe, shapes unto itself many forms
in different ages, in different climes, under different gods.
It has many births; and the miracle of this mystery is
the diversity of these births, the novelty and surprise
of each new morning as it breaks upon a world whose
law is death and which is forever passing away. I said
that the poet is the most lawless of men; that is because
he lives in an ampler law, because the life that is born
in him refuses to be bound in the old births of time;
he breaks all conventions, he tramples on all supersti
tions, he violates all barriers; for he brings his own world
with him, and new horizons. Emerson said that the
birth of a poet is the chief event in chronology. He
means that they mark the great changes hi the minds
of men. Wherever such a change is nigh, wherever the
flame of life bursts forth with most power and splendor,
there the poet is found; he is the morning and the
evening star of civilizations. He is but one among men,
but in his single soul the soul of mankind comes to fullest

182 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

consciousness of itself and is illuminated from horizon
to horizon, from height to depth. He seems to men
divine because he thus gives to them the divine part
of themselves. His fame may be swift or slow, but in
the end it fills the world. He is lawless, judged by the
finite; but in his passion and his dream he has given
himself to a higher law, and reposes on the infinite, of
which he is the latest birth. So it seems to him. In
these lectures I shall present the genius of six of these
poets as illustrations of that passion and power of life
in which poetic energy consists.

II

MARLOWE

MARLOWE is the very type of the poet whom I have
described. "Mad" is the first epithet that comes to
our lips in thinking of him — "mad Marlowe," — •
whether one looks at the wildness of his unregulated
career or at the tameless force embodied in his genius or
at the romantic extravaganza that is the body of his
literary achievement. Brief and tragic were the annals
of his life. He was born two months before Shakespeare;
son of the shoemaker at Canterbury; educated at school
and college; a scholar when he came down from Cam
bridge to London, which he entered the same year with
Shakespeare; favored by the theaters and the public;
a wild liver, impulsive, passionate, uncontrolled, giving
his genius free way with himself for the eight years of
his manhood during which he did his work; faithful to
his intellectual part and industrious as he must have been
to have accomplished all that he did; and killed in a
tavern brawl at the age of thirty. This is all that we
know of him; yet in every line of this story one knows
that it is the epitaph of genius. He was in his own day
denounced as an atheist and blasphemer, and his death
was long cited as a notable instance of God's sudden
justice. "Not inferior to these," says one account, "was
one Christopher Marlow, by profession a play-maker,
who, as it is reported, about 14 years ago wrote a book
against the Trinity. But see the effects of God's justice!

183

1 84 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

It so happened that at Detford, a little village about
three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab
with his ponyard one named Ingram that had invited
him hither to a feast and was then playing at tables, he
quickly perceiving it so avoided the thrust that withal,
drawing out his dagger for his defense, he stabbed this
Marlow into the eye in such a sort that, his braines
coming out at the dagger's point, he shortly after died.
Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, work
the end of impious atheists." So runs the Puritan's ac
count of this tragic episode; and it is altogether likely
that Marlowe, lawless in all ways, was a free-thinker, and
being a child of the Italian Renaissance was then intel
lectually what was called Machiavellian in his ideas.

Notwithstanding this grewsome picture of the atheist's
bloody death, it was not thus that the poets of that age
saw the protagonist of their company who brought in
"the spacious times of great Elizabeth." Their tributes
to his memory make us aware of an exceptional quality
in the man, of the burning of a fire in him such as no
other of his comrades knew the touch of, of something
that transfigured him; and this transfiguration is seen
in the fact that he alone of all that group was idealized
by them in fancy. The poets brought flowers as if to
hide the corpse of that grisly memory of his death. It
is much that he who lay there was Shakespeare's "dead
shepherd." The other lesser poets, whenever they speak
of him, are instinctively touched with imaginative fan
tasy. Chapman, invoking the Muse, bids her seek Mar
lowe's spirit, and after death

"find the eternal clime
Of his free soul, whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood";

MARLOWE 185

and in the flowing line we seem to feel the full flood of
that stream of poetry as it broke forth in its own age.
Drayton's oft-quoted words transmit the strange fire that
was in the young poet's whole frame like a second soul: —

"Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire which made his verses clear;
For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."

Personal fascination survives in this description — the
transcendency of genius, seen, felt, touched, as it were,
in its mortal body by mortal senses. Still another youth
ful poet, like Chapman, following the spirit with praise
after death,

"where Mario's gone
To live with beauty in Elyzium,"

gives us the contemporary glow of enthusiasm for Mar
lowe's eloquent and musical fancy: —

"Whose silver-charming tongue moved such delight
That men would shun their sleep in still dark night
To meditate upon his golden lines."

It is by the light of such tributes as these that we
recall and re-create the young poet, — in his rise the star
of the Elizabethan morning, in his tragic fall, as Lowell
called him, "the herald that dropped dead in announcing
the victory in whose fruits he was not to share."

"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough,"

we cry; the sense of the limitless power and suggestion of
genius blends with the accident of its extinction in its first

1 86 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

burst — the pathos of what was never to be, the tragedy
of a soul of price lost to mankind; and with this mood
dumbly mingles the universal feeling of some darkness in
poetic fate, and obtains mastery of the heart and controls
insensibly the judgment. To all later poets, as to his
contemporaries, Marlowe is a younger brother, struck
by the shaft of unkind gods; something of that trans
figuration that his fellows saw — the silver flood of
beauty about him, the miraculous fire within him — still
lingers, and he stays to abide our question rather in his
spirit, in the might of unaccomplished resources, than in
any created work that came from his hand.

One work there is, however, in which his youthful-
ness stands revealed, his tastes and sensibilities, the
richness of his emotions, and the warmth of his life.
The translation he made after Moschus, called "Hero
and Leander," gave to English literature its single work
of the pagan paradise, and it shows such an endowment
of the soul and body of passion in the hand that wrote
it and the heart that brooded it, as leaves its young
author among English poets without a rival for sensuous
happiness. The poem still stands alone; neither its
mood nor its music has ever since been heard in Eng
land. It was plainly this poem that clothed Mar
lowe with that atmosphere of the golden age in which
his brother poets saw him stand. By it he became for
them the heir of classic beauty and the living token of
that voluptuousness in the joys of the imagination which
was the poetic charm of the Italian Renaissance; and
to them he stood forth like an inhabitant of that fair
realm, native to that air, and mixed with the figures and
the landscape of his own vision. We can realize only
faintly the power with which this great movement, the

MARLOWE 187

Renaissance, the new and second birth of man's intellect
and sense, came upon the nations of the West; with what
vital surprise, what energizing force, what kindling im
pulses along the nerves of will and desire, with what
intoxication of intellectual curiosity and artistic passion,
this renovation of life hi Italy fell in the second century
of its accumulated mass, and made impact through a
thousand channels on such an age as Elizabeth's and on
such a fiery and sensitive temperament, such an origina
tive and shaping genius as Marlowe's. This little poem,
nevertheless, is like a single blossom from that world
wide field, and may give us the hue and fragrance of the
Renaissance in flower, if we will: so a rose shadows us
with Persia, or a single lotus blossom unbosoms all the
Nile.

One quality the poem has, which specially charac
terizes it as Marlowe's handiwork — an excitement of
the imagination resulting in exuberance of fancy, a
stream of decorative art, an incessant welling up of
imagery and epithet in profuse and exhaustless abun
dance; no poem is so fluent, so effortless, so negligently
rich in this regard, so prodigal in its spending of the
coin of fancy. In that age when all the seas first yielded
to man, imagination, too, made her voyages of discovery,
and brought home gold and pearl and the marvel of the
loom from every clime; many a passage in the poets of
those days is a museum in itself; and of this rifled wealth
of the Elizabethan world, heaped from antique and
oriental sources and every quarter of learning or of
fable, Marlowe was a master. In "Hero and Leander"
he showed only his prentice hand in this lavish piracy.
It is, nevertheless, even there a sign of that overflowing-
ness which stamped his genius from the first as of a royal

i88 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

nature. He had neither to search nor to hoard, but only
to spend. It was not, however, in a love episode, a few
hundred lines in length, however stored with langour
and beauty, that he was to show his wealth, but on the
broad stage of England. The poet, nevertheless, was
prior to the dramatist in Marlowe, as indeed all the Eliza
bethans were poets first and dramatists afterwards; and
it was this poet, the child of Italy and the Hellespont
breathing English air, that his brother poets loved and
immortalized, before ever his greater fame as the first
fashioner of a noble and lofty style for English drama
was even dreamed of.

I own that the early English drama has caused me
much weariness even in my youthful days, and neither
would I now voluntarily read it, nor should I have the
heart to subject any other to the trial. For men of
English speech the drama is necessarily measured by
Shakespeare; and in a certain sense he raises his fellows
to his own neighborhood. So, when one stands upon
the highest summit of some many-folded range of hills,
the mere loftiness of his station makes the lower crowns,
distinct and bold beneath him, seem little inferior; but
when, on the other hand, descending, he makes one of
them his perch, how the lonely monarch soars aloft!
Thus it is when from Shakespeare's height men survey
his fellows, the swelling names of that Elizabethan cluster.
"Marlowe," they say, "on whose dawn-flushed brow the
morning clouds too soon crept with envious vapors that
the most golden of Apollo's shafts should never pierce
more; Beaumont and Fletcher, twins of the summer
noontide, and Chapman bearing his weight of forests
with the ease and might of old Titans; Ford and Web
ster who made their home with the tempest and seemed

MARLOWE 189

to leash the thunder; " and so on with all the others of the
tremendous upheaval of the age. But when one leaves
Shakespeare's ground, and descends to any of these,
how tumid is all such description, while undiminished
the king of the peaks still soars in the sky! It is not
by our will that Shakespeare's altitude is made the
measure of other men who were so unfortunate as to be
born his rivals; one can help it no more than the eye
can help seeing. His genius reduced all his contempo
raries to perpetual subjection to itself; no superlatives
can be offered in their praise except by his leave, and
when their own worth is made known, the last service
they do, in showing us how invaluable is Shakespeare's
treasure, is perhaps the most useful.

Even Marlowe, in whose youth, if anywhere in history,
was the promise of a mate for Shakespeare, needs the
latter's withdrawal before he can tread the stage. Some
would say possibly that Shakespeare might not have ob
tained entrance there with Lear and Othello, if Marlowe
had not first fitted the tragic buskin to the high step
of Tamburlaine; and hi a sense the retort is just. The
highest genius avails itself of those who go before to
prepare the way, the road-makers building the paths of
speech and opening the provinces of thought; but to be
forced to stipulate at the outset that a great name in
literature, such as Marlowe's, shall be considered only
with reference to his turn in historical development is
to make a confession of weakness in the cause; it is to
forego his claim to be considered as a writer of universal
literature. What the difference is, in Marlowe's case,
is tersely indicated by the fact that competent students
discern his genius in "Titus Andronicus," which in
Shakespeare's crown is rather a foil than a gem. This

igo THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

play, with Marlowe's touch still on it, would illustrate,
if compared with Shakespeare's undoubted work, how
cumbrous and stiffening were the shackles of the stage
tradition from which Shakespeare freed the art. But in
Marlowe's accredited dramas, say, in "Doctor Faustus"
(to lay aside the rant of "Tamburlaine" as merely initia
tory, tentative, and facile) the necessities of contempo
raneous taste and usage are so tyrannical as almost to
ruin the work for any other age. "Doctor Faustus" is
a series of slightly connected scenes from the life of a
conjuror, in which thaumaturgy and the hatred of the
Papacy are made to furnish comic horseplay of a clown
ish kind; or else fear of the devil is used to freeze the
blood of the spectators with the horns, hoofs, and fire
of coarse horror. Of the dramatic capabilities of the
Faust legend as a whole Marlowe indicates no percep
tion. He caught the force of two situations in it — the
invocation of Helen's shadow and the soliloquy; but
though in treating these he exhibited genius as bold,
direct, and original as Shakespeare's own, they are merely
fragmentary. Except in these scenes in which Mar
lowe's voice really quells his time and sounds alone in
the theater, the uproar of the pit frightens away the
Muse and leaves comedy and tragedy alike to the ruth
less disfigurement of the early English stage. In "The
Jew of Malta," even if the first two acts are fashioned
by dramatic genius as no other but Shakespeare could
have molded them, the last three taper off into the tail
of the old monster that had flopped and shuffled on the
medieval boards on every saint's day. In "Edward II"
alone is there drama, properly speaking; it is complete,
connected, sustained, and it has tenderness, passion, and
pathos; but though Swinburne gives it the palm in cer-

MARLOWE 191

tain particulars over Shakespeare's "Richard II," which
was modeled after it, the former will not bear compari
son with the latter in dramatic grasp. To notice but
one difference; in Marlowe's work the king's favoritism
is so much an infatuation and a weakness that he loses
sympathy, and his dethronement, apart from its brutal
miseries, is felt to be just; while in Shakespeare Rich
ard's favoritism is retired far in the background, and his
faith in his divine right to the crown (never insisted
on by Edward) is so eloquent, and so pervades and
qualifies the whole play, that when the king is murdered,
one is driven to believe that the bishop's denunciation
of God's vengeance on the usurping Lancaster must
prove true prophecy. In the matter of dramatic hand
ling there can be no doubt of Shakespeare's more expert
sense, though his ideality may make the characterization
appear, as it does to Swinburne, less sharp. "Edward
II" is Marlowe's best play; but, with this exception, his
dramas in general are deeply engaged in the rawness of
the time, dependent in many scenes on vulgar spectacle
and buffoonery, on burlesque and rout and horror, Tam-
burlaine's chariot drawn by captive kings in harness, the
nose of Barabas, which passed into a proverb for its
enormousness, and similar features. So much must be
allowed, lest the unwary making acquaintance with these
plays should find but strange entertainment. Marlowe,
as a dramatist, is not to be judged apart from his his
torical moment; nor are his works to be appreciated
intelligently except by the student of the dramatic de
velopment of our stage.

But notwithstanding the crudity of Marlowe's works,
as wholes, every page proclaims the transcendency of the
genius, of the poetic energy, there at work. It is an

192 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

energy that has a volcanic lift, splendid, terrifying, filling
heaven. Marlowe's great achievement, in the age of
discoveries and rediscoveries, which blending together,
constituted a renewal of man's life and brought a new
world into being, was to rediscover the main source,
the fountainhead, of dramatic power. He rediscovered
passion, which is the substance of poetry, and made it
the substance of the drama. He sympathized with great
passions; and in order to sympathize with them he had
first to be capable of great passions; that was his endow
ment. The first and abiding impression he makes upon
the reader is that of power — of the presence in his
bosom of the Dionysiac daemonic force, — life clothing
itself in restless creative faculty and calling new worlds
into being in the intellectual sphere. He was a creator,
and the clay he used was humanity, the human spirit,
the soul. The Renaissance restored to man the dignity
of human nature, gave the human spirit back to itself
as a power of life. It unveiled the great achievement
of antiquity in literature, in sculpture and architecture,
in empire, and, perhaps most notably of all, in men.
Nothing is more significant of the mood of the age than
the regard in which Plutarch was held. Plutarch was,
as it were, a resurrection of the mighty dead of Greece
and Rome. The human soul had been capable of such
lives, and of such works as the poets and philosophers
and artists had wrought in classical times. The ex
ample was like a trumpet call; what man had done and
been, man could still be and do. The romantic nations,
Italy, France, Spain, and England, broke into sudden
flower of literature and art and life, as when the sun in
its northing clothes the whole hemisphere with spring
time, and the force of nature is unloosed like a flood,

MARLOWE 193

and belts the planet with new warmth and verdure. It
is this unloosing of human faculty that characterizes the
age; it was a broader phenomenon than we are apt to
think; Shakespeare was but an incident in it.

This force was unloosed in Marlowe; to him, hi his
awakening, came the sense of the greatness of man, the
miracle of human power, the desire to possess his soul
of this greatness, to be in himself this miracle — the
passion of life. Young scholar though he was and hardly
fledged from college, he had got more than an education;
he had found his mind. If he wrote a book against the
Trinity, as was alleged, it is a fact that is certainly not
recorded of any other of his fellows, and shows a phil
osophical interest, a mentality, different in kind from
theirs. He was endowed with sensuousness and the
warm delight in beauty, that is the rarest of English
poetic traits and little welcome in that sluggish climate;
he was also endowed with mind; but beneath both en
dowments lay that deep desire to live, that consciousness
of the power to live, that passion to realize his desire in
power, and for which there was no other pathway for
him than the roads of the imagination. It was natural
that what was most borne in upon his mind, the great
ness of man and the presence in man's soul of all that
potent faculty of which Greece and Rome and Italy were
the form and impression, of which the freshly opened
lands and seas, east and west, bore the promise of new
world-careers — it was natural, I say, that this height
of human nature which was foremost in his sense of life
should be cardinal in his imaginative brooding whence
issued the romantic dreams of his mind.

He first seized on the most obvious embodiment of
human greatness, military empire, and on the prime bar-

194 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

baric passion, lust of dominion — on power in its most
simple and sensual form, the power of the conqueror;
he set forth in "Tamburlaine" the career of resistless vic
tory ridden by a master of the world. Tamburlaine him
self proclaims that mastery of inexhaustible ambition
which is proper to man: —

"Nature that framed us of four elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown."

For Tamburlaine the crown was the summit, but in the
larger yearning of the speech, in such a line as

"Still climbing after knowledge infinite,"

is the keynote of Marlowe's mood in all ways. The
drama itself is an unchecked torrent of words, a flood of
large language; it has an imperial breadth of flow, and
bears the kingdoms like islands on its stream. It has
become a synonym for bombast, but it excites and ampli
fies the imagination by its spaciousness, its epithets like
"the hundred-headed Volga," and its terrible energy.
There are many splendid passages of impassioned dic
tion, many noble lines such as only the greatest masters
know the secret of; but I can best convey to you that
quality which I wish to bring out — the new Eliza-

MARLOWE 195

bethan sense of the largeness of the earth and of the
dream of empire over it — by the scene in which Tarn-
burlaine at his death calls for the map of the world.

"But I perceive my martial strength is spent.
In vain I strive and rail against those powers
That mean to invest me in a higher throne . . .
Give me a map; then let me see how much
Is left for me to conquer all the world . . .
Here I began to march toward Persia,
Along Armenia and the Caspian Sea,
And thence unto Bithynia, where I took
The Turk and his great empress prisoners.
Thence marched I into Egypt and Arabia;
And here, not far from Alexandria,
Whereas the Terrene and the Red Sea meet,
Being distant less than full a hundred leagues,
I meant to cut a channel to them both,
That men might quickly sail to India.
From thence to Nubia near Borno lake,
And so along the -^thiopean Sea,
Cutting the tropic line of Capricorn,
I conquered all as far as Zanzibar.
Then by the northern part of Africa,
I came at last to Graecia, and from thence
To Asia, where I stay against my will: —
Which is, from Scythia where I first began,
Backwards and forwards, near five thousand leagues.
Look here, my boys ; see what a world of ground
Lies westward from the midst of Cancer's line
Unto the rising of this earthly globe;
Whereas the sun, declining from our sight,
Begins the day with our Antipodes!
And shall I die, and this unconquered?
Lo, here, my sons, are all the golden mines,
Inestimable drugs and precious stones,
More worth than Asia and the world beside;
And from the Antarctic Pole eastward behold

i96 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

As much more land, which never was descried,
Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright
As all the lamps that beautify the sky !
And shall I die, and this unconquered?"

In this passage we are in the world that Columbus and
the great voyagers discovered, and breathe its air as fresh
as in those Elizabethan mornings when the wonder was
still on it.

In "The Jew of Malta" Marlowe selected the second
primary passion of man, the lust for gold, and he made
Barabas a type of the love of wealth, as prodigal as was
Tamburlaine of the love of empire. He it was from
whose lips dropped the line

"Infinite riches in a little room,"

and illustrated it by that glittering hoard which shows in
fewest words the lavishness that is a constant trait of
Marlowe: —

"Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price
As one of them indifferently rated . . .
May serve in peril of calamity
To ransom great kings from captivity."

The passion of the Jew, like that of the conqueror, is
single and alone. Marlowe desired a more unlimited
play for the soul's infinite capacity, and in "Doctor
Faustus" he showed that multiple thirst, which was the
very image of the Renaissance, that thirst to exhaust all
natures by possessing them, which only the secrets of
magic could satisfy and allay, but which was a passion
so deep-seated that the scholar would barter his soul

MARLOWE I97

in exchange for that means of power. At this price
Faustus obtained the satisfaction of every wish and was
as supreme in this empire of the mind as Tamburlaine
had been in the kingdoms of the world.

Infinite empire, infinite riches, infinite satisfaction of
desire, are thus the three great themes of Marlowe, in
these most characteristic plays; the desire, the passion,
and the power of life on a grand scale filled his mind,
and gave his imagination that grandiloquence which is
the trait by which he is most eminent in men's memories.
He had thus discovered passion as the substance of the
drama, and had created great embodiments of it in char
acters that remain types never to be forgotten of the
passion he delineated in each. To put the fact in a differ
ent way, he was the first great psychologist in English
drama; he created psychology in it as a dramatic theme.
He conceived these primary passions somewhat simply
and abstractly, elementally; but in these plays he had
already begun to find the counterfoil to passion, which
is the other half of dramatic art, namely, the event; and
as he went on in his -art, and grasped the interplay of pas
sion and circumstance which makes tragedy whole and
complete as an image of human life, he guided the art
into its proper element, history. That was his second
great achievement as a fashioner of the drama in his day.
In the earlier plays he had given passion its career in
an ideal world; in "Edward II" he seized upon it in its
confining bounds of history, and his work at once gained
complexity and reality, or what is called probability; it
became lifelike. It must be acknowledged that there is
more vitality in "Edward II" than in Shakespeare's more
expert development of the same theme in "Richard II."
Richard suffers in his imagination, in his kingship, in

ig8 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

his idea of himself; but Edward suffers in his heart, and
is hi all ways warmer, tenderer, more manly. It was by
this resort to history as the element of human drama that
Marlowe obtained this vitality in the characters and ac
tuality in the events; and by his example he put into
Shakespeare's hands his 'prentice work in the historical
plays, as he had already directed his interest to the psy
chology of the human spirit and the career of great pas
sions in exalted types of the imagination. Marlowe was
in these ways the forerunner, not only of Shakespeare,
but of the dramatic age.

Marlowe performed another service, not only for the
drama, but for English literature, and one that is for
ever associated with his name. He gave to English
poetry its best instrument of expression — blank verse.
It is true that blank verse had been used before and upon
the stage; but it was Marlowe's distinction to develop
the melody and rhetoric of blank verse, to give it elo
quence, ardor, and passion, to make it throb and live;
and from him, again, Shakespeare took it and through
successive years molded and shaped it, made it flexible
and plastic, till it became the most vital form of English
speech. In Marlowe the line is still in its elementary
stage; its value is there, but its value is often too ex
clusively a monotone and too frequently merely sonorous;
the repetition is tedious, the sound is swelling and bom
bastic; on the other hand, it should be remembered that
this sounding and gorgeous oratory, together with the
eloquence and rhetoric, the excess of rich detail, the pic-
turesqueness and ornament, the lavish fancy, all taken
in one, was a means of securing that illusion of the imagi
nation of which the bare and ill-furnished scenic stage
of Elizabeth stood so greatly in need. In a certain way

MARLOWE 199

this ranting and profuse language was a substitute for
scenery, and helped to give the necessary elevation to
the mimic stage. In his employment of blank verse,
too, Marlowe showed the same rapid progress in the
power of his art that distinguished him in characteriza
tion and in plot; and as he became accustomed to the
measure, he dissolved its original monotone, broke it
up into true melody, while at the same time he gathered
temperance and kept nearer to the natural language of
high passion, as in the great scenes of "Edward II" and
of "Doctor Faustus." In all this, as in the rest of his
art, he was a bold experimenter and learned by doing;
but just as there was a gift of nature which underlay his
sympathy with great passions, that Dionysiac daemonic
force within himself, so there was a gift of nature be
neath his "mighty line." Style, the power and the feel
ing for noble language, was born in him; that aliquid
immensum infinitumque that Cicero desired in the ora
tor was innate in Marlowe; it was not merely the large
words and rolling cadences upon his lips, but throughout
the poet's make there was the sense and feeling of the
infinite, seen at the lowest in the profusion of his fancy,
and at the highest in the reach of his imagination in his
great tragic scenes, but most apparent and condensed
perhaps in that passage on poetic expression which no
lover of Marlowe can forbear to quote, though it be
familiar:

"If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy

200 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit: —
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest."

The feeling of the inexpressible, which is in literature the
sense of the infinite, was never told with more heart-felt
conviction than in these lines. The style of Marlowe,
as lofty as it is rich, where every line brims to the
rim with melody or beauty or high feeling, is such as
belongs to the man. It was Shakespeare's best fortune
that he caught the golden cadence of his youth from
such a master's lips.

Marlowe died at the age of thirty, and left this mem
ory of himself which for splendor and beauty is fitly
symbolized by the image of the morning star which has
been so freely applied to him. It is not because of the
perfection of his works that he is remembered; he left
no single work of the first rank; a developed art is the
prerequisite of great literature. He did not so much
create great works as he rather originated the art itself
by which great works should in their time be accom
plished. I have indicated the specific service he thus
rendered by concentrating the drama on passion, by send
ing it to history to school, and by giving it the instru
ment of blank verse; but I have not meant thereby to
trace his historical significance, but to show forth more
fully the strength that was in him, the immense poetic
energy of which his genius was the phenomenon. He
had the warmth and susceptibility of a youthful poet,
but he had also a greatness of soul which we associate

MARLOWE 201

with more manly years. He was an emanation of the
Renaissance, one of that new brood of men which was
like a new creation in the ranks of the angels of power.
He was a forward-looking spirit; no fiber in him looked
backward to the past; he was revolutionary. He was
full of mastership; no part of his nature went in leash
to any power in heaven or on earth; he was free. He
was lawless, even, as it is the lot of genius to be because
of the prophetic element in it by which it belongs to a
world not yet come into being. More than any of his
fellows, more even than Shakespeare to me, he seems
self-absorbed in his own other world of imaginative art,
and living there as in his own bright, particular star.
He is the very type of genius, as I have said. — the
naked form of it — as bright, as beautiful, as neglectful
of mankind, as free from any regards of earth as an
antique statue that gives to our eyes the mortal aspect
of a god.

Ill

CAMOENS

CAMOENS, the maker of the only truly modern epic,
offers an illustration of poetic power which is to me one of
the most interesting, although the foreignness of his sub
ject-matter and the extraordinary lameness of its Eng
lish translations make difficult obstacles to our apprecia
tion; but for that very reason he has the happiest fortune
that can fall to a poet in the fact that familiarity ever
endears him the more. He is a less pure type of the
flame of genius than Marlowe; poetic energy appears
in him less a spiritual power dwelling in its own realm of
imagination; but, on the other hand, his career admits
us to a nearer view of a poet's human life, to what ac
tually befalls the man so doubtfully endowed with that
inward passion of life, in the days and weeks and years
of his journey. Scarce any poet is so autobiographical
in the strict sense. Others have made themselves the
subject of their song; but usually, like Shelley, they
exhibit an ideal self seen under imaginative lights and
through the soul's atmosphere, and in these self-por
traits half the lines are aspiration realized, the self they
dream of; but Camoens shows in his verse as he was in
life, with a naturalness and vigor, with an unconscious
realism, a directness, an intensity and openness that give
him to us as a comrade.

He was of the old blue blood of the Peninsula, the

203

204 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Gothic blood, the same that gave birth to Cervantes.
He was blond, and bright-haired, with blue eyes, large
and lively, the face oval and ruddy — and in manhood
the beard short and rounded, with long untrimmed
mustachios — the forehead high, the nose aquiline; in
figure agile and robust; in action "quick to draw and
slow to sheathe," and when he was young, he writes that
he had seen the heels of many, but none had seen his
heels. Born about the year 1524, of a noble and well-
connected family, educated at Coimbra, a university
famous for the classics, and launched in life about
the court at Lisbon, he was no sooner his own master
than he fell into troubles. He was a lover born,
and the name of his lady, Caterina, is the first that
emerges in his life; for such Romeo-daring he was ban
ished from court when he was about twenty, whether
after a duel or a stolen interview is uncertain; and on
his return, since he continued faithful to his lady, he
was sent into Africa, and in an engagement with pirates
in the Straits of Gibraltar he lost his right eye. He
fought the Moors for three years until he was twenty-
five, and returning to Lisbon, enlisted for the Indies;
but in consequence of a street affair with swords in which
he drew in defense of some masked ladies and unfortu
nately wounded a palace servant, he was held in prison
three years. Eleven days after his release he sailed,
and it is not unlikely that his sailing was a condition of
his release. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope and
came to India, where he served in campaigns and garri
son, and occasionally held official appointments, and
from time to time fell into prison. He cleared himself
from all charges of wrong-doing in office; but he was of
the type that makes both enemies and friends. He was

CAMOENS 205

outspoken, and he indulged his mood in satire, a dan
gerous employment in the narrowness of colonial and
army life. On the other hand, he was a brave and gentle
comrade and delighted in manly traits; and so there was
a round of companions in arms to whom he was dear.
He served far and wide, fought on the coasts of the Red
Sea, wintered in Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, spent some
years in China, and seems to have visited the Malay
islands; once he was shipwrecked on the Chinese coast.
It is clear that he roamed the Orient on all the lines
of travel and enterprise, of commerce and war, wherever
the Portuguese ships could sail, and bore throughout
the name and character of a gentleman-adventurer of
that world, a daring, enterprising, hopeful, unfortunate,
and often distressed man.

Sixteen years of his manhood passed in these toils —

"In one hand aye the Sword, in one the Pen,"

— along the tropical seas and under the alien skies; for
from the first, even before in his youth he planted a lance
in Africa, he had held to his breast that little manuscript
book where year by year, on the deck and the gun-breech,
in his grotto at Macao, in prison, wherever he might be
and under whatever aspect of fortune, he wrote down
the growing lines of that poem which is now the chief
glory of his native land. When he was shipwrecked in
China, he lost the little store of gold that he had accu
mulated in the office which he was recalled from, but he
held safe this book —

"In his embrace the song that swam to land
From sad and piteous shipwreck dripping wet
'Scaped from the reefs and rocks that fang the
strand."

206 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Now, after sixteen years, nostalgia, not simple home
sickness, but the nostalgia of him who fares forth into
the world and voyages long in stranger-lands, had fallen
on him, and was heavy in all his spirit. He had left
Portugal, indignantly saying that his country should not
possess his bones; but he had long changed this temper —

"Tagus yet pealeth with the passion caught
From the wild cry he flung across the sea"; —

all his hopes had really rested on the honor of the song
he had built up for the glory of Portugal, and while every
thing else that men name success faded away and escaped
him, with this poem surely he would find welcome home.
He stopped at Mozambique with the captain governor,
and when he wished to continue his voyage, this officer,
who was his host, consigned him to prison for a debt due
himself, a small sum. Soon afterwards, however, a ship
came by, with a dozen of Camoens' old messmates and
friends, veterans, and they contributed the money for his
release. So, says the old biographer, "were simultane
ously sold the person of Camoens and the honor of Pedro
Barreto" for £25. With these friends Camoens sailed
homeward, and arrived safely, but not to find prosperity.
It was three years before his book was published; and
he received for reward only a pension of about one hun
dred dollars in our money at its present worth, and this
was not often paid. The entire eight years of his life at
Lisbon were filled with such poverty and distress as we
remember of the last dying days of Spenser and Chatter-
ton. He lived some part of this time in a religious house,
that is, an almshouse; at other times his Javanese servant,
who had stayed with him, begged food for him at night,
but the faithful servant died before his wretched master.

CAMOENS 207

Even among the poets few have been so homeless and
destitute as Camoens in his life's end, now going about
on crutches and suffering the last sad effects of a hard-
faring life. It was the moment just before his death when
the power of Portugal was extinguished on the battle
field by Philip of Spain: "I die," he wrote to a friend,
"not only in my country, but with it." The time of
his death is uncertain, but he was about fifty-five years
old. He died in a hospital. "I saw him die," says an
old Carmelite brother, "in the hospital of Lisbon, with
out a sheet wherewith to cover himself." Such in its
external events was the life-story of Camoens.

If one throws upon this harsh narrative the light that
flows from Camoens' poetry, the lines are softened in
the retrospect; the hardship and misfortune are seen in
that atmosphere of melancholy that pervades his strong
verse and blends with it, as tenderness companions valor
in the man himself. To see properly the phases of his
genius, one should glance first at the lyrical works, and
especially the sonnets, that preceded and accompanied
the heroic verse of the epic. From his student days at
the university, unlike Marlowe, he was the heir of a
developed art, and in all his work is seen the fair back
ground of the poetic tradition — in the epic the forms
of old mythology, and in the lyrics the Italian example
of Petrarch. To him his lady Caterina was what Pe
trarch's Laura had been, an ideal of hopeless and pure
passion. Her personality is not definitely known, but
she married and died while still young. Though in his
sonnets to her Camoens followed the poetic tradition,
the reality of his devotion cannot be doubted in its in
ception; and in its continuance through the years of
his youth, and especially of his long exile in the Orient,

208 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

this ideal passion stood for him, at least, as the sign and
certainty of his first failure — his failure in love. It
became, perhaps, after long and hopeless years simply
the cry of his imagination, but it had its original being
in the call of the heart. Very sweet and noble, though
conventional, is his early pleading: —

"Beautiful eyes, whereof the sunny sphere
When most with cloudless clarity of light
The infinite expanse he maketh bright,
Doubting to be eclipsed, doth stand in fear:
If I am held in scorn who hold you dear,
Then, having of all things such perfect sight,
Consider this thing too, that mortal night
To cover up your beauty draweth near.
Gather, O gather with unstaying hand,
The fruits that must together gathered be,
Occasion ripe, and Passion's clasp divine.
And, since by you I live and die, command
Love, that he yield his tribute unto me,
Who unto you have freely yielded mine."

After years of vain castle-building during which he
seemed his "own sorrow's architect," and in that wide
roaming which he describes —

"Now scattering my music as I pass,
The world I range, —

he still kept true to the lover's creed: —

"All evils Love can wreak behold in me,
In whom the utmost of his power malign
He willed unto the world to manifest:
But I, like him, would have these things to be.
Lifted by woe to ecstasy divine,
I would not change for all the world possest."

When his lady died, he lifted his prayer in his loveliest
and most famous sonnet —

CAMOENS 209

%

"Soul of my soul, that didst so early wing
From our poor world thou heldest in disdain,
Bound be I ever to my mortal pain,
So thou hast peace before the Eternal King!
If to the realms where thou dost soar and sing
Remembrance of aught earthly may attain,
Forget not the deep love thou did'st so fain
Discover my fond eyes inhabiting.
And if my yearning heart unsatisfied,
And pang on earth incurable have might
To profit thee and me, pour multiplied
Thy meek entreaties to the Lord of Light,
That swiftly He would raise me to thy side,
As suddenly He rapt thee from my sight."

In these sonnets and other lyrical poems the poet is
hardly more personal than in the heroic epic, but his per
sonality is more exclusively felt, and the topics are not
confined to his love. The most lasting impression made
is of the passing of hope out of his life. Camoens was
one of those souls who are great in hope; and he often
bent upon the past reverted eyes, and drew the sum of his
losses, ending in the refrain —

"For Death and Disenchantment all was made —
Woe unto all that hope! to all that trust!"

The vein of melancholy in the lyrical poems opens the
tenderness of Camoens, and perhaps the softer note is
somewhat overcharged in these admirable but rather Ital-
ianated version of Dr. Garnett's that I have used; life-
weariness and profound discouragement, indeed, there is
in them; but they are not the simple outflow of a Pe
trarchan lover's complaint, but the sorrows of a much-
toiling man; for Camoens was both sailor and soldier,
and as natural to those ways of labor as to the handling

2io THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

of the lute. The voyage, the march, and the battle made
up the larger part of his life.

This opens the second trait to be observed in the phases
of his development, namely, his absorption of the patri
otic vitality of his country. It is true that he inherited
a developed and conventionalized art, and had always
that fair background of classical figures and Italian at
mosphere which were his portion of the Renaissance;
but the Renaissance was rather like a little mountain
city where he was born and drank his youth; he did
not abide there, but came down into the great modern
world that was then to be — the world of the waste of
waters and the spreading empires. Portugal played a
great part in that age which broke the horizon bars and
passed the western and the eastern limit of the sun alike,
and made the fleets as free of the ocean as the sea-birds
of every wandering wave. Camoens was to make this
the great theme of his song — the ocean fame of Portu
gal. But he was inducted into his passion of patriotism
by natural ways, before the glory of the ocean discoveries
was fully opened in his mind. Portugal, you remember,
was the child of battle, born of the conflict of the Chris
tian and the Moor; on the stricken field she found her
crown itself, and became a state, and in maintaining the
struggle that drove the Crescent back into Africa, and
in following across the straits to free the seaboard, she
developed her strength, laid up her most heroic memo
ries, and built those navies that were to open and com
mand so many seas.

When Camoens in his youth fought his first campaigns
in Africa, he was united with his country's cause and
honor in its great historic current, and it was by nature
that there flamed up in him that national pride, hating

CAMOENS an

»*

and triumphing over the Moor, which is the historic
substance of his epic. He had found his theme in battling
with the Moorish power. The realization of this theme,
the patriotic past of his country, was the second phase
of his development. Then came, with his long and
perilous voyage and his years of wanderings through all
the picturesque coasts of the East, that expansion and
enrichment of his theme which reduced the original
Moorish battle to the rank of episode and background,
while the maritime greatness of Portugal, set forth in
the story of the voyage of Da Gama round the Cape of
Good Hope as the main action, became the more promi
nent subject. The poem itself yields these three main
elements corresponding to the division that has been
made: the background of classical mythology, which
affords the mechanism of the plot, and is of the Renais
sance; the history of Portugal which affords the time
perspectives and the main episodes; and lastly the for
tunes of Da Gama. The poem thus grew with Camoens'
own growth, and contains his artistic training in the
school of Renaissance tradition, his youthful African
marches and raids, and his manhood voyages. He made
it embrace the whole glory of Portugal, compressed into
its stanzas all her romance, heroism, and fable from the
earliest record in antique days to his own hour, spread
in it the naval dominion of her great contemporary age;
and he did this, not as a reminiscent scholar in VirgiPs
way or Tasso's way, but as one who had labored in the
glorious action by sea and land, near the port and far in
the open, boy and man, with sword and pen. The en
thusiasm of a lifetime here gathers and gives out the
passion of a whole nation and makes a people's glory one
with the poet's fame. The "Lusiads" is the principal

212 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

monument of Portugal, and the chief national bond that
binds her children in one.

It is this infusion of personality — and personality
like Marlowe's of the daring Renaissance type — which
makes the "Lusiads" so different from all other epics.
The theme is not presented as an ideal action in remote
time after the manner of other poets, but seems a real
event, something that the poet had done and been. It
is as if Ulysses had written the "Odyssey." Gamoens
was himself, like Ulysses, such a traveler, a romantic
wanderer, a hard-toiling man, in the heroic exile of
enterprise on the sea-edges of a larger and unknown
world. It is this temperament of the wanderer that so
endears him to all nomad souls. It is this which made
him attractive to Captain Burton, for example, who
made the labor of translating his works a part of his task
for twenty years; and though it is marvelously unread
able, it is from his translation that I shall quote; for at
times, and not seldom, he catches the spirit of Camoens
as the sail catches the wind. The "Lusiads" is a sea-
poem. No poem approaches it in maritime quality ex
cept the "Odyssey." The note of the whole is struck in
Da Gama's account of the setting sail of the fleet from
Lisbon: —

"We from the well-known port went sorrowing,
After the manner of far-faring men."

The fleet made out to sea, and this is the parting
view: —

"Slow, ever slower, banisht from our eyne,
Vanisht our native hills, astern remaining;
Remained dear Tagus, and the breezy line
Of Cintran peaks, long, long, our gaze detaining;

CAMOENS 213

Remained eke in that dear country mine
Our hearts, with pangs of memory ever paining ;
Till, when all veiled sank in darkling air,
Naught but the welkin and the wave was there."

The sense not only of the deep sea, as in this last line,
but of the undiscovered, is constantly present — not only
the illiminitable waste of waters, but the peril of them.
It is a growing peril, vaguely felt at first beside the new
islands and capes lately discovered, in the strangeness
of the coasts by which the ships drop southward, in
the adventures with the unfamiliar tribes at the land
falls; but the strangeness becomes peril, slowly and
surely — that panic fear which is not for a moment of
alarm but for days and nights of increasing dread — the
mood which all great explorers have known, from Colum
bus to the latest, who have had to master their men with
the desperate force of a higher courage and hold them
to the onward course. It is this gigantic fear, rising
from the endless rolling of the sea and driving of the
cloudy winds in the pathless ways of the lonely sail —
it is this fear that Camoens gives body and a name in
the most daring and perhaps the most celebrated of the
inventions of his fancy — the apparition of the giant
phantom, Adamastor, off the Cape of Good Hope.
Adamastor symbolizes the dangers of the ocean enter
prise and the revenge of the elements outraged by the
human victory over their brute power.

What Camoens there renders by imagination and alle
gory he draws again realistically in the account of the
storm in the Indian Ocean. The storm in Shakespeare's
"Tempest" is the only sea-storm that compares with it
for majesty and violence, and at the same time for truth
to sea-weather. The little picture of the nightwatch on

214 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

deck with which the scene opens gives perhaps in briefest
space that unaffected naturalism which distinguishes
Camoens' descriptions of actuality: —

"All half-numbed and chill
Shivered with many a yawn the huddling crew
Beneath the bulging mainsail, clothed ill
To bear the nightly breath that keenly blew;
Their eyes kept open sore against their will
They rubbed and stretched their torpid limbs anew," —

and to keep awake they begin to spin yarns; in this
case the fine chivalric tale of the Twelve of England —
in the course of which the storm breaks on them with
tropic suddenness.

The labor of the life is thus a main element in the
poem, which is solid with experience and somber with it,
also. Camoens delighted in his companions, those vas
sals of the king, "peerless in their worth," but it is the
darker side of their lives that holds his imagination and
memory alike: —

"Look how they gladly wend by many a way: —
Self-doomed to sleepless night and foodless day,
To fire and steel, shaft-shower, and bullet-flight;
To torrid Tropics, Arctics frore and gray,
The Pagan's buffet and the Moor's despite;
To risks invisible, threatening human life,
To wreck, sea-monsters and the wave's wild strife."

The lonely death in a foreign land, always near in
the prospect, imparts a deep melancholy to the verse,
that true epic melancholy, which Virgil summed in that
one of his most immortal lines where the dying soldier
"remembers sweet Argos." Camoens was a man of
friendships, of that comradeship which flowers only in
such hardy soil, and many of his verses lament the un-

CAMOENS 215

timely death of the brave heart in its youth. One son
net on the death of a comrade in Africa, in the form of
an epitaph spoken by the victim, best tells the story: — -.

"Few years and evil to my life were lent,
All with hard toil and misery replete:
Light did so swiftly from my eyes retreat,
That ere five lusters quite were gone, I went.
Ocean I roamed and isle and continent,
Seeking some remedy for life unsweet;
But he whom Fortune will not frankly meet,
Vainly by venture woos her to his bent.
First saw I light in Lusitanian land,
Where Alemquer the blooming nurtured me;
But, feeble foul contagion to withstand,
I feed the fish's maw where thou, rude sea,
Lashest the churlish Abyssinian strand,
Far from my Portugal's felicity."

The same mood, in the "Lusiads," fills the stanza which
he dedicates to the memory of all who fell by the wave
and along the trail: —

"At last in tangled brake and unknown ground
Our true companions lost for aye we leave,
Who mid such weary ways, such dreary round,
Such dread adventures, aidance ever gave.
How easy for man's bones a grave is found!
Earth's any wrinkle, ocean's any wave,
Whereso the long home be, abroad, at home,
For every hero's corse may lend a tomb."

Camoens is always directly faithful to the daily and
hourly life, to the physical scene and the human man
ners; but his truth to the heroic spirit, the martial
breath that filled the sails of the great enterprise, and
also his truth to the sentiment of the wanderer, the

216 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

power whereby he renders the melancholy which falls
from the dry and sterile Arabian peaks of rose-red rock,
diffusing that nostalgia of the brave heart, heightening
all that bravery so, and thereby renews for us, and illu
mines, that old type of the "much-enduring" man — all
this constitutes a truth for which reality seems but a
faint and shadowy name. It is the truth not merely
of a voyage, but of man's life on earth — such as it is
when poetry presents it most nobly, most feelingly, and
without a veil. To Camoens the fortune of human life
showed no smiling face; it was not in fortune but in
character that he found life's value. He was a lover
of heroic men, those

"By the doughty arm and sword that chase
Honor which man may proudly hail his own ;
In weary vigil, in the steely case,
'Mid wrathsome winds and bitter billows thrown,
Suff'ring the frigid rigors in th' embrace
Of South, and regions lorn, and lere, and lone;
Swallowing the tainted rations' scanty dole,
Salted with toil of body, moil of soul."

The character of Da Gama is very nobly drawn ; he is all
that such a leader should be; a figure worthy of his place
in the poem, and of the fame to which he is exalted, akin
to ^neas before him and to Tasso's Godfrey who was
born after him. Camoens' morality, his conception of
the character of "a good king, a great captain, a wise
councillor, a just judge, a pure priest," as Burton draws
the catalogue, is always energetic and lofty. Of all his
personal qualities he is most proud of his own independ
ence in judgment, his honesty of speech, his perfect and
entire fearlessness. He returns repeatedly to this claim
of truth-telling, which he thought was his duty as a part

CAMOENS 217

of his fidelity to the Muses; and when he invokes their
aid, he makes this his main plea: -

"Aid me you only: — long indeed sware I
No grace to grant where good doth not prevail,
And none to flatter, whatso their degrees
On pain of losing all my power to please."

In telling the story of Portugal, past and present, he
had much occasion to use this high ideal; not even in
those days did he hesitate to denounce and inveigh within
the pale of the Church itself. Morality, in the high
sense of character, pervades the poem; virtue, in the
ancient and manly meaning of the word — the old epic
"arms and the man" — is its substance, and charm is
diffused over it as in the "vEneid." This charm partly
arises from that oriental coloring — the lux ex Oriente
— natural to the scene, in the detail of which, Burton
says, Camoens rarely trips, being more accurate than
most modern authors, and that experienced traveler
wonders at the quality of the brain that amassed so much
information from sources so few and so imperfect. The
charm, however, lies also in the contrast between the
realism of the matter and the fantastic power of Cam
oens' imagination, which is one of his most powerful and
fascinating traits and peculiarly a feature of his orig
inality. The Adamastor episode serves as an example;
but a nobler one is the ideal figuring of the rivers Indus
and Ganges, who appear like Neptunian forms in the
dream of the old king which was one of the motives
of the voyage. The variation by which the scenes of
pictured history — a tradition of the epic and seen by
^Eneas, you remember, at Carthage — are here found
spread on the banners of the festally decorated Portu-

218 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

guese ships is a happy play of the poet's fancy. The
isle of Venus, that receives the homeward-bound fleet,
is perhaps the most surprising, as it is certainly the love
liest, of these imaginative fantasies. But it is not by
any piecemeal criticism and naming of passages that
the quality of this epic can be conveyed.

Yet one must add still another of its larger elements,
namely, its spaciousness. I mean the map of the world,
like that map in Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," that it un
folds. Camoens describes the European quarter early
in the poem, beginning from Russia and sweeping south
ward and west, leaving England entirely out as if it
were Iceland of to-day, and finding, of course, in the little
state of Portugal the climax and summit of the world.
It is a perspective to which our thoughts are unused,
but in its day was not an untrue one; and for us to have
it in mind — to emigrate into it, as it were — is a pre
requisite to the appreciation of the "Lusiads," for such
was Camoens' world. He also describes the voyaging
of the fleet with great detail. But it is in the last book
of the poem that the face of the new earth is shown,
magically in the mystic globe of the planetary sphere, to
Da Gama by the Siren: that new earth, fresh as it then
arose from the uncovered waters — the Asian seas and con
tinent and islands, the African coasts and uplands, and
the unknown west far as through Magellan's Straits; it
is a wide reach, a finer vision than Milton gave from the
specular mount, and with it as in its own horizons the
epic ends.

The "Lusiads" is the only truly modern epic, but one
seems to breathe in it the early air of the "Odyssey"
and "Iliad" more than in any intervening poem; like the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey/' it has no love element in

CAMOENS 219

its plot, but the old heroic life — man's life of the oar-
blade and the battle-field — rules the scene. The sense
of primitive life, however, is still deeper-seated, in its
neighborhood to nature, where the sky is the tent of the
bivouac and the roof of the deck-watch, and man is a
solitary figure in the landscape, and life a hand-to-hand
affair. Into that far alien field of earth and waters
the pride of Portugal is carried, as it were, on the ban
ners of a little squadron conquering a mighty world.
It was fitting in the Peninsular war that the regiments
of Portugal went into battle with lines of Camoens in
scribed upon their flags. Yet it is a narrow view that
would see in the "Lusiads" only the self-glorification of
a little state. It has a larger significance. The blend
ing of the East and West at a great dawn of history is
here rendered in a noble form of human greatness, cast
in the lives of a few brave men equal to great tasks.

Such are a few of the traits of this epic. But what a
fiery soul must that have been which could carry such
a passion of poetry through the years of exile and ever
cherish it as a life above life itself! The deep melan
choly of Camoens, as it gathered in later years, is plain;
his failure in love — the hunger of the heart that was
never to be appeased with any earthly touch of the ideal
— was but the sign of the famine that fell upon him in
all the ways of success. He had no talent for success.
He was filled with poet's blood, as the pure grape with
wine. He was wild and free, amorous, framed for en
joyment, Southern-hearted, a boon comrade, a tender
friend; between the prison and the camp and the ship's
deck he had a soldier's gaiety, was fond of fine apparel
and of golden suppers — the adventurer's changeful for
tune; but failure was all he found in the East, and the

220 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

profound discouragement of his lot invaded his heart
at last. He reviewed his life in one of his last sonnets.

"In lowly cell, bereaved of liberty,
Error's meet recompense, long time I spent;
Then o'er the world disconsolate I went,
Bearing the broken chain that left me free;
My life I gave unto this memory;
No lesser sacrifice would Love content;
And poverty I bore and banishment;
So it was ordered, so it had to be.
Content with little, though I knew indeed
Content unworthy, yet, aloof from strife,
I loved to mark Man's various employ.
But my disastrous star, whom now I read,
Blindness of death, and doubtfulness of life,
Have made me tremble when I see a joy."

The passing of hope out of his life was the history of
his soul. He came home only to make disaster sure, as
the event proved. Sick, old with wounds, the almshouse
gave him to the hospital, and the hospital to the grave,
as a corpse is cast from wave to wave till it sinks into a
nameless tomb. It seems — it is — pitiful.

"Woe unto all that hope! to all that trust!"

It is the epitaph of most of the poets. Yet it is from
the consuming flame of such a passion and power of life
as burnt in this much-enduring soul that poetic genius
gives out its immortal star.

IV

BYRON

IT is an error to think of Byron as an English poet;
he was expatriated not only in his person but in his
genius; and this partly accounts for the fact that his
reputation so soon became, and still remains, Continental.
He was not a poet of what was always, for him, the dis
mal island of his birth. He was rather a poet of the
Mediterranean world. There he found the main mate
rial of his works — the motive, the stage, the incidents,
and the inspiration — the picturesque and romantic
scene of his imagination, ranging from the Straits of
Gibraltar to the Golden Horn. He stamped his mem
ory there — still felt — from Calpe to Stamboul. Portu
gal and Spain, Albania and Greece were his earliest
topics in verse after his boyish preluding was done;
Italy was the main theme of his most majestic manhood
poetry; and by a nearer and internal tie the Italian
literary tradition entered into his genius and character
ized his style. England need not have troubled to refuse
him so often and so long a niche in the Abbey; for
wherever his bones may lie or tablets of grateful honor
he erected, Greece is the true shrine of his memory, and
will always be so. In all things that pertain to the im
mortal part of him, he thus belongs to the Mediterranean;
and it is only in the perspective of those broken coasts,
in the purple of those lonely islands, in the high atmos-

221

I

222 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

phere of those snow-clad and thronging peaks that his
genius is seen as in its home,

He was but a youth and in the first flush of his poetic
blood, when the Mediterranean revelation came to him,
on his first voyage. He entered the south by Lisbon.
The moment was a true awakening; and so natural that
he was not aware the poet was born in him; and later he
was still clinging to his adolescent and apprentice work
— such as the "Hints from Horace" — for the hope of
reputation, when by the publication of these first Medi
terranean moods, he "awoke and found himself famous."
But his fame was not more sudden than the awakening
had been. He responded at once to that disclosure of
the Mediterranean beauty, which is a romantic marvel
to all Northern eyes;

"Ah me, — what hand can pencil guide or pen
To follow half on which the eye dilates?"

and one feels his new throb of life in the mere ampli
tude of description that overflows even from the earliest
stanzas: —

"The horrid crags by toppling convent crowned;
The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep;
The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrowned;
The sunken glen whose sunless shrubs must weep ;
The tender azure of the unruffled deep,
The orange fruits that gild the greenest bough,
The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
The vine on high, the willow branch below,
Mixt in one mighty scene."

Byron had the poet's temperament, full and strong —
the peril in his blood, the wildness of impulse, the law
less will, the passion of life. He was fresh from his first
angers with life, and had gone out from England seeking

BYRON 223

an escape — some air of freer breath, some horizon to
wander in. It was now that the love of the ocean was
confirmed in him; for in his experience it was a love of
Mediterranean waves. It was from them, as he sailed
onward, that the Corsairs' song was caught: —

"O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!"

It was a great adventure for this youth of twenty years
— such a voyage into the Levant. It was a free life —
such freedom as he had never known — and it was ro
mantic in its scene and human incident, its mingling with
more primitive men of strange aspect and rough hardi
hood, its combined naturalness and foreignness. He
never forgot its pictures; and he drew one for all in that
passage of "The Dream" which describes in brief these
wanderings: —

"In the wilds

Of fiery climes he made himself a home,
And his soul drank their sunbeams; he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects; he was not
Himself like what he had been ; on the sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer;
There was a mass of many images
Crowded like waves upon me, but he was
A part of all; and in the last he lay
Reposing from the noontide sultriness,
Couched among fallen columns, in the shade
Of ruined walls that had survived the names
Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds
Were fastened near a fountain ; and a man
Clad in a flowing garb did watch the while
While many of his tribe slumbered around;

224 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in heaven."

This admirably composed oriental scene may stand
for the circumstance and atmosphere of this voyage as
Byron himself remembered it, but it needs to be sup
plemented by the more stirring scenes, such as his re
ception by the Suliotes when the weather forced him and
his crew to land on that doubtful coast: —

"Vain fear! The Suliotes stretched the welcome hand,
Led them o'er rocks, and past the dangerous swamp,
And piled the hearth, and wrung their garments damp,
And filled the bowl, and trimmed the cheerful lamp,
And spread their fare — though homely, all they had."

Through such contact with nature, with the pictur
esque and primitive, with wild and savage or broad and
solitary scenes, Byron's imagination first took on its ro
mantic color; and the free life he led in the open, on the
sea and in camp, loosed in him that spirit of adventure
which in his verse took the cast of desperate love and
pirate warfare — the passion and brigandage of the Levan
tine East. They were almost natural elements in that
environment; and in idealizing them the ardors of his own
young temperament found an imaginative form. Byron
never again lived so fully and keenly, either imaginatively
or in the merely physical sense, as in this early year of his
Mediterranean roving. He was not a natural wanderer, a
born traveler, like Camoens. He never heard the call of
the wilderness nor obeyed the Wander-lust. This voyage
was only such a one as any young Englishmen might take
for pleasure, for sport. Nevertheless, to him, being a poet,
it constituted his awakening, and stirred and freed him,

BYRON 225

•*

and gave his genius wing. It remained his deepest poetic
experience and the happiest memory of his dying past,
with its "rosy floods of twilight's sky"; its latest recol
lections, after many years, gave, in "Don Juan," the
loveliest scenes of all his verse; and he was conscious
of the debt: —

"Ave Maria! blessed be the hour!
The time, the clime, the spot, where I so oft
Have felt that moment in its fullest power
Sink o'er the earth, so beautiful and soft,
While swung the deep bell in the distant tower,
Or the faint, dying day-hymn stole aloft,
And not a breath crept through the rosy air,
And yet the forest leaves seemed stirred with prayer."

Byron in later years himself once wrote to Moore in
a moment of discouragement that his poetical feelings
began and ended with Eastern countries, and that having
exhausted the subject, he could make nothing of any
other. Certain it is that this year of adventurous travel
unlocked the sources of his poetic power.

The sudden burst of his genius under these favoring
circumstances is, as you know, one of the wonders of
literary fame. He had made three very simple prime dis
coveries. The first was of the romance of the Orient;
and his rendering of it in his tales is still its chief ex
ample in our literature. Moore, who cultivated the
same field, was in this as in other things only Byron's
satellite; and both he and Southey and the others who
added the Arabian or Persian glamour to their works were
mainly indebted to dictionaries, commentators, and
travelers, whereas Byron took it from its native soil.
However melodrama may enter into his tales, it would
be an error not to recognize their realism, not only in

226 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

their magnificent nature-coloring, but also in their man
ners, the accoutrement of their scenes, the play of their
passions — and especially in their truth to the sentiment
of the land —

"The land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime."

Byron's genius, in a certain sense, was low-flying; he
never liked to be far from matter of fact; and in that
"bodiless creation" that the more ethereal, spiritualizing
poets delight in, he was without faculty. He was little
gifted with the power of invention, and beneath his verse
is often found the substratum of the prose of others. Even
in these tales there is paraphrasing of Mrs. Radcliffe's
novel, "The Bravo," for example; just as in his drama
"Werner" there is another English novel, and in "The
Island" and in the shipwreck of "Don Juan" there are
versions of old voyages. Byron required that the scene
should be given to him, a basis of matter of fact —
realism. It was his good fortune that, in assimilating
the Orient, realism was given to him in a romantic form
and on that superb landscape background, of which the
description of the sunset over the Morea, seen from
Acrocorinth, is perhaps the most familiar example. This
coloring belongs to the characters as well, who are
charged with passion and bravery; and the whole is in
keeping with that tradition of violent adventure and
sudden turns of fortune, which is the historic legend of
the Mediterranean in the Moslem centuries. The tales,
in fact, are nearer to the temper of Southern literature,
long familiar with the Saracen and the Turk, than to
our own. Their realism cannot but seem exotic in Eng
lish, but to the traveler they recall the country of their

BYRON 227

«•

origin with the vividness of memory. For Byron's fame
this discovery of the Levant was not unlike what the dis
covery of the Highlands had been for Scott — a new
world where fact itself was romance.

The second discovery of Byron was the sentiment of
history in the landscape. It began in his classical devo
tion. He had been bred in school and college on Greek,
and had that enthusiasm for the ancient past that was
one of the great and fruitful traits of the old education.
He had translated from many a Greek poet with school
boy fervor. This voyage vivified his boyhood studies.
Nothing is more genuine hi his life than the emotion
with which the actual presence of the sacred places of
the old Greek land filled him.

"Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey,
Not in the frenzy of a dreamer's eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty! . . .

Oft have I dreamed of Thee! whose glorious name
Who knows not, knows not man's divinest lore:
And now I view thee, 'tis, alas, with shame
That I in feeblest accents must adore.
When I recount thy worshipers of yore
I tremble, and can only bend the knee;
Nor raise my voice, nor vainly dare to soar,
But gaze beneath thy cloudy canopy
In silent joy to think at last I look on Thee!"

It was on the next day after composing these stanzas that
he saw on Parnassus the flight of twelve eagles that he
took as a happy omen of his poetic fame. The mood
of these lines, the mere fact of this incident, testify to
the sincerity of his feeling. It warmed his description

228 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

of Greece, and gave that heroic blast to the lines with
which again and again he strives to rouse the sleeping
land. It was a feeling, moreover, destined to a rich
development, and at last made him the characteristic
type of the brooder over the buried past — the poet of
the desolation of human greatness. Here, again, the
solid base of history, the natural cling of his mind to
realism, to matter of fact, is noticeable. Under this
mood of history poetry becomes meditative, in a deep
sense, and broods upon human fate in its final issues;
there grows up that feeling which Tennyson called "the
passion of the past," and it interprets itself and finds
expression as an elegy of the nations. Byron became
the great poet of this mood; it was born of his contact
with the Mediterranean shores, and it took its touch
of nobility especially from the classic stir of his emo
tions in Greece.

The third discovery in this year of travel was his
practical enthusiasm for political liberty; or, if it be
hardly just to ascribe to one group of circumstances the
revolutionary force that played so great a part in his
fame and was so deeply rooted in his nature, yet it was
the actual sight of the servitude of Greece that pre
cipitated and condensed and gave practical direction to
his ardor. Every line of his enthusiasm for the Greece
of old goes coupled with a rousing cry to free the
land; and great lines they are in which he strikes this
tocsin of liberty, none more famous: —

"Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow!"

Indignation with the present sloth and ignominy is in
constant struggle with his memory of the past and

BYRON 229

his feeling of virtue in the soil and of the beauty of
the scene: —

"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The free-born wanderer of thy mountain-air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare;
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

"Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground;
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
And all the Muse's tales seem truly told,
Till the sense aches with gazing to behold
The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon;
Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold
Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone:
Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon."

The very name of the old battle-field is a reproach.
It is in these stanzas, and others like them, that there
is the prophecy of Missolonghi.

These three elements of the verse, the romance of
the Orient, the sentiment of the past in the place of its
decay, the call to arms against the Turk, are Mediter
ranean moods. Every traveler still recognizes them as
dominant in his own experience — the picturesqueness,
the desolation of old time, the hope. The sense of deso
lation is the most universal and profound, and in five
lines Byron gave it expression that is true not of one
place but on the thousands of miles of those lonely and
half -savage coasts:

230 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

"Look on this spot — a nation's sepulchre!
Abode of gods whose shrines no longer burn.
Even gods must yield — religions take their turn;
'Twas Jove's; 'tis Mahomet's; and other creeds
Will rise with other years, till man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds."

Every traveler knows the mood, and there at least is
apt to find it just. Outside of the circle of these three
earlier motives, romance, meditation on the past, en
franchisement, the nobler genius of Byron, even in after
years, hardly moved; nor did it rise to its height in
other than Mediterranean air, except on the field of
Waterloo and in the mountains of Switzerland.

In his works he gave the first motive, romance, its
most memorable expression in the loves of Juan and
Haidee in scenes of unrivalled beauty — the highest
reach of the romance of passion in English verse; the
second motive, meditation, he developed most impres
sively and eloquently in the last book of "Childe Harold,"
making Italy his theme, in an elegy of genius and em
pire that is nowhere equalled; the third, freedom, found
its climax not in poetry but in his death for Greece.

There is yet another element that sprang and strength
ened in this year of travel, and is inextricably blended
with the other three — his initiation into the love of
nature. Byron was not, as I have already said, a true
rover; he was not only not a Camoens — he was not even
a Burton or a Borrow. He never again repeated this
excursion, but was content to live within the pale of
civilization. He was aristocratically bred, and neces
sarily a social person; in the fine stanzas on solitude, you
remember, he found true solitude, not in nature but in
crowds, that is, in the sense of isolation, and this marks

BYRON 231

him as essentially a social person; but once in his life
he had approached the mood of the rover, and he de
scribes the precise moment when he -

"felt himself at length alone,
And bade to Christian tongues a long adieu;
Now he adventured on a shore unknown,
Which all admire, but many dread to view;
His breast was armed 'gainst fate, his wants were few;
Peril he sought not, but ne'er shrank to meet;
The scene was savage, but the scene was new;
This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet,
Beat back keen winter's blast and welcomed summer's heat."

It is the picture of a young man with a horse, the mood
of Kinglake, for example, in "Eothen." But in this
adventure he first touched hands with nature, and found
by experience the bracing and reposing power that nature
exercises on the social and aristocratic man bred in cities
— he found the relief which nature affords as a foil to
life. He escaped from the conventional and entangling
sphere of society, and reached unbounded freedom in
the open. The scene appealed to him also as a poet;
the extraordinary beauty of it, the majestic mountain
ranges round the long purple gulfs, the mere clarity of
the heavens were a revelation to his senses, and edu
cated them, and through them entered into his spirit.
There was also an idiosyncrasy in his temperament,
something grandiose in the man's soul which the greater
scenes of nature developed and defined more consciously
and gave a run of feeling; such scenes roused the physi
cal electricity of his body, and made him sympathetic
with the Alpine storm, the glacier peak, and the ocean
gale. This deep power of nature so to stir him, and to
exhaust itself in mere feeling, first fell on him with full

232 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

seizure in the solitudes of the Greek coasts. It grew
with his growth, but it was then dissociated from this
early adventure and experience of the wild and the
foreign. It became a power of pure sentiment. "To
me/' he says, "high mountains are a feeling." It was a
more physical feeling than is found in his contempora
ries; he did not idealize and transform and mythologize
nature, like Shelley, or become pantheistic or religious
in his thought of it or awe of it, like Wordsworth; among
nature-poets — and he is one of the greatest of nature-
poets — he remains in the dimly conscious and uninter-
preted mood of men who in the presence of nature only
see and feel. It was true of him in this early time, —

"Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam,
Were unto him companionship ; they spake
A mutual language."

But after this first youthful year "the passion and the
power to roam" was a figment of his ideal self, though
he retained the secret of that "mutual language," and
wherever he found himself in his later little journeys
from Geneva to Venice, from Ravenna to Pisa, he used
this key.

It is apparent from what has been already brought
forward that Byron unfolded his genius characteristic
ally through phases of sentiment, romantically colored,
* of which the various elements show themselves clearly
in the first-fruits of his Mediterranean experience —
the fourfold sentiment for the Levant, for the elegy of

BYRON 233

history, for the hopes of the Greeks, for the more majes
tic phenomena and the elemental force of nature. As
he matured, he developed another sentiment, which was
destined to swallow up all these, and, as it were, to fatten
upon them, and to become the memory of him that most
deeply stamps his personality in. the minds of men. I
can only call it the sentiment of self. He was an egotist,
as most of the poets have been; egotism is the secret
of their strength as it is of the strength of all masters of
the world, except, indeed, the few spiritually minded who
dare to throw their lives away. He built up, as years
went on, an ideal self; the analysis of its formation would
be an interesting psychological study, for it was framed
from many sources. It is but slightly to be discerned
in the early cantos of "Childe Harold." It hardly be
came fixed in his own mind until after the troubles which
led to his second and final flight from England into that
self-exile which lasted till his death. He was one of
those men who have something theatrical in their nature;
he loved the center of the stage; he liked effect. The
circumstances of his life made it easy for him to hold
attention; and also to adopt into his character an ele
ment of mystery, of which he knew the stage value;
and he favored by his air and conduct the public disposi
tion to create in the background of his career something
melodramatic; he let it be believed that in his own Medi
terranean experience there had been the color of "The
Corsair" and of "Lara," and that in the type of his heroes
there was something of himself in masquerade. It is
in the third canto of "Childe Harold" that he unmasked
frankly to the public the ideal self as it had come to
be at the moment of his departure from England —
the ideal of the blighted life: —

234 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

"The very knowedge that he lived in vain,
That all was over on this side the tomb."

This is the well-known refrain that through a hundred
variations makes "Childe Harold" not only an elegy of
nations but a personal lament of the individual life. It
does not appear to me that the burden of "Childe Harold"
is disillusion; it is, on the contrary, disappointment;

"We wither from our youth, we gasp away:
Sick — sick — unfound the boon, unslaked the
thirst — "

in lines like these the mood is of the futility of life,
which is as strongly felt in a thwarted ambition as in a
vanished ideal. Byron's melancholy is not that of the
betrayed idealist, it seems to me, but rather of the
thwarted realist; life had denied to him his will.

Power has always been the quality most immediately
recognized in Byron — "the greatest force that has ap
peared in our literature," says Arnold, you remember,
"since Shakespeare"; and every reader feels "the fiery
fount" in him, that Dionysaic daemonic force, which is
the core of poetic energy. He had the unquenchable
thirst for life that belongs to the poets; desires and ambi
tions filled him; but in the first maturity of manhood, just
before he was thirty, there fell on him the certainty that
he was balked, that his passion and power of life was an
irony of fate, and for him only the curse of being. It
is not necessary to inquire into the causes of this; the
fact was so; and against this fact he revolted with a reac
tion of tremendous energy. It so happened that the
country of his birth, England, served her poet mainly as
a foil that brought out the most violent aspects of this
revolt. England, in his mind, was the incarnation of

BYRON 235

•*

that which had defrauded him. In turn he struck back.
In his religious dramas he attacked orthodoxy, and in
"Don Juan" he attacked morality, as the English under
stood those terms; he shocked England, and still shocks
her, by the blasphemy and licentiousness, as it is there
described, of his verse. It was his literary revenge on
his country.

He still strove for the poetic laurel; he had literary
ambition to a strong degree, and his historical dramas
are rooted in this ambition, the fruits of it, and are little
successful, for the soil of mere ambition is not deep
enough for poetry. His productiveneess was great and
rapid; he showed his energy in this trait, and created, as
it were, by main force a drama in a month, a poem in a
day. In nearly all the same strain is constant, and the
despair or contempt of life is the motive that yields alike
the most sincere and the most cynical verse, and makes
the ground tone of the whole. It is, however, impos
sible not to feel that Byron's suffering was real, that
in him something noble was frustrated, and that the ideal
self, on which he concentrated all his power of senti
ment with an extraordinary faculty of self-pity and of
self-exaltation, had genuine elements. In the last canto
of "Childe Harold" he blends his own melancholy —
that of the individual life — with the melancholy of the
fate of human grandeur in a flow of noble eloquence and
personal passion, gathering breadth and majesty under
the shadow of Rome, until he pours it like a mighty river
into the sea in that last magnificent apostrophe on the
shores of the Mediterranean. "Childe Harold," which
gave forth the first fountains of his genius, taken in its
whole course, is its life-stream; it is his most noble work,
and contains all his personal ascendency in the figure of

236 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Harold, and the most powerful elements of his genius
in its brooding over the life of man and of mankind —
the fate of passion in life and of glory in time. Its only
rival in his fame is "Manfred," where he gave dramatic
form to this same ideal self, and condensed its story in
a brief and tragic play. This form is more somber and
composed, and seems more personal, more actual in its
ideal self-portraiture; but this is due to its simpler defi
nition and intense concentration. What "Childe Har
old" is diffusely and elegiacally, "Manfred" is intensely
and dramatically — the ideal summary of Byron.

It was this ideal summary that in the next age became
Byronism, and filled the European youth with its moods;
nor should there be anything strange in this; for Byron-
ism, despite all seeming, is the mood of strength. It
contains the two halves of youthful life at the full — its
intense ardors and its profound discouragements. The
melancholy of Byron is the shadow cast by his power;
he lamented life because he loved it so much. It is
true that for men of English blood, what seems melo
dramatic and sentimental and the weakness of personal
complaint interferes with the appreciation of his verse;
but, as I said at the beginning, Byron is not character
istically an English poet, but a poet of the Southern
lands, of the Mediterranean, where he found his inspira
tion and his themes, and in whose neighborhood he passed
his life during the composition of his works; and to
men of Romance blood, and also to the German and
the Slav, melodrama and sentiment and the psychology
of passion are quite a different thing from what they are
in the British climate and the Anglo-Saxon temperament.
The surprise and novelty of these things to Englishmen
was indeed one of the causes of their immediate success

BYRON 237

•*

in London when they were still fresh. Byron's render
ing of the history and the scenes of passion is the sign
royal of his poetic genius. He was, in this as in all
other ways, a realist, and he presented the theme with a
vividness of emotion, a rush of eloquence, and a dramatic
tic sense of incident and of catastrophe, that make them
still the best tales in poetry in our literature, as they
originally drove Scott, his only rival in the game, out of
the field. It was natural that with the maturing of years,
and amid his own private unhappiness, he should show
the darker side of the history of passion; and no poet
has so painted its pains and its despairs, as in the Rous
seau stanzas and many others; it is natural, too, that
such an expression, so violent, so warm, so personal,
so self-revealing, should be more sympathetically re
ceived by the nations of Southern temperament, who are
to the manner born, and in whose lives passion plays like
blood, and to whose own experience these lines give form
and meaning. Passion, the poet's gift, was Byron's en
dowment and experience both, and in his latest work he
still drew its scenes with truth and charm beyond all
others, with delight in them, even when the sequel was
cynicism. It is by the variety and the fire of his ren
derings of real scenes of passion, and by the psycho
logical analysis of it as an element in the wretchedness
and futility of life, that he entered most intimately into
the hearts of all those youths whom he so stirred upon
the Continent. It was to them a part of his strength.
It was as a type of strength and not of weakness that
they saw him. He was to them a Promethean figure,
Titanic in energy, suffering the woes of life, and warring
on the gods of the old regime, the incarnation of splendid
and passionate revolt against life itself. His poetry had

238 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

with them the double fortune that it had in himself; it
blended with their private lives on the pathetic side and
with their public hopes in their revolutionary energy.
For, if he was the victim of passion, he was also the
apostle of liberty; no voice rang like his through Europe
in the cause of freedom, and in his death he was its
martyr.

If there is one thing that is borne in on the sympathetic
reader of his life, it is that the man lacked a career —
some channel for the passion and power of life in him to
pour through, some cause to serve, some deed to do.
In personality he reminds one of that Renaissance type,
masterful, not subject to any law, reckless; and, in his
later years, he seems near to the decadence, like an
Italian nobleman of the degeneracy, disoccupied with
life and more selfishly cynical with each revolving year.
It was from this state that he roused himself to make
that last effort in the cause of Greece which restored to
him the robe of honor that was slipping from his shoul
ders. It was from one point of view a kind of suicide
of genius — the act of a man who finds nothing left but
to die with honor. In seeking it, nevertheless, he recalls
to us the generous qualities that were in his youth, of
which the type is the Boy in the antique oratory. There
was a spirit of nobility in the man's soul in early years,
as his school friendships show; and though dimmed, it
was never lost. He was good metal. He had power; he
had passion; and the charter of greatness was his. He
had come to wreck, in his own eyes; and to ours he seems
like a noble vessel chafing to pieces on the sluggish reef
of time. He would end it. He remembered his youth —
when he had sat on Sunium's marble steep and dreamed
that Greece might yet be free. He went back to those

BYRON 239

Adriatic shores, to the Leucadian seas, where he had
coasted in the dawn of his fame, to the height of snowy
Parnassus over the long purple gulf that had so stirred
him, and there in its shadow, in his last stanza, he said
adieu to life: —

"Seek out — less often sought than found —
A soldier's grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest."

V
GRAY

I HAVE thought it appropriate to select one example
of the poetic temperament, not from the "bards sub
lime," but from those more quiet sons of the Muse whom
we call minor poets; for, though their works be in low
relief, yet, if the theory is sound, they should show in
their degree the traits of the grand style, as we find
the same supreme Greek art even on broken vases and
utensils of daily life. Certainly no one would dream
of describing Gray as "mad" ; the word "passion" is
grotesquely inapplicable to him; and even such a phrase
as "the power of life" seems dubiously to be used of his
lethargic nature. He was a mild and gentle scholar,
who lived in the lazy air of a university, slow in all
his physique, intellectually self-indulgent, procrastinat
ing, an invalid with invalid habits of conduct, a dilettante,
a letter-writer. His entire routine of life afflicts us with
a sense of dulness and heaviness, an English atmosphere
of dampness and ennui, which inclines us at once to
commiseration. He wrote very little — so marvelously
little that he is, in literary history, the typical instance
of unproductiveness, of sterility. The Dionysiac fire
was very somnolent, to say the least, in his case. Vesu
vius, however, is not always in violent eruption, and
those who look on it for the most part see the mighty
mountain with only a thin wisp of smoke lazily drifting

241

242 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

upon the pale, high air; sometimes there is not even
that.

In comparison with such poets as we have considered,
Gray's verse is such a wisp of smoke. Yet it is fair to
remember — what is oftenest forgotten — that great
literature is not a constant product of this planet, that
many nations have none of it to speak of, and that in
favored nations it is the rarest of all their products.
On the whole, poetic energy, if it has the violence and
splendor of volcanic fire, has also its general repose-
fulness. In the intervals of activity men are content
with the phenomena which show the continued, though
torpid, existence of the great life-principle; and the
wisp of smoke is, after all, curling placidly up from the
old forges within. It behooves us, especially, to be
modest, for our magnificent America has never yet pro
duced a poet even of the rank of Gray. Moreover, there
is a singular circumstance in Gray's case: slight as his
product was, it has had an immense fame and vogue
among men. His work resembles one of those single
anonymous poems of the world which have achieved
fame all by themselves, unaided and alone. Little poetry
has been so widely read, so familiarized in households,
as the "Elegy." It has also been highly appreciated.
No poem has had a finer compliment paid it than was
contained in the old story of Wolfe's reciting it to his
officers in the darkness of the river as he drifted down to
his heroic death, and declaring that to write it was more
glorious than a victory. The "Elegy," it is true, is
somewhat exceptional; but the best of Gray's work has
had equal immortality, and still goes wherever the Eng
lish language makes its way. No one reads Marlowe
now except students in libraries and poets by profession;

GRAY 243

and the voice of Byron grows rare and distant — his
vogue evaporates; but Gray's verse still has the shining
of the adamant of time upon its lines, and seems as
untouched with two centuries as Mimnermus and Theog-
nis with twenty. Gray is among the poets who die only
with the language that they breathed.

Gray did not greatly strive for fame. Perhaps there
was some obstruction in his nature or his circumstances;
perhaps he did not greatly care. There was, at least,
no struggle in him, no restless necessity for expression,
no stress of thought or of feeling. He was, as a mortal,
very ordinary; and as a man of culture, very humane.
He led the stillest of bachelor lives in college chambers.
If he had deliberately excluded emotion from his life,
he could hardly have better succeeded. Of course he
was often bored, and often lazy — that is, not unem
ployed, but with a scholar's laziness. He took but little
interest in contemporary politics or war, and found
rather amusement than any cause for excitement in the
spectacle of what men do. The passage in which he
describes Pitt's speech, on proposing a monument for
Wolfe, is typical and a melancholy comment on the
admiration of Wolfe for the writer. "Pitt's second
speech," he says, "was a studied and puerile declamation
on funeral honors. In the course of it he wiped his
eyes with one handkerchief, and Beckford, who seconded
him, cried, too, and wiped with two handkerchiefs at
once, which was very moving." That is typical of the
way in which he looked on human affairs. They were
no great matter — Gray was a gentleman. He moved
freely in the world of high life, and liked to talk of men
of rank over the sweet wine he drank after his mutton.
The passions of nations, the swing of ideas, the fortunes

244 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

of battle, were no more to him than club topics would
be to-day, news and conversation, but not exciting. He
read Rousseau, he says, but "heavily, heavily" ; that is,
he was bored. He had his well-bred circle of friends,
very polite, and his well-bred private tastes, very culti
vated; but he was unmoved, habitually otiose, lethargic,
oppressed with the dulness of things very often, yet not,
I think, unhappy; indeed, a certain intellectual gaiety,
even in describing his own dulness, is a part of the charm
of his private correspondence. There was much non
chalant good breeding in him, especially as he grew up
and came into the routine of manhood; he was a man
of the world, not in the sense of being merely a man
of society, but in the sense of being disengaged, dis
interested, the impartial spectator with a light touch,
a just judgment, and a tone of elegance.

In his youth he appears more amiable, though there
was in him then all the promise of the type he became.
He made, you remember, with three other friends at
college a league of friendship known as the quadruple
alliance. Walpole was one member of the set; and his
friendship with Walpole characterizes the eighteenth-
century tone of the social half of his nature. A second
member was West, who died young and with griefs of
the mind as well as with ills of the body, and who left
a charming memory of himself, both in his verses and in
his affection for Gray, with whom he is associated as
the true youthful comrade; and this friendship with
West, in which there is an unusual high-bred demeanor
considering the youth of the two, characterizes the other
half of Gray's nature, the more kindly and natural half,
not more intimate, but intimate with more equality; with
Walpole one thinks of Gray's social history, with West
one thinks of his personal charm.

GRAY 245

This private side of character he exhibited, it would
seem, in his college residence during his mature life to
younger men who were students there. The tribute that
one of these young men paid to him, shortly after his
death, breathes the pure spirit of such a happy relation.
The passage is familiar, but can hardly be spared. The
young man is writing to his mother.

"You know that I considered Mr. Gray as a second
parent, that I thought only of him, built all my happiness
on him, talked of him forever, wished him with me when
ever I partook of any pleasure, and flew to him for refuge
whenever I felt any uneasiness. To whom now shall I
talk of all I have seen here? Who will teach me to
read, to think, to feel? I protest to you that whatever
I did or thought had a reference to him. If I met
with any chagrins, I comforted myself that I had a treas
ure at home; if all the world had despised and hated
me, I should have thought myself perfectly recompensed
in his friendship. There remains only one loss more; if
I lose you, I am left alone in the world. At present I
feel that I have lost half myself."

Another instance of the cordiality with which he wel
comed youth, at least when it appealed to him at all, is
his remark on the Swiss Bonstettin, who so uselessly tried
to make Gray talk of his own poetry and personal affairs.
"I never saw such a boy," says Gray; "our breed is not
made on this model."

A life, so untouched with worldly unrest, so withdrawn
in happy privacies of companionship and of gentle tastes,
so breathing the air of delightful studies, lying wrapt and
somber in our minds between the churchyard repose and
the collegiate hush, is almost monastic in its effect.

246 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Yet the impression needs to be relieved by other traits.
Gray, for example, was a traveler, and at times he es
caped from this seclusion of himself, for if the mind
does not change with travel, it at least moves under differ
ent lights. He made the journey through France, when
he was young, with Walpole, and went into Italy as far
as Naples. Whether he derived it from this excursion
or not, he had a liking for travel — I dare not call it a
passion — but it was perhaps such an enthusiasm as
his veins were capable of. It is said that he had mapped
out every picturesque journey in England, and in the
middle of the eighteenth century picturesque journeys
in England for an elegant gentleman like Mr. Gray were
really proofs of enterprise. He was early hardened to
travel on the road and had knowledge of inns, and in
these journeys was his slight taste of adventure — all
he had. Just before he died he seemed to feel that his
only hope lay in travel. The fact of his saying so shows
how much travel had meant to him in his life. The
notes he made of his Italian travel, for example, exhibit
the quality of his mind with great clearness. He was
mentally vastly curious; his intellectual curiosity was
unbounded, and shows primarily in him the mind of the
scholar; not the mind of the thinker at all — for he
seldom generalizes — but that of the scholar, the col
lector of knowledge; for knowledge may be collected like
snuff-boxes or fossils, and the scholar's learning is not
infrequently a sort of museum. Such a museum was
Gray's mind. On his Italian journey one sees him in
the act of collecting it with youthful enthusiasm. He
catalogues the pictures and marbles, and describes and
comments briefly upon them; he maps the cities, the
squares and buildings, the river and the road, and the

GRAY 247

ruins beside the way. In Naples, especially, one is
struck by the thoroughness with which he explored the
ancient district to the west of the city, the diversity of
interests he found there, the fulness, minuteness, and
variety of his account, compressed though it is, and above
all by the interest he took in it. His open and cordial
spirit toward foreign things — not a frequent trait in
first travels — is extraordinary. He was plainly a care
ful traveler, laborious and fruitful in observation, storing
up multitudes of facts. This, which is so plainly seen
in the Italian notes, is characteristic of his mind in all
its accumulations.

He was a connoisseur of the fine arts, not merely in
the major arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture, but
in prints, antiquities, gardening. He applied himself
to natural sciences in several fields, like Goethe, and
made the best account of English insects up to that time.
He was profound, for his age, in history, and commanded
foreign history in its own languages. He was as fond
of reading travels as of traveling, and interested himself
in geography; he investigated heraldry. He was expert
in the literature of the art of cooking. He understood
music. He was an excellent scholar in Greek, then a
rare accomplishment, and very thorough in his pursuit
of it, where he had some of the qualities of a pioneer.
Clearly, he had a wonderfully acquisitive mind for facts,
and also a singular capacity for the development of esthe
tic tastes of diverse kinds. He was a man of compre
hensive faculty and consequently of erudition.

His information, however, retained the general charac
ter of the note-book and the handbook; it was miscel
laneous, but exact and detailed. For such collections as
have been described a great deal of industry was re-

248 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

quired, though it was an industry that might seem to
Gray often a waste of time and a kind of laziness; in
details one often seems bewilderingly idle, at the best,
and Gray's mind worked by details. In the midst of
such occupations which are in themselves the leisure of
a college life, he sometimes found time to write, or to
cancel, a line of his poetry, to file a phrase or meditate
an epithet, and from one nine years to another to publish
a poem. There was no hurry, no need; he never wrote
for the public, nor for money; he made verses as a man
of taste, just as he collected butterflies or prints, for
his own pleasure.

There is no psychological problem, no temperamental
puzzle in Gray. The inquiry why he wrote so little,
which seems to be the main concern of his critics, is
futile. Ill health, low spirits, dissipation of mind on a
multitude of pursuits and interests are alleged as one
reason; but great poets have been so afflicted without los
ing their voice. That he fell on an age of prose is also
brought forward to account for the fact; but his own mind
was not at all prosaic; even the pursuit of science could
not make it so. He did not choose, did not care to write
very much. What he did write he wished to be perfect —
just as every letter of his manuscript is carefully made,
even in .his loosest notes. He had no great range in the
world of poetry. He was interested in neither strong
emotions nor great ideas. In religion being, as he said,
no great wit, he believed in a God; and he left the
matter there. He was never emotionally stirred by any
great experience beyond that bereavement which is the
common human heritage. All his life was at a low
temperature, and the reasons of his infertility seem less
circumstantial than constitutional.

GRAY 249

9

The classicism, in which he was intellectually bred,
suggested and gave body and form to his development.
He was chiefly a moralist; in substance of the Latin
Ifcdition, using the Roman mode of abstract imagination
and bringing forward those contemporary eighteenth-
century figures of Fear, or Madness, or Adversity, which
together make a kind of philosophical and bodiless
mythology in which man's psychical fortunes are external
ized like phantoms — bloodless and weak creatures that
are to true mythology what the shade of Achilles in
Hades was to the glorious earthly manhood of the hero.
The treatment, however, was far better than the sub
stance, for he employed for this the original Greek
method of idyllic art. He was characterized, as I have
said, by interest in detail. In his art it is the same.
He was a connoisseur in words, and thought that poetry
has a diction of its own, more select than the language
of common life, and he was careful to employ this colored
and somewhat exquisite language, word by word. He
built the line out of the words, and the line rather than
the phrase is his unit of style. He filed each line, and
composed the stanza, and of the stanzas the completed
poem. At each step he took a short view; to have the
fit word, the well-molded line, the stanza, the poem. In
all this process he worked by the method of detail; it
is what we sometimes call in verse jeweler's work, or
miniature work. The latter phrase is the most suggest
ive, for it indicates that the poem is made up of suc
cessive pictures, linked together in a larger composition,
or else simply left to succeed each other in a pleasing
order. This is the classical idyllic method of verse,
which he learned at first hand from the Greek, but in the
English use of which he was instructed by Milton in

250 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

such a poem as "L/ Allegro" and its companion piece.
The method is most familiar to us in Tennyson's "Palace
of Art" or "Lady of Shalott."

Gray was not so finished an artist as Milton or Tenny
son, and one reason of this is, I think, because he was
more directly and exclusively dependent on his taste in
the fine arts. It is true that he had natural taste, and
knew that poetry is good only when born in the open,
or must be written, in Arnold's phrase, with the eye on
the object. It is not a very adequate phrase, for it sug
gests realistic rather than imaginative treatment. Gray's
eye was certainly not on any object when he wrote: —

"Now the golden Morn aloft
Waves her dew-bespangled wing,
With vermeil cheek and whisper soft
She wooes the tardy Spring; "

but one feels in these lines the reminiscence of painting
— the "vermeil cheek" is the glowing of the color
softened as he had seen it on canvas and not on any
ruddy English maiden. The whole passage is fresco
painting; and so, it seems to me, as I read on, I see a
painted landscape: —

"Yesterday the sullen year
Saw the snowy whirlwind fly;
Mute was the music of the air,
The herd stood drooping by."

This is a natural scene, but it is carefully composed, the
atmosphere of the snow-squall first, and the herd in the
foreground. Farther on, the poem becomes frankly pic
torial, using the painter's art as a metaphor and not to
form a picture: —

GRAY 251

"The hues of bliss more brightly glow,
Chastised by sabler tints of woe,
And blended form, with artful strife,
The strength and harmony of life."

The method of this poem is obviously that of painting
in these passages.

It appears to me also that he uses composition — I
mean the grouping of figures — very often to give such
life as is possible to those dreary figures of the family
of sorrow, and make them pleasing; unless he does so,
he leaves the present generation at least with a very
dissatisfied sense of beholding merely allegoric images
little alluring in themselves. I mean such composition
as this: —

"Amazement in his van, with Flight combined,
And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind."

So, too, the same holds of the numerous dances, rings,
and bevies to be found in his verse, all of which seem
to me like reminiscences of wall-painting. His imagi
nation was internally controlled by the art of painting,
even when most natural; it is not merely in the occa
sional coloring and composition, such as I have instanced,
but especially in his habitual careful use of perspective.
In nearly every poem examples may be found of this
peculiar sensitiveness to distance, and he seldom fails
to give either horizon or centering to the view. The
first stanza of the Eton Ode gives an easy example of
such a prospect, complete in background, in fore
ground: —

"Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores

2SZ THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Her Henry's holy shade;

And ye that from the stately brow

Of Windsor's heights the expanse below

Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,

Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among

Wanders the hoary Thames along

His silver-winding way."

Generally, however, it is by a brief stroke that the effect,
the idyllic picture, is given. He was especially fond of
the sight of a distant march on the mountain-side. Here
are some instances which need only to be read — this of
the sunrise: —

"Night and all her sickly dews,
Her specters wan, and birds of boding cry,
He gives to range the dreary sky:
Till down the eastern cliffs afar
Hyperion's march they spy, and glittering shafts
of war."

Or this: —

"Such were the sounds that o'er the crested pride
Of the first Edward scattered wild dismay,
As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side
He wound with toilsome march his long array."

Or this very simple but perfect scene: —

"Far, far aloof the affrighted ravens sail;
The famished eagle screams, and passes by."

And that other eagle —

"Nor the pride, nor ample pinion,
That the Theban eagle bear,
Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air."

Or for a near scene, and one illustrating Gray's love oi
wild majesty in nature: —

GRAY 253

Hark, how each giant oak and desert cave
Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!"

Or, again, the well-known image of the progress of
poetry: —

"Now the rich stream of Music winds along,
Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong,
Through verdant vales, and Ceres' golden reign;
Now rolling down the steep amain,
Headlong, impetuous, see it pour;
The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar."

The same poem yields another of those large-motioned
scenes on the wide prospect: —

"Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car
Wide o'er the fields of Glory bear
Two coursers of ethereal race,
With necks in thunder clothed and long-resounding pace."

Examination will show, I think, the predominance in
Gray's imagination of scenes thus guided by his eye
for coloring, composition, and perspective in the painter's
rather than the poet's way. He uses perspective meta
phorically where, for example, in the laughter of the
morning on the sea the whirlwind "expects his evening
prey," and again, just below, where

"Long years of havoc urge their destined course;"

and we find it, curiously enough, transformed both to
the sense of hearing and the realm of metaphor: —

"And distant warblings lessen on my ear,
That lost in long futurity expire."

Observe, too, how in the opening of the "Elegy" the
landscape is thus built up, with the horizon, the half-
distance, and the foreground: —

254 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

"Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

"Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign; "

and the eye is brought to rest thus on the dark church
yard, with its shadowy trees and obscure hillocks and
hollows of the turf.

Gray, then, was a poet, in the main a moralist, using
an imaginative method to inlay the moral sentiment of
the verse with miniatures, in the Greek idyllic mode, but
miniatures which have in them the scope of fresco and
canvas by virtue of his use of color, composition, and
perspective, for which he was indebted to the fine art of
painting, by whose means he interpreted nature and also
realized allegory. The scope of his interest as a moral
ist was narrow and commonplace, and hardly exceeded
the ordinary English view of life as a scene of misery
of which the last act is the burial service. He relieves
on his vision of spring, you remember, the figure of the
convalescent invalid as the climax of happiness in that
season; he sees the Eton schoolboys on a background
of the actualities of life suggesting rather the hospital
and the jail than a battle-ground; he leads all seasons
and fortunes up to the inevitable hour and converges

GRAY 255

the paths of glory to the grave. It is a familiar English
view, and was familiar to our fathers at least. He is
not lacking in other powers, in satirical and light, almost
gay, verse, as in the story of the cat and the goldfish,
where he paints the fate of lovely woman. It is not a
cheerful fate, though cheerfully described. Nor is there
anything cheerful in Gray, except the alleviations of
our misery by the rosy hours of morning, the fragrance
breathing from the ground, and the bliss of ignorance
in school days. The characteristic of Gray is a somber
view, in which brilliant artistic colors are inlaid by an
imaginative rendering of history and nature. His artis
tic faculty distinguishes him in his commonplace moral
ity; but as a leader in a new world, with the passion and
power to bring it into being, he seems to have no place,
nor was there in his life the fermentation of any pro
found experience.

He does present, nevertheless, certain faint signs of the
characteristics of poetic genius. For one thing, his verse
was an innovation. Excepting the "Elegy," which, as
he truly said, succeeded by its subject and would have
succeeded had it been prose, his verse was a puzzle to his
contemporaries and its acceptance was slow; it was
long before men selected him as without question the
chief poet of his generation, and longer before they knew
that his works were a classic of his language. Yet he
originated nothing; his originality lay only in the fact
that, being sincere and having a sound critical faculty
of high order, he was true to the great tradition of poetry
which had been lost in England, and by his respect for
Shakespeare and Milton and for the ancient classics he
was enabled to cultivate the qualities of imagination,
melody, and nature which are essential to poetry. He

256 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

was saved from his century by his taste. He was, how
ever, so exceptional in this that his practice had the force
of originality, being an innovation, and he to this extent
suffered the initial contempt that a poet often receives
in his own age. But he was an innovator, a pioneer in
more important ways. It is obvious in his learned tastes
that he was not only in advance of his age, but in
advance along the whole line. His study of both science
and history foreknew the great career of both these
branches in the next century. He was an archeologist,
too, in the kingdom of which many of us now live. And
besides these broad premonitions of the age to come, he
had the clarity of genius in three specific particulars in
his own art.

The first of these prophetic traits was his devotion to
Greek. It is true that in this he was the heir of Milton
and the humanists, but he went forward well into the
paths of our quite different modern scholarship. Three
times in the last century English poetry has been dipped
in Castaly all over, and risen radiant from the bath: in
the person of Shelley and his comrades, in that of Tenny
son, and in that of Swinburne. Gray was the premoni
tion of this, and a forerunner as was none of his contem
poraries. Secondly, he was a discoverer of the romance
of primitive literature. He was made enthusiastic by
Ossian, and valued that verse much as did men upon the
Continent. He was attracted by Gaelic, and the monu
ment of this is that Welsh ode from which I have read,
which is poetically his greatest work, with touches of
the sublime in both its mood and language — a great
English ode. In obeying this taste he showed that glim
mer of the romantic dawn, then far away, which brought
with it the romance of the Highlands and the Sagas, the

GRAY 257

•«,

old Saxon poetry, the Song of Roland, and all the early
literature of the romance tongue, and which now includes
the ingathering from all primitive peoples. Thirdly, he
was a lover of wild and majestic scenery, and of the
picturesque beauty of the English land, a landscape
lover, and even in his prose notes later poets have found
ore for their own golden lines. In this he foreran the
poetry of nature, which became so large an element in
the romantic age. He did not philosophize nature, nor
etherealize it, nor idealize it; but he saw it and re
sponded. In comparison with the great nature-poets,
such as Wordsworth and Byron, his rendering of nature
is slight indeed ; it is, perhaps, no more than the brighten
ing of our willow stems in the clear east winds of morn
ing hours, but it is a sign of spring. In these three ways,
each a main direction of development, Gray was a sharer
in that quality of genius by which it is symptomatic of
the future, sentient of it, and an exponent of it before
the fact.

But, though we may trace these ties of consanguinity
with the great poets and find a few drops of the royal
blood in Gray, yet if we are true to our own impres
sion and speak justly, I think that neither passion nor
prescience of change are much in our minds when we
read his verse. It is true that his poetry displays more
passion than that of his contemporaries, in its lyric fulness
and sweep; but, after all, it is a reminiscence and not an
inspiration, it is stylistic passion, a passion for the roll
and fall of words, a passion of rhetoric, and it is an echo,
besides, given back by his classical tastes. He likes to
show the tone and compass of his instrument, and the
instrument is the lyre. At his best he is remembering
Pindar; and as in that picture I read of the Theban

258 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

eagle, he seems to be rather drawing on paper the evo
lutions of the bird than taking flight himself.

Our main feeling after reading him is that he is classic.
No other English poet gives the feeling in so pure a
form; as if, except for the coloring of time, he might
have written these pieces, that seem relics and frag
ments, being so few, in some far-off century in Ionia.
One critic, Professor Tovey, the best it seems to me of
Gray, says, very appositely, "that poetry is the most
securely immortal which has gained nothing and can lose
nothing by the vicissitudes of sentiment and opinion."
That is a mark of the classic, and Gray bears it. To
rise outside of the circle of change is hardly given to
mortals, but one mode of approaching such a state is to
live in commonplace. Gray was a contemplative moral
ist, and his thought is commonplace; but if he had a
passion for anything, it was for perfection, for finish, in
the way of expression; and by virtue of this instinct,
which never slept in him, he dignified and adorned the
commonplace English view of life. He, moreover, was
somber; and he chose for his theme the most solemn
point of view in life, the resting place after death. He
was very sincere in this; you will find, from early days,
in his letters to his friends the idea that men are at their
best, that the soul is in its best earthly estate, in the
times of their bereavement. He certainly believed this,
and his poetry is indebted to this profound belief. The
"Elegy" is a universal poem, because its material is
so commonplace that it might, as he suggested, have been
written in prose, but it is dignified and adorned, per
fected in expression till it seems as inevitable in every
word as the "inevitable hour" itself. This artistic hand
ling of the theme is what the poet in Gray added to the

GRAY 259

•»

phraser of commonplaces; the combination works the
miracle that such a gentleman as Gray was, such a
remote scholar as he was, should turn out to be the poet
of ordinary people. Gray, as I said, was very humane;
in essentials an ordinary human nature deepened into
poetry by a grave tenderness of feeling and expressing
himself with a pure clarity of thought. Though a classic,
he does not belong with the great poets. His work re
minds me most often of the minor craftsmanship of the
Greek artisans, who made of common clay for common
use the images and funeral urns; such seems to me the
material of his poems; but in form how perfect they are,
both for grace and dignity, and they are adorned, like the
Greek vases, with designs, little pictures, imitated from
and echoing the greater arts. If the poetic fire in them
be rather a warmth than a flame, yet they are lovely re
ceptacles of its half-extinct ashes.

VI

TASSO

THE poetic temperament is consanguineous in all the
poets, and hence in passing from one to another one is
always noticing some sign of kinship. Tasso reminds us
of certain traits of both Gray and Byron; the classical
scholarship of the one and the Mediterranean quality of
the other ally them to the Italian, and the melancholy
which in one was an elegy of the churchyard and in the
other an elegy of nations, becomes in Tasso an elegy
of life itself; moreover, there was in Tasso's personality
an irritable self-consciousness that recalls Byron's ego
istical sensitiveness. In another way Tasso so exceeded
Gray in power, and Byron in charm, that he seems out of
their class; and he has always been in men's memories so
signal an example of the misfortune that attends the poets
as to seem almost solitary in his miseries.

He was by his nature exposed to every acute feeling;
and his education was such as to increase his peril, and
make his sorrow sure. He was the son of a distinguished
poet, of noble family, and born at Sorrento; his memory
still haunts the place, but his residence there was brief,
and his life is associated rather with the north of Italy,
whence his family came from a town near Venice. Still
a child, he was separated from his mother, his father
being in trouble and a wanderer, and he never saw her
afterward; it is probable that she was poisoned. He
joined his father, and was educated at the court of Urbino,

261

262 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

and the Universities of Padua and Bologna. He was
an extraordinarily precocious child, and while still at
Sorrento had been given into the hands of the Jesuit
fathers, who impressed upon him that religiousness which
so deeply marked him and was the cause of much of
his suffering. He took his first communion at the age
of nine; he recited original verses and speeches at the
age of ten; and while yet but eighteen, he published a
considerable poem, "Rinaldo," which immediately gave
him great reputation in Italy, and determined his
career.

He entered the service of the Duke of Ferrara, with
whose name his biography is most closely joined. His
life is obscure with mysteries that time has not cleared
away. He was a favorite of the Duke; yet in the height
of his fame, the Duke put him in prison and kept him
there for over seven years, in spite of protests and peti
tions from princes and prelates and other persons of im
portance. It was long supposed that the reason was
Tasso's devotion to the Duke's sister, who was his friend
and the lady of his sonnets. The weight of opinion now
is that, whatever concurring causes there may have been,
Tasso's own condition and conduct gave sufficient excuse
for restraint. He had within him the germs of insanity,
and with every year they seem to have shown more vio
lent manifestation. He was full of suspicion and re
sentments, and repeatedly had left his patron suddenly
and gone to others, only to return again; he had hallu
cinations also; and, as time went on, he saw and con
versed with spirits; sometimes it was his worldly or
literary affairs, sometimes his religious fears that were
the motives and subjects of this mental disturbance; the
Duke said that he kept Tasso confined in order to cure

TASSO 263

him. He was allowed full liberty of correspondence, and
was seen by friends and visitors. Montaigne so saw him
— the poet being asleep apparently and shown by his
jailer. Tasso's letters are full of details and terrible
complaints; but how much of what he wrote may he not
have fancied? The facts are insoluble. Some ascribe
his madness to his love, some to his religious education.
At all events the care of the insane was then but a poor
sort of medicine, and prisons in those days were places
of negligence, filth, and sickness. If only a small part
of what Tasso relates of his confinement is true, it is
enough to justify the pity that he has always received.
It is singular, if there were no other reason for the Duke's
conduct than the poet's mental state, that he should so
obstinately have refused to let him go into the care of
other princes and courts who were anxious to receive and
aid him. At last he was released; and after that time he
lived mainly at Naples and Rome, where he died at the
age of fifty years, just before he was to be publicly
crowned with laurel in the Capitol.

It does not appear that, except for a few outbursts of
violence, his insanity was such as to interfere with the
usual action of his intellectual powers as a scholar and
a poet; the higher faculties were left untouched, while
his sense of fact was subject to delusion. His young
friend, Manso, was a witness of a conversation at Naples
between Tasso and the spirit with whom he talked; both
voices, says Manso, were Tasso's, though he did not seem
aware of it. Such was Tasso's madness — an over-
excitement of genius; in consequence he passed much
of his life in prison or in wanderings from city to city
in Italy, often with much hardship, but oftener treated
with kindness and great honor, except that at Ferrara

264 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

the fact of his fame and his favor in the earlier years
exposed him to the jealous persecution natural to a small
court. He was a man very masculine in appearance,
uncommonly tall, broad-shouldered, grave in demeanor,
of the blond type, with blue eyes, well-exercised in the
use of arms. He stammered, and seldom laughed, and
was slow in talk. But this portrait from his last years,
and the pale sunken cheeks and worn look, which are
also mentioned, belong rather to the victim of life than
to the young poet who wrote the great Italian epic, "Je
rusalem Delivered."

Tasso was a voluminous writer. His works fill thirty-
three large volumes; but his fame is comprised within
the limits of this epic, and of another small pastoral
drama, "Aminta," which is related to his genius some
what as "Hero and Leander" is to Marlowe. Apart
from the brutal miseries of his life, the true and unavoid
able tragedy of it lay in a conflict which took place within
his own nature. He was a poet with the qualities of
one; but his temperament was developed in a double
way. On the one hand it was an artistic nature
grounded in scholarship, not unlike Gray in that respect;
on the other hand it was a religious nature grounded in
the asceticism and exaltation of the Jesuit training of
his precocious childhood. The two natures were contra
dictory; and in the lifelong struggle between them, re
flected in his literary work, the religious nature finally
triumphed. In his last years he rewrote his epic, and
left out its charm in obedience to his conscience; but
fortunately the original version was already in the hands
of the world, and the later one is now completely for
gotten.

He had chosen his subject and sketched out parts, at

TASSO 265

least, of the poem before he was twenty years old; and
as he composed, he labored over the verse, and refined
and revised it, with great care. It was the period known
as the Catholic Reaction, during which the Church
crushed the Reformation in Italy and withered the
Renaissance there, and thus prepared for Italy the cen
turies of her servitude from which she has arisen only
in our day. Tasso was acutely anxious that his poem
should be in harmony with Catholic truth and pious feel
ing, and he submitted it to ecclesiastical criticism; the
worry of his mind over the trouble that thus arose was,
it must be thought, one grave cause of his malady; but
though he modified the verse, he did not then entirely
destroy what he loved so much, its poetic beauty. He
had chosen a Christian theme, the recovery of Christ's
sepulchre by the crusading knights, and he would treat
it worthily, with seriousness and piety; but nevertheless
the poetic art was a tradition, and he was bound, as a
scholar with the tastes and principles of the Renais
sance, to obey the tradition of Homer and Virgil no less
than he was obliged as a faithful son of the Church to
listen respectfully to the views of Puritan Cardinals. He
must write a classic epic; and the poem is, in fact, not
only classical in its general conduct and method, but in
detail echoes the "Iliad" and the "^Eneid" much as Milton
echoes the Bible, and a reader familiar with the classics
takes the same pleasure in these echoes that a reader
familiar with the Bible takes in the words and imagery of
"Paradise Lost."

The epic, however, when it came into Tasso's hands,
had added something to the classic tradition, and had
changed it in important particulars; especially two things
had been brought prominently forward, namely, magic,

266 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

and the interest of love. The presence of these two new
elements in their degree of development made of the epic
so different a thing, that a new name was coined to
describe it, and it was called a romantic epic in opposi
tion to the older style. Tasso's theme was an admirable
epic subject; it was noble in itself, and one in which the
powers of heaven and hell, whose participation was
thought necessary in epic verse, could appropriately be
introduced; the combatants on both sides were worthy
champions, so that the martial interest could be well
maintained; and the subject was made Italian and
brought home to the present hour by the link that bound
the poem to the House of Este, at Ferrara. In fact,
the entire ground of the poem was near to the contem
porary age, in the point that the Mohammedan power
was still a dreaded foe and held the Mediterranean, so
that the feeling of hostility was acute, and, besides, the
physical aspect of the Saracen East was well known;
Italy and Christendom still faced that way. The taking
of Jerusalem was a more contemporary topic than we
are apt to think, and the poem appealed to a living fear
and hatred; thus, though not a national poem, it had
some of the qualities of one, and it stirred a martial
ardor not wholly extinct.

The martial interest is in the foreground, and is de
veloped in the verse to the greatest degree possible. The
course of the war is deployed with skill, so as to open
an ever wider field of operation and to increase steadily
in importance and interest till it culminates in the fall
of the city. In detail every kind of warfare is depicted
— the single combat by challenge, the personal en
counters by accident, the melee of the armies and the
individual fight in its midst, the night attack, the siege,

TASSO 267

**

the assault — every variety of battle, even to the cut
ting off and total destruction of a corps marching to
the assistance of the Christians under a Danish chief,
which may perhaps be exemplified for us by such an
action as the Indian massacre of Custer's command.
Tasso's descriptions of these scenes are admirable for
spirit and variety of detail, and I find his military
operations less tedious than those of most epics. In
the contrast of the two civilizations he is also successful,
and he renders the opposition of creed and manners, the
barbaric and the pagan to the civilized and the Christian,
with vividness and yet not so as to degrade the enemy.
In the characterization, again, on both sides he is excel
lent, and he gives much distinctness even to the minor
persons, which is unusual in epics, while the heroes are
vigorously and diversely drawn. The main heroes are,
of course, removed from the field early in the action by
one device and another in order to give the others their
opportunity to act, while the greater characters them
selves come in to make the climax of interest and valor
toward the end. All this is in the ancient classical man
ner, like the "^neid" and "Iliad." So is the bringing in
of the supernatural powers, the angels on one side and
the devils on the other, corresponding to the partisan
ship of the gods in the old epics; but here Tasso suffers
from the powerful rivalry of Milton. Tasso's devils
are merely medieval monsters, and his angels have
little to do. His imagination would in any case have
been checked in its free action by Catholic scruples.

The place of the old gods of Olympus is, however,
really taken by the romantic element of magic, in obedi
ence to which indeed the devils also act; and it is not in
the court of Heaven, but in the witch, Armida, that the

268 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

counterpart of Juno's hatred for the Trojans is to be
found. Magic had been popularized in poetry, especially
by Ariosto, and Tasso followed here this master and the
popular taste. Perhaps to us the poem is much en
feebled thereby and loses reality; it seems so to me, at
least; it becomes almost a fable, Arabian. On the other
hand, magic as an artistic device frees the fancy of Tasso
and makes him the master of surprise. It is here that
he begins to be himself, and to write with his own un
aided hand; but it is in the second element that he
derived from the romantic epic — the element of love —
that he is the master and comes to his own. If he treats
of battle in all its phases, it is from a sense of duty, in
part; but he depicts love in its various forms because
it is his pleasure. War he learned from other men's
books, and mastered by imagination; but in love he was
lessoned only by his own heart, and in the story he gave
out experience. It is the more singular because he was
not of an amorous nature, but was rather indulgent to
ascetic feelings. His imagination was warm, and it is
rather the sentiment than the passion of love that he
depicts; and he always blends it with nobleness of nature.
Dante's line — "love is but one thing with the gentle
heart" — might be the formula of all these varied scenes.
In the second canto he introduces one such episode,
and one that was so cherished by him that he refused to
cut it out at the bidding of the ecclesiastics who advised
him. It is the story of the Christian maid, Sophronia,
who is drawn almost like a nun, and who to save her
people confesses to an act that had incensed the tyrant
ruler of Jerusalem; she stands at the stake to be burned,
when her lover, Olindo, who had not dared to show his
love, recognizes her, and at once confesses to the same

TASSO 269

act; it is plain that both are guiltless, but both are
condemned to burn at the same stake. As the flames
approach, he tells her his love as being about to die.
The execution, however, is stayed in a natural way, and
the two are released to a life together. Such a happy
issue is rare, nevertheless, in Tasso. It was believed
that in Sophronia he drew the figure of his lady, Leonora,
the Duke's sister, and in Olindo the veiled love he bore
her; and thus in this fable pleaded his own cause.

In the other great instances of his portraiture of love
the persons are the leading characters of the poem, and
not introduced merely episodically. He drew three
types. Tancred, the chief Christian hero after Rinaldo,
is in love with the Saracen warrior-maid, Clorinda; in
his passion he is the typical knight of chivalry. Thus
he fell in love with her at first sight, and her face at any
time makes him oblivious to all else, even the call of
honor in battle; she, being an Amazon and a pagan, is
entirely indifferent to him; it is only at the last moment
and by a miracle that, when being vizored they fight and
he kills her, in the act of dying she asks him for bap
tism and is reconciled. She afterwards appears to him
in a dream and confesses her love. Tancred is also the
hero of the second type, Erminia, a Saracen princess
whom he had rescued and treated with great kindness
and who fell in love with his gentleness and nobleness.
She was no warrior, but a tender woman to whom love
gave courage, and she stole away from Jerusalem by
night in the armor of Clorinda, to go to the Christian
camp and heal him when he was wounded, for she under
stood the art of healing; but she was frightened on the
way and fled to some shepherds, with whom she remains
until near the end of the story, when she returns to care

270 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

for him after Clorinda's death. The third type is the
love of the witch, Armida, for Rinaldo; she enchains this
youth, the Achilles of the poem, meaning to destroy
him, but is overcome by her love for him, and transports
him to her garden in the Atlantic Ocean, whence he is
rescued by holy aid and recalled to the war. He leaves
her, and she follows, seeking revenge, but still in love,
and attends the pagan army; in the final defeat she is
saved by Rinaldo, and desires to become a Christian
through her love for him.

These three poetic types of womanhood, the tragic
type in Clorinda, the pathetic type in Erminia, and the
romantic type in Armida, give a wide compass to Tasso
in the interpretation of the passion. In each case love
overcomes, equally master over magic, over the cold
ness of the Amazon, and over woman's simple heart;
in all love is victorious. The two knights also yield to
love; but the passion is represented rather in the women
than the men, and hence the poem is most famous for
these three types of womanhood rather than for its
heroic figures, and more for love than for war. In Spen
ser's "Faerie Queene," you remember, in the same way the
female characters excel the knights in interest. Tasso
is thus peculiarly the poet of love; excellent as he is
in the martial and truly epic part of his task, it is in
the romantic part and in the passion, that is rather lyrical
than epic, that he is a supreme and unequaled master.
It is natural to find that the traits which most attract
his readers are those that depend on the predominance
of love in the verse.

It is characteristic of the poem that its atmosphere
counts for more than its substance; the power of fasci
nation is in the atmosphere; and, in fact, the substance

TASSO 271

itself tends to pass into, to evaporate into, mere atmos
phere. This is an important point. You will observe
in reading it, for example, how large a part the landscape
plays in giving tone to the most charming scenes. It is,
of course, Italian landscape that is used, though the
scene is Palestine. It is, moreover, selected Italian land
scape — seashore, glens, quiet places in the hills; and,
besides, this landscape is brightened and adorned, in
the manner of painting or of stage illusion. One recalls
especially the moonlight scenes, such as that where the
light touching the armor of Erminia betrays her on her
flight — or the pastoral scenes, such as the remote spot
where she found refuge with the shepherd boys; and
again the garden scenes, especially those of Armida's
island, which gave to Spenser his Bower of Bliss and to
Milton his Eden.

It has been noticed that light rather than color charac
terizes the poem; it is filled with light and chiaroscuro,
but not with hues; in fact, it seems to me that the place
of color is, as it were, taken by sound. It is true that
the poem has a landscape setting, characteristically
Italian, quiet, reposeful, of ideal beauty; but it has also
another setting in the sense of hearing, which is con
stantly appealed to, as if music in the strict sense were
an element of the scene. It is not merely that the birds
are always there, but sound in many forms breathes in
various concords. A brief example is the charm that
greets Rinaldo in the enchanted wood —

"a sound

Sweet as the airs of Paradise upsprings;
Hoarse roars the shallow brook; the leaves around,
Sigh to the fluttering of the light wind's wings;
Her ravishing sweet dirge the cygnet sings,

272 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Loud mourn the answering nightingales ; sad shells,
Flutes, human voices tuned to golden strings,
And the loud surging organ's glorious swells/' —

all these make up a hidden orchestra heard in one.
And again, a little farther on, it rises:

"Impearled with manna was each fresh leaf nigh:
Honey and golden gums the rude trunks weep;
Again is heard that strange wild harmony
Of songs and sorrows, plaintive, mild and deep ;
But the sweet choirs that still such tenor keep
With the swans, winds and waves, no ear can trace
To their concealed abode in shade or steep;
Nor harp, nor horn, nor form of human face,
Look where he would, was seen in all the shady place."

Such a hidden harmony and secret accompaniment go
through the poem, and sphere it in music as the land
scape spheres it in visible beauty. It is as if various
belts, like Saturn's rings, were wound about the poem
and shed colored light upon it.

The Italian is a subtle genius, and Tasso excels in
subtlety. It is a thing difficult to describe, but more
even than by landscape and music trie poem is enveloped
in emotionalism, of which perhaps the constant appeal
to pathos is the most obvious form. A simple detached
instance is the death of the Soldan's page, in the ninth
canto, slain in battle where like a child he was playing
at war. Every artifice is used to enhance the mere pity
of his savage death. Pathos, however, pervades the
poem. Emotionalism is still more intensely present in
the tragic and pathetic and romantic treatment of love
directly in the three types already mentioned. It has
been pointed out that the characteristic phrase of Tasso
is that by which he so often expresses his failure to

TASSO 273

express himself — that is, his sense of the inexpressible
— the phrase non so che, "I know not what." So he
describes the last words of Clorinda when she asked
baptism of Tancred, who had killed her —

"Like dying lyres heard far at close of day,
Sounding I know not what in the soothed ear
Of sweetest sadness — the faint words made way."

Tasso thus habitually at the highest moment of feeling
takes refuge in the mystery of the unexpressed.

It is evident that such qualities as these, beauty of
such a type, such a use of music, such pathos, sorrow,
and yearning of life, cannot but impart weakness to
a martial epic poem, as such, and diffuse through it a
relaxation of the heroic quality. The character of the
heroes is enfeebled in many ways — in Tancred and
Rinaldo by the love element and in Godfrey, the leader,
by his prudence; it is rather among the Saracens and in
the minor Christian knights that the heroic quality is
most purely preserved, the simple martial manhood of
the enterprise; but, in proportion as the inward life
enters into the characterization, as the psychology be
comes interesting, the epic power is diminished.

This is equivalent to saying that in the characteristic
part of his poem Tasso obeys a lyrical impulse. The
emotion to which he is most sensitive is not martial,
but tender; the things he loves are not the things of war,
but of charm; and more and more, as his true mood
grows upon him, he emerges in the region of mere beauty
and delight, and sings, not the epic of action, but the
lyric of feeling. Once, indeed, in the climax of the
garden of Armida, the highest point of the mood is
frankly given in a song. With all his epical dexterity,

274 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Tasso is primarily lyrical by genius, and his love of
landscape, music, and the emotional disburdening of his
spirit are forms of his lyricism. Beauty, grace, kind
ness, gentleness, nobility, are the things he loved and
responded to, and rather with a lament than with a
pean. For the scene of life is presented with vigor in
the action, it is true, by an intellectual tour de force in
description, of which he had learned the art from books
such as Homer; but the scene of life is also and more
markedly represented with great melancholy in the
thought and after-issue of the action, with unceasing and
irrepressible sadness. The history of love in the poem
is nowhere a happy history, and Tasso pleaded this fact
in his strife with the ecclesiastics who disapproved of
these scenes. The whole field of life here represented
is one of sorrow and death — the woes of men; but the
great test of the militant spirit of life — delight in vic
tory — is strangely absent. There is no joy of victory
anywhere in the poem. Though Jerusalem falls, and the
knights enter in triumph, this seems a very unimportant
incident at the end, and merely winds up the poem. The
poem is really done, when we know the fate of the lovers
in it.

So far from victory felt in the poem, it is the sense of
the difficulty of life, of the thwarting of life, of its sad
fates — the sense, hi a word, of the unaccomplished —
that most remains with the reader. The feeling of the
inexpressible — the non so die of his favorite phrase —
is one with the feeling of the unattained. Tasso's view
of life thus ends not in action, but in an attitude toward
life, a certain cast of thought and habit of emotion. It
is not merely that action is not the true subject and
interest of the poem; but rather emotion divorced from

TASSO 275

action, pure emotion; mere feeling in its own realm is
the characteristic trait and charm of this verse; and
therein lies Tasso's original genius as distinct from all
that he inherited from the old masters. He was an
extremely sensitive poet, with an excitable imagination
cultivated in its exercise by the most highly developed
artistic tradition, not only in poetry but in all the arts;
but from his precocious adolescence to the close of his
career, he was brought in contact with real life only
in the sphere of the sentiments, and for the most part only
in the region of an ideal love for the Lady Leonora. His
touch on life had been almost exclusively through the
imagination, and his pleasures and sorrows had been in
that realm, in a true sense. No wonder he became vis-
T'onary even to the point of mental disease, that is, of
hallucination; but in the sphere outside of hallucina
tion his ordinary daily life was still imaginative. It
was natural that there should grow up in such a genius
a prepossession for emotional states little related to
action, a love for emotion just for its own sake, as if it
were the effect of a drug.

The point of culture he marks lies, thus, in emotional
ism toward beauty and joy, sensuously felt through their
charm, but becoming an end in itself for the sake of the
emotion only. This is the secret of his love of music,
for it is in music that emotion is most freely experienced
in this pure form disjoined from action. In his poetry
art is seen on the way to music, and his lyrical passion
is the intermediate stage. It is historically plain, be
cause his pastoral drama "Aminta," in which these quali
ties I have dwelt on are shown free from any epic
entanglement, was the beginning of pastoral drama in
Italy — that is, it ushered in Italian opera. Tasso, by

276 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

virtue of this possession of his genius by emotion for its
own sake, is the forerunner and prophet of the age of
music soon to dawn after him, and in the coming of
which he assisted.

You will observe that Tasso exemplifies with singular
precision the main principles that were laid down with
respect to the general nature of poetic energy. Though
he was a scholar from boyhood and steeped in the aca
demic learning of his time, and master of the earlier
tradition of literature ancient and modern, and was so
expert with his mind that he could, like Pope, compose
in his teens a work seemingly mature and excellent
enough to make him at once, like Byron, and younger
than Byron, the best poet of his time, nevertheless, it
was not by this weight and compass of learning nor by
anything intellectual that his genius succeeded; but it
was by his power of emotion. Emotion is found to be,
in a singularly pure form, the substance of his epic, its
center of interest, its core from which its power radiates.
Secondly, though by the traits of his epic, its classical
and romantic handling, its relation to luxury and the
arts, its piety, and much else both in structure and de
tail, he belongs to the Renaissance, and the great emo
tional upheaval due to that rebirth of the soul and senses
of man, and is in fact the last child of that age in his
own land, and hence is to be counted in that group,
nevertheless, he is also a forward-looking man, and an
nounces the new and approaching age of music. In the
most intimate and personal part of his genius he deals
with emotion as it is under the condition of music, and
attempts in poetry the characteristic effects of music,
endeavoring to realize emotion for its own sake. He is
thus in his genius prescient of the change of the mood

TASSO 277

in the race, and attaches himself to a modern time by
the link of the opera and by the use of his imagination,
specially in the highly artificial forms of the pastoral and
of magic; that is, he frees himself as much as possible
from realism in the scene, and disengages emotion from
actuality in the manner of the opera. It is unfortunate
for his fame that he thus stood, as it were, between two
arts, poetry and music. Among epic poets, he professed
to fear only Camoens, of his contemporaries; his inferi
ority to the greatest, such as Homer and Virgil, is ob
vious, and in majesty he falls short compared with Mil
ton; he cannot be ranked among the greatest poets in
epic verse. The reason appears to be that in his martial
verse he follows a literary tradition and is at best doing
by main force what others had done; while in his emo
tional verse he is experimenting in a kind of art which
reaches perfection rather in music than in poetry. He
was too late for martial epic; he was too early for musi
cal emotion; but his genius foreknows the moods of
music. Thirdly, his genius is greatest and most effi
cient in proportion as it is unconscious of itself in its
art. That part of his work which was intellectually and
consciously determined was the martial part, the struc
ture of the action and placing of the episodes, the imi
tations of his predecessors — all, in brief, that he derived
from the classical and romantic tradition, from books.
If he had done only this, he would have written only a
respectable poem, like a hundred others, which would
have soon been forgotten or listed only in the history
of his country's literature. What he added out of his
own heart — the poetry of love ensphered in landscape,
melody, pathos, sentiment, sensuousness — and seized
most intimately and passionately in the form of an

278 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

inexpressible longing without issue — all this was the
flowering of the unconscious, the original part of him —
that which was least indebted for subject or method to
other men and former poets. The primacy of emotion,
the prescience of the future, the guiding and prevailing
power of the unconscious element in his genius are
clearly seen.

The characteristic marks are just as plainly to be
seen in his personal temperament and worldly fortunes.
A precocious boy, he had extraordinary sensitiveness and
extraordinary creative faculty, and under the excitement
of a fevered and unhappy life his senses blended with
his creative faculty and made him a visionary — the
victim of his faculties. He was a courtier and a scholar,
and both are careers naturally subject to annoying jeal
ousies, to envy and detraction and intrigue; he had no
power of wise conduct in unhappy circumstances, and
his long and miserable imprisonment in the flower of his
manhood was the result; yet in his life he was much
honored and befriended in general; his fame, which he
highly valued, was always a solace to him. Looking
beneath the obvious facts, however, it appears to me
that one reads an old and familiar tragedy of life. He
was from birth a man framed for the natural enjoyment
of life, and especially for its esthetic enjoyment; he was
a man to whom beauty and delight appealed in the most
noble, sweet, and penetrating way, and his original sensi
tiveness was developed to the full by high cultivation.
Two barriers, nevertheless, rose between him and life.
He loved a princess, not of his own world, and conse
quently he was filled with that ideal passion which is
the tradition of Italian poetry and which is full of senti
ment, of unrealized emotion. Secondly, he was trained

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<*

by the Jesuit fathers, in charge of his boyhood, to an
ascetic habit and view, and to a fear of displeasing
heaven; and, as time went on, this element in him, which
always fought with his poetic impulses and power, made
him cancel the best of his verse. In these two ways his
natural enjoyment of life was blocked. He responded
to the call of life with his senses and imagination; we
read his true nature, in this way, by the charm of the
things he loved. Yet, under the conditions, it is not
strange that the main impression left by his poetry is
that here is written the despair of a heart in love with
life. It is this despair that gives such poignancy to his
pathos, such melancholy to the verse, and such yearning
force to his lyrical cry of the beauty, the joy, and the
extinction of life.

VII
LUCRETIUS

LAST year, in my wanderings through Sicily, I came
to the old town that was once Acragas, and I had the
happiness to abide there quietly for a while, where so
long ago between the sea and the mountains stood what
Pindar called "the most beautiful city of mortals." I
remember I would go down to the ruins, where, in the
midst of immense broken columns, lay on the ground
a great stone figure of a Titan, with his face looking to
the broad, empty blue sky; and it seemed to me like an
unwritten poem of Victor Hugo, as if the Titan in a sort
of triumph lay there on his back in the center of the
fallen temple of Zeus, his foe and oppressor, and looked
up with a stony, sardonic satisfaction into the now throne-
less ether. It was a Mediterranean mood. And often,
wandering about through the region, I remembered that
sage of antiquity, who is to us hardly more than a sound
ing name, Empedocles — about whom you may recall
Arnold wrote a poem "Empedocles on Etna" — who was
for all time the chief glory of Acragas. He was a poet
and priest, a man of science and affairs; even — as he
said — powerful in magic, almost with divine power, so
excelling both to himself and the citizens seemed his
faculty. He occupied himself with great works of
public utility, using novel means; he opened a path for
the north wind through the hills in order to shield the
city from the heats of summer; he turned the bed of a

281

282 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

river, and poured it through a vast marsh and so drove
the pestilence away forever; he raised a woman from
seeming death by his medicinal art; and it is little won
der, in those days, that when he came forth, being a
noble of the state, tall, clad in purple robes and with long
streaming hair, and walking in golden sandals, attended
by his retinue of followers, the people saluted him with
such reverence as is akin to religious awe; such honor,
let us say, as was paid to holy men in medieval cities.
Often I thought of him, and wondered how it could have
been — so impossible and remote seemed the picture in
the denuded plain; and I remembered the words of
Lucretius, whose enthusiasm for great minds is one of
his engaging qualities, in which he laid his laurel on
the memory of Empedocles, whose genius was kindred
to his own: —

"Him within the three-cornered shores of its lands
that island bore, about which the Ionian sea flows in
large cranklings, and splashes up brine from its green
waves. Here the sea racing in its straitened firth,
divides by its waters the shores of Italians lands from
the other's coasts; here is wasteful Charybdis, and here
the rumblings of Etna. . . . Now, though this great
country is seen to deserve in many ways the wonder of
mankind and is held to be well worth visiting, rich in
all good things, guarded by large force of men, yet seems
it to have held within it nothing more glorious than this
man."

With the same lonely grandeur that Empedocles bore
to Lucretius, with the same solitary preeminence, Lucre
tius stands forth to my eyes from Roman time, which
"seems to have held within it nothing more glorious than
this man." I may not be able to carry you along with

LUCRETIUS 283

<*

me in this enthusiasm; for the subject is difficult, the
matter of his poem is hard and dry, unintelligible indeed
to a modern reader without special preparation to under
stand it; and yet, though time has thus petrified large
portions of it, the poem burns with a far deeper vigor
than flows in the poets whose fiery genius I have hitherto
tried to interpret to you. It is the passion not of the
blood, but of the mind; not for a nation's glory like
Camoens, but for the welfare of man's race; not issuing
in despair like Byron and Tasso, but in the control of
life. It is the intellectual passion to serve mankind in
the ways of knowledge.

Just as poetic genius is often a double star — as
Shakespeare was both poet and dramatist, and as Plato
was both poet and philosopher, and the poetic element
was primary in both of them — so Lucretius was a poet
and a man of science, and the poetic element was
primary in him. The subject matter of his work is
science, a theory of physics, explanations of natural phe
nomena, astromony — that is, the science of the ancient
world. For the most part, as science, it is in matters
of detail now merely curious reading, useful in reminding
us that science as well as religion has a history of early
fables and a past littered with errors; but that is all.
Personally, I find something refreshing in coming in
contact with this childhood of science, just as one finds
it in those passages of Plato where he treats incidentally
of similar subjects; and it makes for intellectual modesty,
when one comes upon these provinces of ignorance in
the serious works of the great, for even in our own cul
ture may there not be just such childhood tracts, as they
will seem hereafter? But a better reason why the old
sages of Greece, like Empedocles, interest me is that

284 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

there I feel myself, more clearly than elsewhere, at the
very birth of that Greek reason, in whose advent lay, as
it seems to me — I do not say eternal salvation — but
the salvation of our race here on earth. I like to read
such passages of these old poems as express man's first
sense, not of the difficulty of virtue, but of the quite as
important difficulty of knowledge. It sometimes seems
to us that the early Greek sages were overweening —
indeed the very types of omniscient self-conceit; but
this is partly because of the universality of their theories,
and partly it is the after-effect of Socrates' sarcasm upon
our minds. Hear what Empedocles said, four centuries
before Lucretius: —

"Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the
limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and
blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the
life in death through which they toil; then are they
borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what
they dream they know is but the little each hath stumbled
on, in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all
that they have learned the whole — vain fools! for what
that is no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it
be conceived by mind of man. Thou, then, since thou
hast fallen to this place, shalt know no more than human
wisdom may attain."

Lucretius, however, is little embarrassed by any doubts
of the amount and kind of his knowledge; and as one
reads his explanation of specific natural phenomena, given
out with such assurance, one is reminded of that tone
of knowingness still familiar to us in the eager and plaus
ible scientist. But to leave on one side this detail,
which is as compact of error as the lives of the saints,
there are certain conceptions and ideas of a more favor-

LUCRETIUS 285

able and just notion of Lucretius' true attainment in a
scientific grasp of the world. These ideas are simple
and few; but to estimate them justly it must be remem
bered on what a background they are relieved, how
recent was any natural knowledge, how close was the
world of primitive mind, how small that world was,
how near the gods were in it, scarce a hand-breadth off
— how Lucretius himself lived in a Mediterranean world
seething with idolatries; it is against the barbarian in
heritance of paganism, against its Egyptian mysticism,
its magical practices, its long-consecrated ceremonial
rites — in a word, against the pagan attitude to nature
that these ideas stand forth; and in them slowly forming
was the creation of a new world, the world of thought
in which we now live.

In the first place, in room of that small Olympian or
Nilotic world where the gods were near, he conceived of
infinite space, thronged with systems of worlds, uni
verses like our own. It is hard for us to think rightly
of the sequent steps of man's progress, to realize, for
example, the epoch-making change of such a thing as the
discovery of the ways to work metals, or of cultiva
tion of the olive and of corn, or of the alphabet. Now
we think of the epoch of the expansion of the mind as
being coincident, say, with the substitution of Coperni-
can for Ptolemaic astronomy; but when the idea of infi
nite space was first intelligently conceived so that the
man knew what he was thinking, that was the moment
of expansion to which all others are dwindling points;
that was a sublime moment in the history of man's mind,
though since such knowledge was not so readily transmis
sible as a material discovery, like the culture of corn,
the effects of the act are more slowly apparent. The

286 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

thought of infinity was old when Lucretius received it;
but it must not be considered that the infinity of the
universe was the same to him as to us. He believed, for
example, that the sun and moon and stars actually are
of the size that they appear to us to be; and he filled
space with systems conceived on that pattern. Never
theless, he had acquired for his thought a scale of infinity;
and it gave to his conception of things a sublimity not
unlike that which the same scale gives Milton in "Para
dise Lost."

Secondly, he conceived of nature as an energy exist
ing in this infinite, and infinite itself; and in the analysis
of energy he found the other pole of thought, the infin
itesimal, the atomic; for all matter is composed of the
atoms, infinite in number, and themselves imperceptible
to the senses. In other words, he conceived of nature,
on modern lines, as an unseen energy — the unseen uni
verse, as we sometimes call it — the microscopic, the
molecular, the ethereal wave of force, however consti
tuted, which is invisible, but out of which in combi
nation the visible world of nature emerges to our gross
senses. The world of nature was thus to him, essen
tially, a world of the mind's eye; the veil of sense had
fallen, and he saw what was behind. This theory he
derived, as he did all his knowledge, from the Greeks,
those few lonely thinkers who were the light of that
early world. The idea itself, however, was a great
achievement of thought, and one of the most fruitful
legacies that the antique world transmitted to us.

Thirdly, he conceived of energy as organized; the
atoms were different in kind, and limited in the number
of kinds, and by their combination formed various species
of things, as we may call them, and these species were

LUCRETIUS 287

fixed, so that a certain combination produced one spe
cies only, and if that species had in itself the power of
reproduction, it reproduced only its own species. Every
thing thus, he said, has "its limit and deepset boundary
mark." This clearly is nature organized. Fourthly,
he conceived of energy as a flux, an element of change,
an incessant action and transformation of the atomic
groups dissolving and recombining, which is the process
of nature. Fifthly, he conceived of energy as perfectly
conserved in this process; there is neither loss nor addi
tion; the sum remains always constant. Sixthly, he con
ceived of energy as absolutely law-abiding, subject
neither to interference nor caprice nor default, unchange
able hi its certainty. It is, perhaps, by the strength with
which he grasped this idea of the invariable order of
natural law that he most affects the admiration of modern
times, partly because of the intensity of feeling with
which he clings to it; it is the anchor of his faith. To
sum it up, Lucretius conceived nature as an unseen, or
ganizing, ceaselessly active, perfectly conserved, and law-
abiding energy, working in infinite space and itself infi
nite. This is not unlike the scientific idea that we know.
To turn to the history of the universe, it appeared
to Lucretius that in the ceaseless action of infinite atoms
in infinite space sooner or later there would arise the
particular combination from which the world phenomena
known to man followed. He did not believe that the
world was very old, and he thought the history of man
quite recent. There is in his physical theory a rude doc
trine of evolution, of the centering of the sun and moon
and the solidifying of the earth; and man arising out of
nature, with other species of things, was half-beast, savage
and rough and pitiable, and was gradually by his own

288 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

efforts civilized. He notices the extinction of species in the
conflict for life, and he assigns to the softening influence
of children a great share in raising man from the savage
and brutal state. Some of you may remember that John
Fiske was believed to have added an original contribu
tion to the doctrine of evolution by the influence he
assigned to the prolongation of the period of infancy.
It is a curious parallel. But it is enough to say that in
his theory of the origin of civilization, language, the arts,
and all that concerns the primitive history of mankind,
Lucretius is quite in harmony with modern thought,
even to the analysis of the influence of dreams hi gen
erating some important human conceptions with regard
to the soul. As he thought that the life of mankind and
of our universe had not been long, he also believed that
the world had grown, even in that time, old, and was
losing its strength; his mind was prepossessed with the
idea of the dissolution of things as the natural term of all
combinations of atoms, and it is a curious sign of the
sense of insecurity then belonging to the human mind
to find him thinking that the world as we know it would
end in a catastrophe, which he apparently anticipated as
likely to occur at any moment, when the frame of things
should fall in and the atomic storm fly dispersed abroad.
Such in brief is the view of the world which Lucretius
presents.

It is not, however, the science of Lucretius that inter
ests me; it is incidental to my main purpose, which is
rather to set forth the poet. Yet it was science which
gave to Lucretius the ample career of his mind. He was
excited and enfranchised by it, and in these ideas he
seemed to have received, as it were, the freedom of the
universe, to go fearless and unquestioned where he would,

LUCRETIUS 289

9

as he describes his master, Epicurus, who, he says,
"traversed throughout in mind and spirit the immeas
urable universe, whence he returns a conqueror to tell
us what can, what cannot come into being — on what
principle each thing has its powers denned, its deep-
set boundary mark." Lucretius had reached in these
conceptions the seats of the wise, which he describes in
a famous passage: —

"It is sweet, when on the great sea the winds trouble
its waters, to behold from land another's deep distress;
not that it is a pleasure and delight that any should be
afflicted, but because it is sweet to see from what evils
you are yourself exempt. It is sweet also to look upon
the mighty struggles of war arrayed along the plains
without sharing yourself in the danger. But nothing
is more welcome than to hold the lofty and serene posi
tions well fortified by the learning of the wise, from which
you may look down upon others and see them wandering
all abroad and going astray in their search for the path
of life, see the contest among them of intellect, the rivalry
of birth, the striving night and day with surpassing effort
to struggle up to the summit of power and be masters of
the world. O miserable minds of men! O blinded
breasts!"

It is from such a height that Lucretius is always seen
looking down. For he had about him the horizons and
perspectives of a new world. In another famous and
peculiarly Roman passage he says: "When mighty
legions fill the plain with their rapid movement, raising
the pageantry of warfare, the splendor rises up to heaven,
and all the land about is bright with the glitter of brass,
and beneath from the mighty host of men the sound of
their tramp arises, and the mountains, struck by their

2QO THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

shouting, reecho their voices to the stars of heaven, and
the horsemen hurry to and fro on either flank and sud
denly charge across the plains, shaking them with their

impetuous onset And yet there is some place

in the lofty mountains whence they appear to be all still,
and to rest as a bright gleam upon the plains."

This is the new perspective from which Lucretius looks
on human life. He was the only Roman who transcended
Rome. He sees Rome itself as but one of the swift
runners who hand on in turn the torch of life among the
nations. He was a Roman, and of an ancient house;
but he despised alike imperial power and vastness of
wealth. Rome spread material dominion over the earth,
but he saw only the dominion of the mind as a thing
worthy of man's dignity. Rome subjected men in their
bodies, but his passion was to enfranchise the souls of
men and bring them to a birth of freedom. For Lucre
tius was deeply endowed with that social sympathy which
belongs to poetry by its own nature, as I have said; and
the main motive of his poem was not knowledge, not the
scholar's motive, but was service, the poet's function.
It was not for science that he deeply cared, but for its
effects on the minds of men.

He looked abroad over human life, and he often depicts
it in the large; he sees it without a veil and tells it with
out a lie; there is no golden age in man's past for him —
only the bestial misery and blood-stained cruelty of
savage life from which man rises with vast effort and
suffering; or, he shows, as at the end of the poem, the
plague at Athens, a terrible scene of human wretched
ness; or, he singles out of the high luxurious life of the
age the Roman noble — "driving his horses, he speeds
in hot haste to his country house, as if his house were on

LUCRETIUS 291

fire and he was hurrying to bring assistance. Straight
way he begins to yawn, so soon as he has reached his
threshold, or sinks heavily into sleep, or even with all
haste returns to the city." It is the picture of speeding
wealth in our own day. Lucretius renders life as he
sees it, in its past and present; and his words are blended
of irony, reproof, and sorrow. He had broad and natural
sympathies; and his sympathy, though not lacking in
individual touches, is nevertheless mainly impersonal and
racial; it is for the race rather than the man that he has
pity and commiseration. That is why he wrote his poem
of which the aim is not scientific but philanthropic. He
saw mankind under the yoke of superstition; the critics
say that he exaggerated the terrors of the supernatural,
which did not so afflict men in paganism. I am not
competent to gainsay their opinion, yet my own mind
refuses to see the Mediterranean world of those ages
other than as he described it — permeated with supersti
tious fear and barren pagan practices through all its
million-peopled coasts; so, at any rate, it seemed to him,
and he lifted his hand to wither this immeasurable evil,
the chief and fruitful source of men's woes, at the root.
It is at superstition, as at the old dragon, that every
glittering shaft of reason is shot in these golden lines.

Lucretius identified all religion with superstition, and
meant to uproot it from the minds of men and entirely
eradicate it. He opposed in sharp contrast the pagan
view of the world, under which man and nature were the
sport of the gods, and the view of Greek reason in which
the divine element in every form was excluded both from
nature and human life. The state of man as Lucretius
saw it, under paganism, was one of servitude to fear;
under this idea of the Greek reason it was one of free-

292 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

dom, of dignity, and its worst estate one of noble forti
tude and self-respect. He desired to establish this reign
of reason, in place of paganism, and to follow in the foot
steps of his master, Epicurus, who had opened the way
and brought this light into the world. At the outset of
his poem he describes this achievement of Epicurus and
what it meant for mankind: —

"When human life lay foully prostrate upon earth,
crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed
her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect
lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece ventured first
to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to with
stand her to her face. Him neither story of gods nor
thunderbolts nor heaven with threatening roar could
quell; they only chafed the more the eager courage of
his soul, filling him with desire to be the first to burst
the fast bars of nature's portals. Therefore the living
force of his soul gained the day; on he passed far be
yond the flaming walls of the world and traversed
throughout, in mind and spirit, the immeasurable uni
verse. ... Us his victory brings level with heaven."

It is always a great moment when mankind looks at
its gods with level eyes; and, in this case, the gods
seemed to Lucretius to vanish and remove far away.
He believed that these gods that men worshipped with
altars and sacred rites over the whole earth, and honored
with festal days, were the coinage of man's brain, and
man had placed them in heaven and given them charge
of all things: —

"O hapless race of men, when that they charged the
gods with such acts, and coupled with them bitter wrath!
what groanings did they then beget for themselves, what
wounds for us, what tears for our children's children!

LUCRETIUS 293

<*

No act is it of piety to be often seen with veiled head
to turn to a stone and approach every altar and fall
prostrate on the ground and spread out the palms before
the statues of the gods and sprinkle the altars with much
blood of beasts and link vow on vow, but rather to be
able to look on all things with a mind of peace."

Nor, says Lucretius, in his opening lines, should any
fear that the ground of reason is unholy and her path
the path of sin; rather it is religion that is sinful. And
he goes on to draw that picture of the human sacrifice
of Iphigeneia by Agamemnon, her father, when the Greek
ships crossed to Troy, as a capital instance of the evil
to which religion inclines the hearts of men. He puts
this picture in the forefront of his poem as a landmark
of its thought; it was from such monstrous acts, and the
mood which is their parent, that life could be freed;
in other words, the capital thought of the poem is that
life must purify itself. For Lucretius looked on life
as not so much wretched because of external calamity
visited upon man, but because of those woes to which
his own will consents and in which it is by folly or
fear an accomplice; religion in particular was some
thing of which man could rid his bosom, since it was
born of it. To this end, then, Lucretius strove; it is
with passion that he pleads the cause, and it is this
passion which underlies the intellectual vigor of the pano
rama of nature in her acts and scenes which he unfolds,
and also the profound moral sympathy with which he
displays the human lot under nature's dispensation. It
is, therefore, not exposition but persuasion that he has
in view, and for this reason he inlays the verse with pic
tures, in the old way — Gray's way — and puts truth
forth as poetry.

294 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

His procedure is easily understood. "This terror,
then," he says, "and darkness of mind must be dispelled
not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day,
but by the aspect and the law of nature." He excludes
the gods from dominion over nature on the ground that
the universe is infinite and command of it is beyond
their power. Man's conception of the world had out
grown his conception of the gods. "Who can order
the infinite mass? who can hold with a guiding hand the
mighty reins of immensity?" Lucretius says. And again
he excludes intelligence from nature on the ground of the
imperfection of the world; it is obviously not the work
of intelligence. Intelligence belongs to man alone; it is
the accident of his being, and will vanish from the uni
verse with him. We are not concerned with the truth
of the statement, but with the fact. What a step it was,
what a power it showed in man to change his mind!
What a masterly reversal of the point of view this is,
in comparison with that universal habit of old time
which projected human life into all things and gave the
early peoples over to animism, polytheism, and all the
subtler forms of anthropomorphic thought as it fades
away in philosophy and metaphysics. It is by just
such reversals of universal past beliefs that the progress
of reason is marked.

All this argument against the gods proceeds, you ob
serve, not on moral but on intellectual grounds; that is,
it is a characteristically Greek mode of thought. The
citadel of superstition, however, in Lucretius' eyes was
rather in the fear of something after death than in the
presence of the gods in this life and the world of nature.
He met this fear by the simplest mode of attack, and
denied the immortality of the soul. It is not necessary

LUCRETIUS 295

to go into his argument. To me the most remarkable
thing about it is not the argument nor the belief itself,
but the grave and almost tender considerateness with
which Lucretius tries to reconcile men to this belief —
it is almost as if he were talking to children, with a
gentle but firm insistence, and with entire understanding
of their disturbed fears and sympathy with them, but,
nevertheless, if they will listen, the fact is not only really
so, but best, a blessing, the greatest blessing that can
come to heal the wounds of men and give them peace.
This lulling tone in the argument always reminds me of
the persuasive melody of the verses hi the "Faerie
Queen," where Despair wooes the knight to self-destruc
tion. In no part of the poem is Lucretius more vividly
in sympathy with life in its natural happiness. "Soon,"
he says, "shall thy home receive thee no more with
glad welcome, nor thy true wife, nor thy dear children
run to snatch the first kiss, touching thy heart with
silent gladness." Nowhere is he more gravely eloquent:
"Death, therefore, to us is nothing; . . . and as in
time gone by we felt no distress when the Carthaginians
from all sides came together to do battle, and all things
shaken by war's troublous uproar shuddered and quaked
beneath high heaven, and mortal men were in doubt
which of the two peoples it should be to whose empire
all must fall by sea and land . . . thus when we shall
be no more . . . nothing whatever can happen to excite
sensation, not if earth shall be mingled with sea, and sea
with heaven." Nowhere does he speak with more dig
nity, like a Roman: "Why not, then, take thy departure
like a guest filled with life — and with resignation, thou
fool, enter upon untroubled rest?" "Now resign all
things unsuited to thy age, and with a good grace up

296 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

and greatly go: thou must." "Even worthy Ancus has
quitted the light, . . . the son of the Scipios, thunder
bolt of war, terror of Carthage, yielded his bones to
earth just as if he were the lowest menial. . . . Even
Epicurus passed away when his light of life had run its
course, he who surpassed in intellect the race of man.
. . . Wilt thou then hesitate, and think it a hardship
to die? . . . None the less will that everlasting death
await you. . . . Thus it is that all no less than thou
have before this come to an end, and hereafter will come
to an end; . . . and life is granted to none in fee-
simple, but to all in usufruct."

Such are some of the passages in which Lucretius,
like a patient but high-minded teacher, endeavors to
reconcile the minds of men to their good. For in his
eyes to escape from the evil, whose bondage is a state
of supernatural fear, is to find the door of life itself —
the door of that life still possible to men which, he says,
though on earth, may be a life "not unworthy of the
gods."

For when Lucretius had excluded divine power from
the constitution and government of nature — and he
goes on to show that all events are merely natural phe
nomena — and when he had quieted the fear of some
thing after death by denying immortality to the soul,
he had, nevertheless, performed only the negative part
of his task. He had, besides, to build up an ideal of
wise life under such conditions. The view that great
poets take of human life is never very rose-colored; and
Lucretius is no exception to the rule. The picture that
he gives of the child at birth is very famous: "The
babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the cruel waves, lies
naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid

LUCRETIUS 297

«*

to life, when first nature has cast him forth by great
throes from his mother's womb; and he fills the air with
his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it is to pass
through so much misery in life." Human nature itself
is very imperfect; it is, says Lucretius, like a leaky vessel
that will not retain even the blessings that are poured
into it, and moreover it vitiates these goods inwardly
by a certain taint and nauseous flavor, as it were, pro
ceeding from itself. The discovery of wisdom that could
in any way remedy these objects seems to Lucretius a
marvelous action: "a god he was," he says, "a god who
first found out that plan of life which is now termed
wisdom." It was a more divine gift than corn or wine,
for life could go on without these; but "a happy life was
not possible without a clean breast." The deeds of
Hercules were nothing in comparison. "The earth even
now abounds in wild beasts and is filled with troublous
terror throughout woods and great mountains and deep
forests; places which we have it for the most part in
our power to shun. But unless the breast is cleared,
what battles and dangers must then find their way into
us in our own despite! What cares, what fears! — and
pride, lust, and wantonness, what disasters they occa
sion! and luxury and sloth! He therefore who shall
have subdued all these and banished them from the mind
by words, not arms, shall he not have a just title to be
ranked among the gods?" It is a Roman who is thus
exalting the victories of peace over those of war, and of
reason over arms. He builds then his ideal of a life,
content with little, free from lust for political power or
riches or pleasures, strong in natural affections and in
the reasonable satisfaction of our needs, and with power,
if not to escape calamity, at least by fortitude to blunt

298 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

the edge of evil. To learn this wisdom is the best use
of life in the brief interval that life shall be ours.

Such, in rough outlines, is the teaching of Lucretius.
He does not deny the existence of the divine gods; but
they live remote from man, like him a part of nature in
their own mode of existence, and to be careless of man
kind is a part of their blessedness. It would be easy
to appear to find in that principle of energy, that vigor
which is nature, whose force is in the coming of spring
and the gladness of cattle and in the thoughts of men,
which is the inspiration of this poem in Lucretius also,
as he says — it would be easy to find in this something
like a divine principle diffusing itself in life; but it is
not so presented by Lucretius. He excluded from life
every thought of what is to our minds religion and the
immortal soul; and did it as a bringer of intellectual truth
in the interest of man's earthly happiness. It is, perhaps,
hard for us to realize that he seemed to himself in this a
benefactor of his race. Yet, if we remember justly the
pagan world, or even if we recall the vast reign of reli
gious superstition over mankind still throughout the world
and realize what it is, if we remember how much of super
stition still persists even in the purer forms of religion,
and to how great evils religion has inclined men's minds
in the centuries since Lucretius wrote — if we keep some
thing of all this in our minds, we may better measure the
hopes of this early thinker who first seized hold of the
truths of science and the dominion of the pure reason
over men's minds as if there were in it the coming of a new
and happier age.

Lucretius was not so much prescient of that new age
as living in it. The sense of being a discoverer in a new
land is one of the most vivid traits in his mind. "I

LUCRETIUS 299

traverse," he says, "the pathless haunts never yet trodden
by the foot of man. I love to approach the untasted
springs and to quaff, I love to cull fresh flowers and
gather for my head a crown from spots whence the Muses
have yet veiled the brows of none — because I teach of
great things." He has this mark of the poetic faculty —
its forward-looking gaze, its atmosphere of the virgin peak
and the new-breaking morning. He has also the mark of
passion — intense, overwhelming, absorbing — the pas
sion of the intellect for truth and of the heart for service
to his race. He has the mark of the social bond, which
belongs to genius. He stands, moreover, at that line of
fracture in the thoughts of men which does not belong
to any one age, like the Renaissance, but is the slowest
of the great social changes — the line which marks the
rise of reason in the government of man's thoughts. It
is only in our own time that Lucretius has been esteemed
according to the true measure of his greatness. But
what a far-sighted and firm-fixed genius that was which
could wait eighteen centuries for its true fame —
it seems like one of those great suns of outer space
whose light requires such length of years to reach the
eyes of men. There is this loneliness of intellectual
splendor, hi Lucretius — this quality of solitariness in
his genius, which I began by speaking of. I know that
Virgil was a greater poet, and revere him above all other
poets, but in thinking of Lucretius only the old words
rise to my lips — "This was the noblest Roman of
them all."

VIII
INSPIRATION

You will, perhaps, remember that in opening these lec
tures a few general principles were suggested with re
gard to the nature of poetic power, and from time to
time I have directed your attention to the presence of
some of these principles in the six poets whose genius
we have examined. Poetic energy was defined as, in
essence, shared and controlled emotion; in its being
shared emotion lies its social principle; in its being con
trolled emotion lies its artistic principle. I have dwelt
less, however, on these two subsidiary aspects^ and
have sought rather to bring out clearly the primary
fact that emotion is the base of poetry, and that capacity
for it is the radical power of genius, and that the poetic
life so led is naturally one of unrest and misfortune. In
Marlowe the emotion was an aspiration of all the facul
ties, the individual making out toward the infinite in all
ways; in Camoens it was emotion closely joined with
action in a national epic; in Tasso it was emotion dis
joined from action and tending to the condition of music,
in Byron it was emotion of the heart; in Lucretius it was
emotion of the intellect. It was noticed, too, in accord
ance with the general principle that great literatures
arise along the lines of fracture in human progress, that
Marlowe was the child of the Renaissance in England,
that Camoens was the poet of world-discovery, that
Byron was the star of the revolutionary spirit on the

3oi

302 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

Continent, and Tasso foretold the age of music, and
Lucretius stood in the dawn of scientific reason; each
occupied a point of vantage, and was, as it were, a
mountain crag that caught and flashed on a moment
of morning light. Each represented some mood of the
world at a culminating point, and with intensity.

The prevailing trait of the poetic temperament in
action — its free and lawless nature — has also been
exemplified. These poets have left upon our minds,
I am persuaded, a sense of their extraordinary vital power,
of their strange difference from men in general, and of
something that awes us in their genius as if a miraculous
element entered into it. The sense of the mystery of
spiritual power is felt in connection with these men. It
is under the influence of such thoughts as these that men
speak of poetic energy as an inspiration ; they convey thus
their sense that the faculty is something "above man,"
that it partakes of the mystery of all power in the uni
verse, that it is kindred with what they call the divine.
Something — they know not what — but something
greater than the man speaks through the man, and there
is a virtue in his works that his own unaided power
never placed there. I think I describe the feeling fairly
in these words. Inspiration is a natural conviction of
men with respect to poetry; and to the greater poets
themselves it is as natural, for their own works and
their states of mind in composing seem beyond and above
themselves. This sense of possession, of being caught
up into a sphere of greater power, is the true poetic
madness, which is so familiar an idea in Greek thought,
and is not yet extinct. I have thought it appropriate
to close this various survey of the poets with some final
remarks on this old mystery, so ineradicable; not with

INSPIRATION 303

9

any idea of solving it at all, but merely to offer some
few considerations with regard to it, which have occurred
to me from time to time. Let us return, therefore, to
that gulf which we found in the first lecture between
the primitive dancing and singing horde and the divine
poet, and look more closely at the phenomena.

It has been said that "the mental condition of the
lower races is the key to poetry"; and you may recall
that I defined the poet as "under excitement presenting
the phenomenon of a highly developed mind working
in a primitive way." Primitive psychology is a sub
ject beyond my ken; but there are a few obvious facts
that a modern reader can hardly escape. You will
remember that in the dance of the primitive horde the
rhythm is very simple, and the cry is perhaps one sound,
interminably repeated. Monotony is, in fact, charac
teristic of primitive life. The repetition has certain
uses easily seen. In all thought of primitive conditions
it is hardly possible for us to exaggerate the feebleness
of the human mind in its emergence from brute condi
tions. The first use of monotonous repetition is to fasten
attention, a difficult thing for the savage mind; power
of memory, the power of brain-cells to retain the mental
image of a thing or an event, must have been greatly
indebted to such a monotonous habit. Again, the rep
etition assists in labor: songs of labor are not a relaxa
tion but an aid; the Egyptian workmen sing when they
are tired; again, the well-known law that every mental
idea of an action tends to realize itself in that action is
sufficient to account for one definite utility there is in
the repeated utterance of such a word as "strike," say,
in rhythm before each blow. On the passive side, also,
it will be readily understood that monotone has an hyp-

304 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

no tic and preparatory influence on the mind. Indeed
the monotone may be the basis, the exciting cause, or
nervous predisposition of the wild passion which breaks
forth and possesses the participants in the dance. Any
of you who have ever witnessed such performances must
have been struck by the singular coexistence in them
of monotone and of excitement; the two are linked
together — wild excitement such as we never dream of,
together with monotony so insistent and prolonged as
to seem incredible. I have never heard Tennyson read,
but I have heard his reading precisely imitated, and
I was struck in it by the same combination — namely,
that as the passion grew, the chanted monotony of the
lines stood more rigidly. It has been noticed, too, that
poets naturally thus chant their lines. Wordsworth did
so, and I have heard his reading also imitated with pre
cision. These two elements, monotony and excitement,
are faithfully reflected in the Mohometan religion,
which is near to primitive habits in all ways. Thus in the
several sects of North Africa one is distinguished from
another in various ways, and among others by the
formula or verse which is repeated by each member a
certain number of times daily. Thus the brotherhood
of Abd-er-Rahman must recite their formula, seven words,
three thousand times a day; the Tsidjani must pray at
morning the two words "God pardon" two hundred times,
followed by a longer prayer one hundred times repeated,
and then one hundred times the formula of seven words.
At three o'clock in the afternoon are other similar
prayers, and at sunset the same as at morning. In Mos
lem mosques I have myself sometimes taken the beads
from the priest and repeated the formulas as I wandered
about, to see what it was like to live in that way. On the

INSPIRATION 305

other hand, in the dervish dances the element of excite
ment in combination with monotony is easily observed.
It appears, therefore, that while for us monotony de
stroys interest and puts us to sleep, under other con
ditions it is the ground of the highest excitement.

I have a theory — whether I have read it or dreamed
it I do not know — that the emergence of man from
the brute-stage of life was accompanied by an immense
outburst and increase of emotional power. If it were
so, the emotion was of this kind; and, without regard
to the scientific ground of the theory, it appears to me
prima facie plausible to this degree, that such emotion
was a main condition of the gradual advent of intellec
tual life. If we remember how weak and unstable then
were all mental phenomena, still perhaps more like wak
ing dreams than what we know as continuous and or
ganized mental life, and if we remember also the power
of emotion to vivify the mental processes, it is plain that
minds so stirred would grow and would store power
beyond other minds. The phenomenon would be only
what is our well-known experience taking place in a lower
plane of being. Excitement increases the speed and
power of the mind; the use of stimulants affords such
excitement, and when the excitement arises naturally
through the emotions, the effect is the same. The state
so induced, whether naturally or artifically, does not
differ in kind from that of inspiration — that is, a power
above the normal from which the subject of it recedes
when the mood is gone. Emotion, however induced,
discharges itself according to the constitution of the man
who feels it; and in primitive life it would discharge
itself in this one or that one wildly, wastefully, spas
modically, perhaps, and in brains of a finer or stronger

3o6 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

quality in another way, that is, along directions of
thought. The most active brains would be those most
capable of emotion.

If emotion played such a part in generating intelligence,
it becomes easier to understand the respect paid in all
primitive times to those who are described as madmen,
and to all who were subject to exalted psychical states
from whatever cause; and the impulse which led men
to cultivate, as it were, the trance state by artificial or
semi-artificial means, which is found in all religions,
would seem more normal. Certain it is that about the
ancient oracles there gathered intellectual and moral
power, and even as at Delphi great guiding power; they
were very old places of immemorial inspiration, in all
its defined religious forms, its trances, and ecstasies as
well as other kinds of soothsaying; they were, in a cer
tain sense, the seats of truth most revered. For the
oracles were not places of fraud; fraud entered into and
combined with original beliefs and practices, as it has in
other religions without number, but only in their decay.
Originally the oracles were sincere facts of religion as it
then was. There were other concurring causes for their
religious primacy; but it seems not unlikely that the
power of emotional excitement to unlock and speed intelli
gence may have been one element of real utility in the
phenomenon. Facts of disease, of the action of vapors,
of psychical states and susceptibilities that are still ob
scure, were no doubt involved in the entire primitive atti
tude to the divine madness; but in the midst of all there
remains one thread of sense and reality in the normal
power of excitement to set the intellectual powers in
uncommon action.

It is also to be observed that monotony characterizes

INSPIRATION 307

<*

the primitive mind in another way than has been noticed;
no community is so bound in convention, tradition, and
routine as the savage horde ; just as in the lower organiza
tions of life, the ways of doing once found are fossilized
in invariable paths of instinct, as in the bees and ants, so
in the primitive horde ways of behavior once established
became conventionalized with a rigor that tyranny could
never equal. The great difficulty to-day with the primi
tive African people is to persuade them to do other or
different from their fathers. In the primitive horde every
one conformed, and especially after superstitious religion
began to prevail; that is, every one conformed except the
madman — and there could be but one explanation of
such a man, he was a sacred person, in some way touched
with that power, which, whether it was daemonic or di
vine, was pretty much one to the savage mind. Thus
primitive man regarded these various phenomena, rang
ing from the ordinary type of insanity up to the priestess
of the temple, as belonging in the region of inspiration,
of that power above man which made of them persons
apart; and this mood toward them persisted through ages
and far into high civilizations. The easy old-fashioned
way was to look on all this primitive and pagan belief as
merely a structure of superstition and fraud; but this is
no longer possible. And it seems to me, speaking specu-
latively and not dogmatically, that in this universal belief
and long adherence to it we may perhaps discern some
historic traces of the great function of emotion, as an
evolutionary element, in disengaging and freeing and es
tablishing the intellectual powers of the race.

Let us turn now to the phenomena as they appear in
the field of civilization. There we see, as in Greece, men
under excitement producing poems, dramas, and other

3o8 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

works at moments of exaltation; and their state was de
scribed by observers and by themselves as one of poetic
madness. It was a theory universally received. What
is it that had happened? It seems to be no more than
in other cases of excitement, except for a peculiarity in
the manner of the discharge of the emotion. Let me
recur to the distinction which was alluded to in the first
lecture between the power of Dionysus and the power of
Apollo, made by the brilliant and unfortunate German
writer, Frederic Nietzsche, in an essay of his youth upon
Greek tragedy at a time when he was dominated by en
thusiasm for Wagner's music. He divided poetry be
tween the two: to Apollo he ascribed the intellectual part,
the dream, the perceptive faculty, the idea as it is known
to consciousness, the phenomenal; to Dionysus he gave
the intoxication, the self-destruction or renunciation of
consciousness, the revel of emotion, the unfathomed
energy of existence; or, in brief, the form-giving element
in poetry he described as Apollinian, the energy he de
scribed as Dionysiac. He worked the theory out in his
own way. But it is interesting to find the youngest of
our new philosophers adopting and interpreting in modern
terms the oldest doctrine of poetry — namely, that it is
a madness; and the distinction he draws serves to clarify
our thoughts. Dionysus is the god who presides over
the emotion as mere energy, as an intoxication, a physical
and mental disturbance, an orgy of the muscles and the
nerves, a daemoniac possession. Apollo is the god who
presides over inspiration rather in its intellectual issue as
a power generating fair forms and clear-shining truths, of
which poetry is the embodiment. If you will recall what
I have just said, that in the mass of the phenomena there
are all sorts of wasteful emotion, but amid them there

INSPIRATION 309

is one thread of sense and reality — there where the
waste is, is Dionysus raving; there where the single
thread is, is Apollo's shining hand.

There is one idea that played a great part in Greek
thought — the idea of harmony. Apollo is the god of
harmony. Now the Greeks believed that there is a prin
ciple of harmony in the world which takes body of itself.
It is independant of man, but it may take body through
his mind. Thus the great temple, the Parthenon, was a
harmony brought into being by man, yet he did not make
the harmony. This is the view so familiar to us in
Emerson's poem: —

"These temples grew as grows the grass;
Art might obey, but not surpass:
The passive master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned."

That is, there is a principle of harmony in the world
independent of art, but through art it takes form and
becomes apparent to the eyes or ears or imagination of
man. Apollo is the god who so guides the original energy
of emotion that out of it issues this fair harmony known
through the senses and their imagery to the perceptive
powers, that is, to the mind of men. This is what, in the
first lecture, was called the dream that attends emotion,
the sensuous and intellectual part; but it was also there
said that the dream is not something added to emotion,
but is the product of the emotion itself. The Dionysiac
orgy ends in the physical state, and when the body is
exhausted the emotion is spent and gone; the inspiration
of Apollo ends in an intellectual harmony of poetry or
music or other art, and this work abides after the emo
tion is spent — is indeed the enduring and eternal form

310 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

of that fleeting emotional overflow in the soul and body
of the poet and artist. It was natural that inspiration
should gradually become restricted, as a term, to this
particular operation of emotion by virtue of which it
realizes for the mind the principle of harmony, whether
under the form of reason — that is, of truth — or under
those forms of the senses which we call the arts. In
spiration, then, is, in this view, emotion vivifying and
giving clearness and speed to the intellect, out of whose
store of memory and imagination it creates that dream in
which it immortalizes its moment. Emotion flooding the
higher soul of man, and not merely his physical part —
flooding the rational soul, and there creatively productive
according to the harmonic laws of that realm — that is
the power of Apollo, that is inspiration in the artistic
sense.

Wherein, then, is the madness? for it is agreed that
the man so affected is out of his senses and not his own
master; he is an instrument, a voice, not personal but
oracular; a passive master, as Emerson says, who has lent
his body and soul to the god. Is it, then, indeed, so
strange? or is not this a thing familiar to us all in our
daily lives? Do we not all have such moments, so
charged with emotion that we seem taken out of ourselves,
so filled with intensity of life that we seem unconscious —
moments when new truths come with a physical flash on
the eye, when perceptions of beauty illuminate the soul
with sudden and ample glory, when motions of love ex
pand the spirit and pour it abroad — and then comes
darkness, and we fail from out the mood; but yet do not
altogether fail, for the memory of the truth stays with
us, that beauty has illuminated all our days, those mo
tions of love have expanded the heart forever; it is on

INSPIRATION 311

the memory of such moments that we live. You remem
ber that Gray found these moments, in their most intense,
revealing and exalted power, in the times of bereave
ment; and I suppose that is the commonest experience
of humanity. But in any part of experience they may
arise, in its gloom or in its brightness; and when they
arise is it not true, especially if the experience be pro
longed or recurrent, that we seem to ourselves not en
tirely our own masters and to others somewhat out of
our senses?

The difference that makes the poet lies in the fact that
by some peculiarity of organization he stamps an image
of his soul at such moments in a work of art, and what
is for us a thing of the private life becomes through
genius a thing of the public good. He, too, fails from
out the mood, but this work of his remains; he feels in
the same way as we the mystery of the experience; he
cannot repeat it; he cannot summon the inspiration at
will; he can only observe its times and seasons, and be
in a state of preparedness for the god — to use the reli
gious phrase — for inspiration has its conditions, like
all mortal things, and these are subject to knowledge.
If you will read Emerson's essay on Inspiration, you
will find that he employs nearly the whole of it in laying
down these conditions; yet they might, I think, all be
present, and the inspiration not occur.

Now, if you will apply what is true of our own lives
to the life of the race in time, you will have a fair
image of the relation of literature to civilization. The
great poets, the great ages of poetry, are such selected
and fortunate moments of the life of the race when
the power of emotion was roused and released, and es
pecially released in those harmonic forms of the rational

312 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

soul, poetry, art, truth, which are all essentially forms
of the reason; in these men the flowering of the soul
takes place in time. The race lives long upon the
memory of them, measures its own capacity by them,
and believes that in them, if anywhere, it touches the
divine pulses of the world. Poetic madness is thus no
more than the common emotional experience of men in
a form of higher intensity, and especially characterized
by the trait that it leaves an artistic product in which
the emotion is permanently recorded. Furthermore, it
should be observed that men of genius occupy very often
a position analogous to the primitive madman who does
not conform his behavior to the ways of the tribe; the
poet is by his nature somewhat lawless, especially when
under the control of his genius; and he is often regarded,
therefore, as dangerous, diabolical, denounced as an
atheist and sent off into the desert, disowned and de
famed; in other words, being the announcer of new
moods and new truths, he is distrusted by men of the
past and society as already organized in belief and prac
tice; genius, in fact, is the principle of variation in so
ciety, it is the element in which the new comes to birth;
and to the old the new always seems a madness because
it is in contradiction with that past experience which is
the test of sanity for the bulk of men. Poetic madness,
then, is characterized not only by the fact that it leaves
an artistic product, but also by the fact that this product
is a new birth in the world.

Let us consider now, in the light of these conceptions,
that course of changes in the beliefs and moods of men
that we commonly denominate progress, of which great
literatures are the record. You will remember that I
spoke of great literatures as being in the landscape of

INSPIRATION 313

«*

the mind like mountain ranges that mark the emotional
upheavals of the race; and I have just spoken of them
again as being the places where the race believes that it
touches the divine pulses of the world. It is convenient
to recur to the conception of Lucretius as he expresses
it in the great invocation with which he begins his poem;
he addresses the energy of nature and prays that this
power which brings forth the springtime will inspire his
mind; inspiration, for him, is this breathing and awaken
ing power in his mind, which is one with all power. He
conceived of man as evolved out of nature without any
divine intelligence in the process; the eye was not made
to see nor the ear to hear, but these senses had arisen
under the conditions existing and had become what they
could; that was his theory. Man is born in the world
of nature, and I suppose we shall all agree that man's
life in nature as he rose through stages of animal and
primitive life was a hard struggle; nature was not al
together his friend, and civilization slowly won seems
to have been won somewhat in spite of nature, and nature
is still very indifferent to man and his fortunes; man
exists by making what use he can of the foothold he has
won in the world of natural law. Man is also born into
a psychical world; that is, as his body is subject to natural
law, his mind is subject to another sphere of law, the
law of mind. Man's faculties have unfolded, we may
suppose, in the same way as his senses, under the con
ditions of the case; they were not created but have
evolved. Nor is there any reason to believe, so far as
I can see, that the world of mind is any more friendly
to man than the world of nature has shown itself to be.
Certainly the race began by being merged in profound
ignorance, and in its first steps it was plunged in universal

314 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

error, especially in respect to what we call higher truth.
It was long before the errors of the senses — as for
example that the sun moves round the earth — were
corrected. In the field of religion the first essays of
the race were universally what we now call savage super
stition, a realm of magic and senseless formulas, of the
worship of stones and animals, and it was long before
the conception of immortality itself was other than a
gloom or a curse; the way upward from the ideas and
moods of primitive man to such ideas and moods as
prevail in that small section of mankind which is called
enlightened was as hard a way as the way of material
civilization in nature has been. Man has always been
in peril, and has often suffered. Emotion is one great
part of psychical life; but it is plain that the history of
emotion has been as much a record of disaster as the
history of reason has been a record of error. If you
read the history of religion and attend to the kind and
quality and issue of emotion toward the divine, what an
extraordinary chapter it is of folly and pain and evil!
It is only slowly that emotion found out the useful and
guiding ways, the illuminating, the humanizing ways
of its life; just as slowly reason found out its true
methods in thought.

Poetry, at its birth, marks the point of victory in
this career, in this experimentation of emotional energy;
thereafter it gave the scale of value to emotion. Emo
tion had value in proportion as it became such inspira
tion as Lucretius prayed for, and passed into the intellect
and was there discharged in poetry, or music, or sculp
ture, or other forms of art, and, in the scientific realm,
of truth; there it evoked and bodied forth that principle
of harmony which seems to be the main fact of the psy-

INSPIRATION 315

chical world, the world of the perceptions, the world of
mind. The function of poetry is to qualify the emo
tional life of the race as the function of science is to
qualify its rational life. The test of emotion is its
capacity to produce poetry, as the test of reason
is its capacity to produce science. The wasteful and
destructive emotion, the intoxication and raving, the
physical exhaustion and death of Dionysus is laid off and
avoided; the creative emotion issuing hi harmonies of
the mind which we call the life of the spirit — this, the
inspiration of Apollo, is preferred. The soul has a sure
instinct in these matters; as a rule, it forgets the past
rapidly and gladly, but it holds in its memory and clings
invincibly to the great ages in which this harmony was
most given out — to poetry which is the most immortal
of human works, to art in all its culminating periods, to
Greece as the most fruitful mother of both beauty and
intellect under the guardianship of the Delphic inspira
tion.

The mood of the world changes. Race differs from
race, and age from age, hi mood as well as in ideas.
Each race and age creates its own poetry, according to
its place in civilization and the power of its life. I was
much struck by the mood of the Mohammedan religion —
by its sincerity, its dignity, and the fitness of the mood to
the nature of the people. The bare and quiet mosques
seemed to me a fitter place for the presence of the
living god of the desert, the god of boundless nature,
than any Christian cathedral I ever entered. In a
Christian church I am apt to feel something of the
confinement of a tomb, the air of one; the service seems
a watch for the resurrection. Not only does race differ
from race, but man from man in the mood of life; the

3i6 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

test of the mood, of its value in the scale of worth, is
its power to give out the noble dream, body forth a
poetic form for itself, or if not to create one freshly, to
find one among those offered by the poets, musicians,
artists, and prophets of the world. The service of the
poets is to provide such forms of feeling for mankind.
The variety of such forms now in the world is great in
every field of life, in the Bibles of the race, in the battle
songs of nations, in the love and death songs and the
faith songs of many ages. The range of value in these
is from the lowest to the highest; they are higher in pro
portion as they contain a more perfect beauty, a more
pure truth, a more simple harmony of many elements.

Is the inspiration, then, divine, and do all these forms
proceed from one infinite power that prompts them?
Many a poet and many a prophet has so affirmed it of
his own work — but when Mahomet says that he has
talked with God, there is a grave shaking of heads.
It would seem that Jehovah hardly escaped the curse
he visited upon Babel, but has himself spoken to the
nations in many tongues. It is not necessary to be too
well assured. The name of the god adds nothing to the
truth of the doctrine. The god of poetry is certainly,
as Tennyson says, the nameless one; the source of in
spiration is no more known than the source of the other
moods by which our being is sustained. It belongs to
our sense of the infinite in which man feels he vaguely
shares, that the inspiration is inexhaustible, and con
tinually puts forth a new form. The diversity of these
forms, viewed in their length and compass from the
beginning and through the world, is one miracle; the
second and greater miracle is that there is forever, age
after age, an ever new birth of the hitherto unknown and

INSPIRATION 317

unexpected. The mood of the world is forever renewed.
The poets contain this element of promise; in them is
the thing that shall be; they are the wings on which the
new sphere swims into our ken. The infinite energy,
of which Lucretius sang, has thus its times of putting
forth in the race, its springtides of fresh abundance, its
blossoming from age to age, from race to race; there is
no finality in any of its blossoms; but it never ceases to
put forth another and another strange and unknown
flower.

I have spoken to but little purpose if I have not already
made it plain that the poetic energy, the emotion and
the dream, the madness, is common to men and belongs
to the soul by its own nature. The poetic life is not
the privilege of some, but the path of all, and the passion
and the power to lead it is the measure of every man's
soul. Men may be great in other ways, great in trade
and politics and war; but they are great in soul in
proportion as they are poets. Just as in the original
dancing horde all were poets, so is it still; there may be
one among them who leads the dance, but all may join
hands and voices and follow on in unison. The poetic
impulse is universal; from the emotional urgency of life
itself no one can escape, but he may avail himself of it
only for the drunkenness of the senses, for the raving
physical waste of the untaught, unbridled madness; but
the man must have, besides the power of emotion which
nature pours into him, the wise use of this power; and
if he have wisdom in his soul, he will strive to be inducted
rather into the choir of Apollo, and behold and share
in those forms of beauty and truth in which the harmony
of the world is seen, for these forms of beauty and truth,
revealed in poetry and shaped in art, are the intellectual

318 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY

children of emotion. In their company and gazing upon
them and habituating his eyes to their presence, he will
form his own soul after their pattern; for these works
are so intimately bound with the emotion out of which
they sprang into being, they are so instinct with its
immortal vigor, that they generate the same emotion in
the beholder according as he has power to receive it and
take its form in his own soul; it is thus that the poets
are the guardians of the soul. Their office is to nourish
the poet that is in each one of us, and to free the poetic
energy in our bosoms in noble forms of our own private
life; for by commerce with the poets the creative energy
steals into the breast, and there builds with original force
hi the life that is most inviolably our own and unshared
by and unknown to the world. The great part of man
kind lead this life mostly under the phases of religion,
whose emotional modes are fixed in forms of dignity,
beauty and power sanctioned by long use; but in other
fields the poetic life is neglected.

I am the more struck, I think, as I grow older, with
the sense of how small a part of mankind, and how few
persons in any generation, really possess the higher fruits
of civilization; and consequently how frail is man's hold
even on the good which he has so hardly won. It is not
only liberty which can be quickly lost, but every supreme
blessing. How intermittent and brief the life of the
arts has been; how rare is a poetic age and how soon
extinct, if one looks at the general history of the world!
We are fortunate in the time of our birth, in our in
herited poetry, and in the flourishing of reason among
us; the opportunity for the poetic life is put into our
hands; all of us, if we will, can acquire that wise use of
emotion which I have tried to emphasize. For like all

INSPIRATION 319

power, emotion is a thing of danger; in the hands of
the foolish it often destroys them; and the wisest cannot
better secure himself than by developing his emotions
through the poets and their kindred. He will, so doing,
find that emotion is the servant of the highest reason;
for that principle of harmony which emotion gives out
and unveils in its finite forms is the element that reason
takes note of as the eye takes note of light. The true
opposition is between the infinite and the finite. Emo
tion lies in the sphere of the infinite; the infinite is
inexhaustible, and hence there is no finality in the works
of genius or in our own lives, as poets and artists are the
first to confess, for they have no sooner finished their
work than they are discontented with it and throw it
aside. You will never seize the poet in his poem, for
he has already left it; and the poem is only the prophet's
garment that he leaves behind him in your hands. In
spiration resides in the infinite, in emotion. Reason,
even the creative reason, is of the finite, the measured,
the known; its works are renewed from the great deep,
the throbbing of life itself, inexhaustibly; and hence after
each of the great and glorious toils of genius, each
emanation of the dream, whether individual or the labor
of a race, when the last stroke is struck, the last word
said, and the light begins to die off — then emotion, which
is of the infinite, again supervenes, still brooding in itself
some new world, some new gospel of gladder tidings of
greater joy.

THE POE CENTENARY

An address before the Bronx Society of
Arts and Sciences, New York, January 19,
1909, on the centenary of the birth of Poe,

THE POE CENTENARY1

WE are gathered here to do honor to genius. One
name is on our lips, one memory is in our hearts — that
of Edgar Allan Poe. Sixty years ago five mourners stood
round his grave; today in five great cities of the nation,
and elsewhere, men gather, as we do here, by scores and
hundreds, to commemorate his birth. It is because
genius, once born into life, is indestructible; it is safe
alike from any stroke of earthly fortune and from time's
attack, it is the immortal vigor of the race. Men do not
willingly let the memory of it die; men protect its mem
ory, and this is singularly true of Poe. No American
name in literature is, I think, so warmly cherished. It
is a pleasure, too, to recognize American genius, and
today it is an added grace that Poe was a child of the
South. He was, nevertheless, both in his genius and his
life, remarkably free from locality. It has not been suffi
ciently observed hitherto, I think, that more than any
of his contemporaries Poe occupied a central position in
his generation; he was better acquainted with the lite
rary product of the time, and both by his residence
and his letters was in touch with a wide area of the
country. He had lived in Richmond, Baltimore, Phila
delphia and New York, and had repeatedly visited New
England, and his correspondence reached Cincinnati, St.
Louis, Louisville, Tennessee and Georgia. More than
the others, he had national range.

Poe was a Southerner by his breeding; he was an
American by his career; he was a citizen of the world

1 Copyright, 1910, by The Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences.

323

324 THE POE CENTENARY

by his renown. It was a distinguishing trait of his
personality that when his first tales were hardly dry
from the press, he was already negotiating for publica
tion in England. He always belonged in spirit to the
larger world. The adventurous sense of it was his
cadet dream of joining the armies of Poland when he left
West Point The literary stamp of it was that in the
first lines of his criticism, unfledged critic that he was,
he set up a standard, not that of the leisured hearth of
Virginia or the newspaper offices of New York or the
parlor coteries of Boston, but the standard of all the
world; and though he contracted opportunism, that was
only the wear and tear of practical life on a fine ideal.

But it is not enough to be a critic. No critic ever
had his hundredth birthday celebrated. Poe was from
his youth an all-round man of letters. One trait which
peculiarly wins the respect of his fellow craftsmen, I
think, is that he never was anything else but a man of
letters. He never earned any money except by his
pen. He labored twenty years; for four of these he had
a salary as an editor, and a dozen times he spoke from
a platform; otherwise he was an unattached writer and
lived from day to day. I have no manner of doubt he
was sincere in saying that in thus adhering to his profes
sion he cheerfully bore poverty. His profession pauper
ized him. Is it not startling to think that we are
gathered here, in a city which is the shrine and throne
of gold, to do honor to a man who was a beggar all his
days? It is a striking tribute to true values. I make
no complaint of fate. Literature dedicates her sons
to the vow of worldly sacrifice. It has been so of old
time. He was not chosen to be poor more than the
others were chosen. Hawthorne and Emerson and Poe

THE POE CENTENARY 325

— the three most brilliant men in our literature — all
led meager lives, but Poe alone was the perfect victim.
Poe not only lived meagerly; at times he starved. Pov
erty is a terrible foe; it is thorough in its work on men
and nations; it kills. What a victory it is of the spirit
over its life, of the spirit that makes for immortality
through all disguises of human wretchedness — that we
have today in our minds and hearts, out of Poe's meager
and starved life, poetry, romance, the imagery that fades
not away! It is true that there is that in it which
terrifies; here is the legend and superscription of pain
and death; his music is the requiem of the soul that
breathed it forth. But his, too, is praise. Poe made
of his fate his victory; and, for the victim of life, that is
the master-stroke. We "bid fair peace be to his sable
shroud."

It is fit now, though late, to bring the laurel to him
who first sent the dark green leaf across the sea to
Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, and among ourselves
brought it to Hawthorne and Lowell in their obscure
years. And he has more to grace his memory — that
which all men value, the kindly recollection of those
who were most nigh him. Poe won the laurel and the
marble; but the mortal flower upon his grave is this —
that he endeared himself to his friends. He had many
friends. He had the best. There was no truer gentle
man then alive than Kennedy, who to the honor of
Baltimore befriended his early manhood. There was no
more kindly colleague than Willis, who gave him his
hand in New York and never drew it away. There were
no warmer comrades for mates in life than Thomas,
Halleck and Burr. Poe had also that power which is
one of the singularities of genius — the power to let

326 THE POE CENTENARY

the soul shine on all. His office-boy idolized him;
children suffered him to play with them; and every
wayfarer who touched his hand or had speech of him
on his wandering road, seems to have remembered the
light of that day forever.

Such are some of the thoughts that rise hi me on this
occasion. I seem to share them with you. These traits
of fortune and of character to which I have alluded,
belong to humanity, and link genius to the understanding
hearts of men; but genius is itself the most revealing
force of the soul; its manifestations are revelations of
our nature. The genius of Poe was one of the mani
fold forms of humanity; else it were hot genius; but
that man who would speak rightly of him must, in
his vision of human nature, have room and marge enough
to know that the spirit of life is Infinite in its flowering,
that the Shepherd of us all has many folds.

SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

An address delivered at the celebration of
the tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare,
under the auspices of the department of
English of Brown University, in Sayles Hall,
April 26, 1916

SHAKESPEARE

IT is not for any single voice to bear to Shakespeare the
plaudits of the theater. The mere multiplicity of the
events of this wide commemoration, the volume of uni
versal applause of the generations, force us to realize
the insignificance of any particular expression of the
general praise. As in a popular festival, each partici
pant, as he passes, follows his own whim in the common
carnival. The scholar will turn the leaves of his book
and linger caressingly over recondite difficulties of the
text or the meaning; the player will fit the costume to
the mind, and play the part from his bosom. Every
thing will go on as in a play. To-day all the world 's a
stage. For the most part, it is by the eye that Shakes
peare's world will be seen, embodied in a fantastic round
of revels, a general masquerade, a pageant, how varied,
how familiar, how interminable!

Shakespeare's world!

"Create he can
Forms more real than living man!"

Falstaff, Ariel, Titania's Indian Boy! How they throng
the memory as if coming through a hundred-gated
Thebes ! If it is by its transitoriness that we know life,
it is by its permanence that we know the ideal. There
is an eternal quality, an everlasting freshness, on the
intellectual creations of man, analogous to the morning
luster that still lingers on the Eros, the Apollo, the

329

330 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

Hermes, of ancient days. Who of English speech, bred
to traditions of his race, does not recognize Hamlet in
his "inky cloak" at a glance? Not to know him would
argue one's self untaught in the chief glories of his
language. With what a welcome eye we greet the
Henrys, old John of Gaunt, old York, and how many a
young prince of brief or long renown! We are able
to look in Prospero's Magic Book, though buried deeper
than ever plummet sounded. What a story is recorded
there, familiar to our sight since our childish eyes first
fell on some glorious picture of the luminous leaf! What
is most impressive to me, in a world whose character
istic it is to pass away, is the permanence of these ideal
incarnations of human life in its vital flow and infinite
variety. It is three hundred years since the Maker of
Magic passed; yet his figures seem to have left us but
an hour ago. They combine, as they recede, into a
Renaissance procession, wreathing along in another age
than ours; they compose, in the distance, into a true
triumph of time, with many a medieval and classical
element of look and gesture; and yet, ere the scene fades,
it has opened to our eyes, we know, the timeless vision
of life.

Two things in this great vision fascinate me: the
charm of the youths, the wisdom of mature age. It
is in the earlier plays that I find the spirit of April,
mounting with each year into a richer and more delicate
bloom. In Richard II, the tenderest of ill-starred
princes unfitted for a crown in this tough world, how
piercing is the poetic appeal! There is weakness in
his lyrical eloquence, but how it climbs the heavens
of youth! Biron, on the other hand, is too clever by
half for a true court, and needs the protection of a love's

SHAKESPEARE " 331

«*

nunnery to give his wits room and air. In this morn
ing mood Shakespeare seems like his own Mercury,
"New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill," —

so irresponsibly vital is his gaiety, the mere play of
his mind in all the ways of beauty and sentiment, of wit
and laughter, of courage as quick as it is perfect, of
grace in the action, and of courtesy, which is the grace
of the mind. No less appealing is the maturer atmos
phere of his manlier day: the grave demeanor of Theseus,
the inviolable peace of Prospero. In these two I find
touches of an almost Lucretian calm — that quiet,

"Yearned after by the wisest of the wise,
Passionless bride, divine tranquillity,"

but never so brought down to earth as in Shakespeare's
dream. For to my eyes the great vision, at either limit
of its range, in its charm of youth, in its wisdom of age,
wears the aspect of a dream. There Shakespeare's
poetry, as apart from its dramatic grasp of the passions,
was at its ripest. The fabric is compact of illusion; yet
this charm, this wisdom, are compelling in all lands.
You may sketch the frontiers of civilization by the
echo of Shakespeare's name. Truth sometimes uses a
dream as its best medium: such is poetic truth. There
is an abstract element in poetic truth; it is not for an
age, but for all time. Truth in Shakespeare — that
which greatly distinguishes him — is poetic truth. It
is capacity to express poetic truth that measures a civi
lization. To realize life in the abstract as noble or
beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon
it — that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the
chief modern example of this supreme faculty of man
kind.

332 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

Prospero, you remember, is sometimes taken as a
symbol of creative genius. He declares his might:

"graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art."

The characters, it is true, bear the old names that they
once bore in history or romance before their waking; but
when they walk a second time, they are made of a finer
than earthly substance, they have more than mortal
speech; they have suffered an ideal change. They are
creatures seen by the mind's eye. They are no longer
individuals; a universal element has entered into them,
wherein if any man look he sees his own face. These
are not men, but man; it is thence that they are im
mortal in literature. The power of evocation, such as
Prospero describes it, is the most convincing proof of
genius. Evocation is its royal stamp. So the statue
slept in marble until Michael Angelo evoked it from the
block; so music sleeps until it is evoked from the chords;
so the Virgin's face is evoked from the canvas. The
vision seems magical at its first creation, whatever be
the art through whose medium it comes.

Art, thus, from the beginning of civilization has brought
new worlds into being. They blaze out like intermittent
stars and fade away: the divine sphere of Plato's youths,
the world of Plutarch's men, the thronged region of the
Renaissance romances whence came Shakespeare's ideal
women. How many worlds of art there have been! how
strange it is to fall in with one of them unexpectedly,
like some lost province of the mind or some far country
that we know not of! I remember years ago at Naples
coming upon the Pompeian painting of the ancient time.

SHAKESPEARE 333

It was then that the figures of the mythological world
and the legendary age of Greece first became visible
images to me — a Theseus, a Jason, a Medea; and the
Greek past, which had lain in my mind in a sculptural
form rather than pictorially, took on the romanc of
color with a certain strangeness in the look of the mer
— a racial strangeness. It was as if I had wandered
into a forgotten chamber of the world. Art, in all the
fields of the imagination, has many of these lost provinces
in its domain, stretching over the centuries of man's
various fortunes with the soul.

There is something foreign to us in any past; but the
past is known to us, in its spiritual part, only by these
evocations embodying the passions of life. They are
not historic; they are ideal. They are not individual;
they are abstract. They are more or less intelligible
according to our own understanding powers; but taken
together, they constitute the true story of man's life.
As we review the record, even to the "dark backward
and abysm of time," notwithstanding all strangeness in
the aspect of the vision under the varying light of time's
changes, these evocations of art in all its forms are the
clearest memorial of the soul's life, age after age. It is
the least encumbered with unconcerning things. It
writes one truth large on the ruins of time in each great
age, whatever be the city or the people: this truth —
that it is the victory in the field of the spirit that decides
a nation's glory.

Shakespeare is the chief glory of England. What
Homer was to the ancient world, Virgil to imperial Rome,
Dante to medieval Italy, that Shakespeare was to the
English. His name, as we envisage it, breaks, like a
constellation, into stars, some major some minor, a elus-

334 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

ter of world-names now — Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Mac
beth, a progeny endless as Banquo's line. Each charac
ter clothes himself with a new world — as it were, new
heavens and a new earth. What noble landscapes! the
forest of Arden, the Midsummer Wood, the enchanted
isle, Venice, Verona, Rome! In the art of evocation
Shakespeare held a master's wand. Scarce any other
poet seems so facile and so various in creation. It is,
perhaps, an error of perspective that gives so strong
a character of multiplicity to his imaginative world.
The drama has crowded its own stage in every poetic
land. There was much detail and variety in Virgil, if
one attends to them, in the changeful flow of the verse.
Shakespeare seems to us more abundant, too, in part
because we are native to his world. It was our child
hood region. I began to know his work, where I like
to think he first made acquaintance with himself, in the
Histories. I first saw him, I remember, in that company
of English Kings, which is one of the bravest panoramas
of history. Every verse in those great chronicles vi
brates with English blood. It was thus as a national
poet that he first trod the stage. To this day there
is no such vital history as he wrote, be the scene where
it may. In him Holinshed and even Plutarch, noble as
they are in their own speech, leapt to a life above life.
But it is the Rose of England that he most summons
from the dust. It is a baptism of patriotism for a boy
to be nursed on the English plays. Shakespeare was so
great an Englishman from the first.

"This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;

SHAKESPEARE 335

«*

This fortress built by Nature for herself . . .

This precious stone set in the silver sea, . . .

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England! "

With what a flow, with what a strength, with what a
radiance the verse mounts! And in many another pas
sage of martial ardor or the victorious cry of arms, one
hears the living echo of Agincourt still pulsing along that
far horizon-air. Yet this was but the golden portal of
Shakespeare's verse.

The first incarnation of his genius was in history;
the last incarnation, more powerfully spiritual, was in
fate. There was an interval when his spirit walked in an
enchanted pastoral land, sown with wild forest and vistas
of Italy; and there was an afterworld of poetic romance,
from which everything except pure reality has been elim
inated, which was his farewell to life. In these Come
dies of either group there was the glamour of another age
than ours. In the Histories and Tragedies we encounter
a reality more distinctly of our world — a reality seen
with the seriousness of youth in the one, with the
seriousness of age in the other. What gives to the
Comedies their tranquil atmosphere, their touch of
fantasy, their other-worldliness, is the Renaissance, the
preceding age out of which their characters trooped,
bringing their landscape with them, together with their
costume, revels, and speech. The substance of the
Comedies is the very stuff of the Renaissance in its
iearthly look and mortal feeling. It is a world of acci
dents garbed in romance — the world of the Renaissance
imagination. In the Tragedies, on the other hand, the
garment of Time is stripped off. The world may be
Denmark or Scotland; it is indifferent. Cyprus and
Britain are but names. It is a world of realities, the

336 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

world of the stark soul. It is true that whatever be
the sensible garniture of the play, its times, occasions
and mental modes, the ideas are still the ideas of the
Renaissance. Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation
of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the
Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood
of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the
child of that great movement, and marks its height as
it penetrated the North with civilization. That was his
world-position. It made him even a greater European
than he was a great Englishman, and gave him a vaster
country than his nativity conferred. His genius exceeds
his age, and is a universal possession; and this is because
he transcended the accidents of the Renaissance, fair
and far-spread as they were and much as he employed
them; and in the great tragedies which seem at times
supra-mortal, while still using the spell of the ideas that
the Renaissance gave him, read the fates of men, in a
universal tongue.

Every great movement, nevertheless, such as we name
universal, has the limitations of its arc. Our under
standing of Shakespeare already depends largely on the
vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each
man must live in his own generation, as the saying is;
but the generations are bound together by the golden
links of the great tradition of civilization. A writer is
justly called universal when he is understood within the
limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a
country or an age. Seasonal changes, as it were, take
place in history, when there is practically an almost
universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of
life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and
medieval time, the medieval and the modern. The

SHAKESPEARE 337

immense amount of commentary on Shakespeare proves
the decay of his material, and of his modes of thought
and expression, quite as much as it illustrates his pro
fundity. The Renaissance has long been a past age, and
now rapidly recedes. Shakespeare's scenic world, at
least, begins to have the strangeness of aspect which I
said I first recognized in Pompeian painting. Much in
the present festivals in his memory — reconstructions of
his epoch — is antiquarian. He has still his lightning-
stroke at the moment of fate, his musical eloquence in
speech, his lovely settings of emotion; but the eye is
blind that does not see that Shakespeare's imaged world
is as remote as

"all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come."

Art, I know, by the apparent contemporaneity of its
masterpieces denies time. Genius has an eternal quality
in its substance. Beauty has ever las tingness. I walk
through the museum of Athens, by the calm bas-reliefs
of the farewells of death, with no thought of antiquity.
I read a knightly romance as if the morning sunlight
still bathed its green forest and shining armor. The
violets I find in my books are the same that grow in my
garden. Life is always a present moment. But when
art, like Prospero plucking off his magic garment, lays
aside its apparent contemporaneity — that illusion of
eternity which is implicit in our consciousness of the
present moment — it resumes mortality; it contracts
decay; it disintegrates into history. Shakespeare's art
suffers the common fate — yet with a difference, with
an immortal greatness. It grows remote. Strangeness
creeps into its aspect. But it is equal to its peers, and

338 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

still looks at us with the unfathomed eyes of Apollo or
of Oedipus.

The changelessness of art depends upon the slowness
of change in man's appreciation of it. That change may
be as gradual as a summer's day; it may be as abrupt
as an earthquake rift; but finally it transforms a civiliza
tion. Through whatever secular changes, the expression
in the eyes of life is mystery. Such, too, is the final
expression in the eyes of art. To me the expression
seems more and more enigmatic as art recedes. The
mystery of the fates of men is, I think, best expressed in
English with poetic truth in the tragedies of Shake
speare, as the beauty of life is best displayed in his
pastoral comedies and kindred plays. However time
may pluck at them, they still speak a universal language.
It is true that Shakespeare concentrated the Renaissance
age, and that was another world than ours; we see it in
an evening light; but we are its lineal children and its
language is native to our minds. No greater age ever
robed humanity in a shining garment. The garment
may fade, but the soul remembers long its great epochs
and makes of their master-spirits its sacred guardians;
for the unseen commonwealth, the true State, is spiritual,
and has spiritual guardians.

Art — and I always mean to include in the general
term the fine art of literature — art, so understood, is
the solvent of the nations. That is how Shakespeare
came to be a great European. The Renaissance liber
ated him from nationality in a provincial sense. He was
one of the fathers, and is now a chief pillar, of the
invisible republic of letters, or intellectual State, which
is the core of modern civilization. Impalpable as any
ideal commonwealth of old thinkers, this State is a

SHAKESPEARE 339

9

spiritual reality. Shakespeare helped materially to shape
its present form. The community of scholars in medie
val days rested on a universal language, Latin. The
Renaissance broke the bonds of that great tongue, rich
with the accumulations of thought and knowledge
through the centuries of its millennial career; but not
before a common mold of thought had been established
in the diverse nations, and mental intercommunication
between them assured. Latinity receded from the world
in all forms, especially in language; but art still made a
universal appeal in so far as it spoke directly to the
senses in painting and sculpture, architecture and music;
and though poetic art uses a screen of language and
approaches the senses through the mind, its creations,
when they become visible through the screen of lan
guage, are found to be woven of the same original stuff
that the sister arts employ.

There is this kinship and essential identity in all the
arts. Shakespeare, indeed, employed his special tongue,
the English, with a superb touch on its forms of expres
sion; but far greater than any linguistic skill was that
creative might with which, time and again, he modeled
a world of the universal mind, so compact of loveliness,
sweetness, or grandeur that the words are but its initial
harmonies. It is in this world of the mind that he is so
great a master. Therefore other realms than England
quickly stripped the screen of language from his work
and made him European by their diverse tongues as he
already embodied the intellectual fires and romantic
horizons of the general age. He contributed powerfully,
by his sheer inner worth and charm as a poet, to the
transfusion of national cultures which has long charac
terized western civilization, has made its nations intelleo

340 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

tually hospitable, and has most continued the inheritance
of that great tradition which poured originally from
antiquity, and through the Renaissance overspread
Europ?. It is thus, however slowly, that the world is
unified. The republic of letters has no frontiers.

"Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tides of war."

\
It is a spiritual State, and bears in its hands "olives of

endless peace."

Shakespeare, through embodying the Renaissance, was
thus a main force in "humanizing," in the scholarly
sense, the modern age. By the brilliancy of his genius
he conciliated nations. This was to serve humanity
greatly. It should not be forgotten on his anniversary.
But the effect of Shakespeare historically on world-cur
rents is less to us to-day than his elemental magic in
the ways of genius. Genius is known by its works.
There it is obvious to all; but who would dare analyze
its creative light? I only venture the suggestion that
one characteristic of genius in its works is immediate
vision — what is sometimes called intuitive vision —
and that one measure of its force is the intensity of the
vision. Genius in its creative works does not proceed
by calculation, by any adaption of means to ends, or by
any mode of mechanical processes. It uses neither fore
sight nor afterthought; its works are made at a single
cast. That is why I have spoken of its works in the
arts as "evocations." The summons is instantaneous,
and instantly obeyed. Genius does not proceed as if
by mental logic from step to step; it does not reason
things out; it makes no use of analysis. It sees its
object as if by revelation, as an image disclosed. It

SHAKESPEARE 341

resembles rather, in its operation, the processes of vital
growth. However long may be the unconscious prepa
ration of nature, the plant blossoms in a night — a single
unguessed and exquisite bloom. The vision of genius
comes as a whole and instantaneous, as a face floats into
the air of memory.

There is this immediacy in the creations of art as they
arise in the mind. So little are they foreseen that they
are always a surprise. So little are they planned that
they often puzzle their own creator to interpret them.
So little are they indebted to ordinary reason that
poets have always called them "inspirations." They
do not spring from observation, however long or
profound. Never do they repeat any experience of the
actual. They are free from the world of nature. These
creations have a world of their own — a mental world.
Shakespeare's visible world is in "the mind's eye." The
mental world is a true world, like nature; but it contains
greater reality. Balzac used to say, turning from his
callers to his books — "Now for real people." A uni
versal element enters into the mental world. It is the
sphere of poetic truth, Shakespeare's world. It was the
place of his vision of life. Nothing of Hamlet, Lear,
Othello, Macbeth, was ever actual in experience; nothing
such as their fatal histories was ever observed. The truth
their souls contain is purely mental; it is poetic truth.
Shakespeare presents truth in a vision of that world
which exists only in "the mind's eye." Yet who does
not perceive that his world is more "real than living
man," and unveils the fates of men with a revealing
range and search beyond nature? It is here that genius
inhabits and creates.

In this poetic world Shakespeare, as he matured, de-

342 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

veloped in his genius a penetration and intensity that
seem not only beyond nature, but at times beyond mor
tal power. It is in the four great tragedies that he most
impresses us so. Tragedy is for youth. Nature draws
a film over the eyes of youth which tempers the sight to
that fierce light; but for older eyes,

"Grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars,"

it is too strong a ray. Even in youth one sometimes
lays down the book. The mind turns from the four
tragedies to the earlier "moonlight and music and feel
ing" of the charmed meadows and woods and cities of
the pastoral plays and their kin, much as Tennyson
turned from Milton's angel hosts to delights of Paradise:

"Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
And brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm."

So, too, one turns from the "Inferno" of Dante to the
sweetness and glory of the "Paradise." The genius of the
tragedies is, indeed, more transcendent; but there is
greater fascination in beauty than in terror. It may
be noticed that the tragedies are full of vision, not doc
trine. No judgment is passed on what is revealed. It
is as if the poet said, "Look, and pass." This is what I
have called the world of the stark soul. At times it
scarcely suffers words. The pastoral comedies, on the
other hand, are garmented with lovely phrase. They
are not free from melancholy shades, as at the close of
"Love's Labor's Lost." "The scene begins to cloud,"
says Biron, but it is only with natural grief. For the
most part the tragic lot of man is in the background, if
it intrude at all. We know the sadness of Antonio, in

SHAKESPEARE 343

the "Merchant of Venice," but not what secrets of mor
tality it concealed.

In the pastoral comedies, as I somewhat inaptly term
them from their sentiment rather than from their land
scape, we are in the old, almost antique world of romance.
Romanticism had its nest in Greece. We feel its nativity
in such a play as "Pericles." The chance adventures of
travel, the outlandish regions, the surprising incidents,
the shipwrecks, the general sense of a roving world —
in brief, a thousand details of composition — remind
us how recently the drama had emerged from chaos of
romantic fiction. The world of Shakespeare is full of
this variety in detail, like a book of the Italian Renais
sance, and with the variety there blended an omnipresent
strangeness equally characterizing that age of which the
very breath was mental discovery. The human spirit
was like an immigrant in a new country: anything might
happen there. The tradition of the past is felt in Shake
speare's story, both in its materials and its methods of
narration; but it is a past whose breath of life was ro
mance, and awoke in Shakespeare's mind as in a world
about to be born. Shakespeare was great as an English
man; he was greater as an emanation of the Renaissance
which he drew into himself; but, greatest of all, he was
the blazing star of romanticism, when its unearthly beauty
took possession of the European world.

It is characteristic of genius when it is greatest, to
include a broad arc of man's progress in its own career.
Thus practically an entire cycle of romantic art may
be observed in Shakespeare's drama. It began in archa
ism 1 it ended in a climax of perfection. It is multiple
and composite, characterized by an incessant change
of theme and heterogeneity of material. It has the mis-

344 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

cellaneousness as well as the large horizons of the Eliza
bethan mind. It is a drama as romantic in method as
in subject. Exuberance is the quality of the creative
genius that produced it, and infinite variety marks its
works. His genius is ever companioned by a wandering
spirit. Consider the many disguises in which he uses the
device of the episode, as, for instance, the play within
the play, the introduced dance or masque, the tale, the
soliloquy, or more subtly in the brief idyllic passages that
are for poetry what "purple patches'7 are for rhetoric.
Yet, however far or often genius may accompany this
wandering elf, it keeps within the magic limit which
holds all in true unity. This romantic surface, like a
phosphorescence playing over the dramas, is an incessant
and growing phenomenon of Shakespeare's art. Not less
obvious is the unity of feeling in them — what is some
times called "keeping" — which is an essential part of
romantic unity, and which operates with such force in
Shakespeare as to place each of his plays in a world of
its own.

The singularity of his genius is that while expressing
itself so admirably that at each new disclosure it seems
to have arrived at perfection in its kind, it grows
nobler, grander, or sweeter at each new creation. It
belongs to most of us to seize on some single aspect of
art, and to cleave to it. Taste, by a reversion of type,
may recur to the archaic and primitive, especially under
the impulse of a preference for simplicity. It may, at
least, without going to such lengths, require that there
be only few elements in high beauty — a single bloom in
an isolated vase, or, as the custom now often is in mu
seums, one supreme statue in a room dedicated to it.
Taste, such as this, finds romantic art too distracting

SHAKESPEARE 345

in theme, too overwhelming in feeling. The tragedies
and later romances have too much depth of thought,
too much richness of decoration, too much mystery
(whether of terror or beauty), for minds of such a
caliber. At most they find pleasure in the golden come
dies that sprang to light before Shakespeare's genius
reached its climax of power.

These comedies, which for many are the center of
delight, if not of worship, in Shakespeare's work, have a
smoothness and softness of execution and effect, some
what Victorian in the quality of their art, if I may ven
ture to say so, somewhat Tennysonian in exquisiteness
of impression: not that Shakespeare resembles Tenny
son in style, but there is a kinship of genius between
them at that stage of Shakespeare. This period of
smoothness and softness in art marks a point of per
fection which lasts but a moment. Art roughens again,
in mood and act, as it bends to the new age. There is
a Michael Angelo for a Rafael then; or the Pergamon
marbles replace the Parthenon. It may be for better
or for worse, but the new age will have its way. The
peculiarity in Shakespeare's case is that he himself
brought in the new age, with the tragedies and the last
romances. Though Webster and Ford followed him,
he had already struck the hour. The cycle of romantic
art in the drama was complete, though there might be
a long after-play of its fires.

Shakespeare not only embodied the spirit of romantic
art in his own age; he heralded a greater movement
in time. Art has a double visage: it looks before and
after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ
of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other
hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been

346 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind;
economizes the energy of genius. Formalism supports
feebler spirits, directs, and restrains. Formalism is a
backward looking mode, and archaic with respect to its
own time. Romance plows in the field of the future
^as in an eternal spring. It is true that the reaction from
Shakespeare's art was extreme in England. An intellec
tual, rather than a poetic, age succeeded. But when the
earth began to expand again with an April season of the
world, how the seed of romanticism sprang everywhere,
like grass, as if it were life's natural verdure! Romantic
art did not then, indeed, put forth one all-embracing
genius, like Shakespeare; it required a Byron, a Tenny
son, and a Browning to complete the cycle in our age
just past; but the voice of the modern triad is that of
romance once more a-wing for a supreme flight. The
Renaissance found a new birth in Keats and Shelley
and many another; and though romanticism, spreading
through a wide circle of art and thought, seems less
exclusively, less predominantly literary, in that age of
the nineteenth century, it gave breath to a whole spiritual
movement. Its leaders were not more indebted to Shake
speare than to the other great spiritual guardians, as I
have called them, of the international State that exists
invisibly at the core of modern civilization; but they are
indebted to him, as one of those guardians, there sitting
with his peers.

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than
anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts
thought in his eulogy. "The myriad-minded one" is
his best designation. Wholly apart, however, from his
extraordinary mental inclusiveness, the comprehensive
grasp and intuitive penetration of his visionary genius,

SHAKESPEARE 347

such that he seemed to create worlds of being like
separate stars — and apart also from the substance of
wisdom which the dramas contained, he was especially
wonderful, let me add, as a man of letters merely — that
is, as a man accustomed to express ideas in written words.
An excess of linguistic power over language, equally with
an excess of metrical power over verse, characterized the
latest plays. A marvelous power of expression over
language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in
his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language
as of the bonds of meter. But he was something more
and other than literary. He was a wonderful example
of the human spirit, and in his creative power affects
one with a sense of the inexplicable, like a natural
force. Above all, he was intensely human in his spiritu
ality; that is why he is so often thought unspiritual.
Hence he gathers the world under the spell of his genius.
It is thus that he is beheld at last as an arch-leader in
the world of the spirit of man — one of those few who,
however distant in country or epoch, are, after centuries,
the true "sons of memory."

I have set forth Shakespeare, you perceive, immortal
as he is, in the light of an historic world lapsing now into
the shadows of time. I remember once, when I was
sailing over the Aegean Sea northward from Athens, I
saw what was afterward for me a long-recollected scene.
Naturally my eyes were fastened on the Parthenon, visible
from afar. Shores and promontories slowly became ob
scure in the growing distance. At last nothing remained
except the temple seen against the setting sun. Every
touch of earth had departed from it — a vision as it were
in the golden west. I thought how some young Ionian,
approaching, thus saw it under the dawn, ages since,

348 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS

with the glint on Athene's lifted spear — first a gleam,
then the temple, then the "darling city." I saw it in
my departure, garmented with light, a ruin alone in the
sun. I was to me then the symbol of antique beauty.
It is so that I see Shakespeare's world in the light of a
receding age.

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

An address before the Salem Athenaeum
at the formal opening of Plummer Hall,
October 2, 1907

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

MR. PRESIDENT:

I am accustomed to say that Essex County is the
most blessed spot on the earth's surface, for ordi
nary human life. If I am pressed for some explanation,
I own that possibly filial affection enters into my judg
ment, but that it seems to me that material comfort
is more widely distributed here than elsewhere through
the whole population, and especially that it is the best
place to bring up a boy in. It is not the wealthiest of
communities; it is not the most intellectual; it is the
home neither of art nor manners. In these respects
New York, Paris and Italy surpass it. It is not the most
beautiful in scenery nor the most suave in atmosphere.
I should hesitate to say that it is the most civilized.
The marks of civilization are hard to name. Commonly
each nation or era points to its own characteristic
achievement as the mark of civilization: Tyre to its
wealth, Athens to letters and the arts, Rome and Eng
land to government. But wealth has flourished in all
civilizations, whether as flocks and herds, hoards of
jewels and coins, trade privilege, stock-certificates, with
out much changing its character in any age or environ
ment; letters and arts appear and disappear like the
cities they illuminate and adorn; spiritual lives have
been lived in the midst of revolting conditions of blood,
brutality and ignorance in many lands and times, capital
inventions were made ages ago in China, and the most

351

352 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

vaunted of modern inventions hardly equals in dignity
and power that old invention of the alphabet. It is
truly hard to say in what civilization consists, if one
looks at the long career of men justly. Yet, obeying the
universal influence which guides men's thoughts on this
matter along the lines of their own efforts, in this epoch
of democracy it has seemed to me that one mark of ad
vancing civilization now is the degree to which we suc
ceed in obviating the natural or artificial inequalities
in the condition of men at large; or, in a word, one meas
ure of our own civilization is our power to approach
social justice. It is no part of my own dream to divide
equally the material goods of men; but, a free career
being left to personal initiative and its rewards, it does
seem to me that such a portion of material wealth in
the community should be set aside as to secure to all
citizens equal ownership in and benefit from the great
fruits of civilization, which should be national and not
personal possessions. I mean, for example, a public
right to the benefits of science, as instanced in medi
cine or engineering and illustrated by public hospitals
and water-supply; or to the benefits of elementary or
higher knowledge as illustrated in public schools and
colleges; or to the benefits of art as illustrated in muse
ums, parks, monuments, and all that adorns a city and
softens the life of its people. That is a fortunate city
in which the universal human wants are rationally met
or alleviated by public means, so that its citizens feel
an equal ownership, not in the material accumulation
of wealth, but in the accumulation of civilizing power
in the community to better the condition of men — to
secure health, intelligence, enjoyment, relief, opportunity,
within the limits of what life allows. Such a community

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 353

puts in the breast of every man born into it the most
precious of all human possessions — hope. I wish that
the mark of citizenship were less exclusively thought of
as the right to vote, and thereby share in government,
which (as we all know) is often a very illusory thing;
but rather as the right to share in the common good,
secured by public wealth — the good of education, health,
recreation, the many forms of public property and ex
penditure, of which the fruition is diffused through every
home like daily dividends. There is little need to expand
upon a theme which, more or less clearly understood,
is the ideal of all of us, and one that we inherit; but I
desire to make plain why it is that I merely hesitated to
describe our county as, in the line of our efforts, an
uncommonly civilized spot. Surely there are few places
on the earth's surface so democratically peopled, in the
best sense; few, where under the operation of rightful
taxation and private beneficence the public wealth has
brought the goods of modern life, the fruits of progress,
so within reach of whosoever will to take them and home
to every door; few where the accumulated civilizing power
of the community is a possession held in common.
This city is excellently supplied by its public institutions
and otherwise with the means of storing and communi
cating this wealth; and it is especially distinguished by
the little group of institutions of the scientific and liter
ary life, seldom found so happily united — the Athenaeum,
the Essex Institute, the East India Marine Society, and
the Peabody Academy, which have grown up together,
and, as it were, in the same shell. They are the crown
of the city, and stand to it in the place of a University,
and one of the best kind, one not founded, but native
to the city, growing out of its own past, body of its body,

354 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

and soul of its own soul. It is a remarkable and in
structive phenomenon in American culture.

What is most useful to observe is that our democracy,
our socialism, our use of the public wealth for the com
mon good as a matter of just right, is not a brand-new
thing, something theoretic and reformatory; but is our
tradition from the past; it is home-sprung and home-bred.
These various societies are rooted in old days. To in
quire into their history is like excavating ancient cities;
under each we find a predecessor, sometimes more than
one. You are familiar with the origins of the Athe
naeum, and I shall only touch upon them to illustrate
other matters. It is proper to recall the great name of
Franklin, whose luminous genius was the ruling star
of the second age of the colonies, when, in the growth
of its secular and commercial life, the lines of the nation
began to be molded. Various as were his works, and
marvelous as was his forecasting wisdom, it is doubtful,
in view of the results, whether any of his minor plans
gathered such increase of power, as it grew, as did his
founding of the subscription Social Library in Phila
delphia, which may fairly be looked on as the father of
the public libraries of the United States. The principle
of associated effort was dear to him, and in this case it
was put to great uses. The Salem Social Library was
founded in 1760, and was the third in the country. It
is true that this was a full generation after Franklin, but
things moved slowly in those days. The point of interest
is that here was the first place in Massachusetts where
Franklin's idea germinated. A still greater distinction,
as it seems to me, belongs to the second of the two libra
ries that underlay the Athenaeum, that called the Phil
osophical Library, which was at that time, I suppose,

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 355

unique in the country, and whose influence was one of
the springs of the scientific studies that have distin
guished this city. It was, as you all know, a prize of
war; but I do not find in your records any precise ac
count of its capture.

It was on the homeward voyage from Bilboa that the
ship "Pilgrim," Captain Joseph Robinson commanding,
hailing from Beverly, after a successful privateering
cruise, fell in, on January 5, 1781, with the British ship,
"Mars." The opponents were not unevenly matched.
The "Pilgrim" was of two hundred tons burden, and car
ried sixteen nine-pound cannon and a crew of one hun
dred and forty men; the "Mars" was frigate-built, four
hundred and fifty tons mounting twenty-four carriage
guns, and manned by a crew of one hundred men. The
combat lasted over three hours, and is described as one
of the most severe and desperate sea-fights of the Revo
lution; at the end, both ships being much shattered and
disabled and the "Mars" having lost her captain and five
men killed, with eighteen wounded, victory rested with
the Americans. The "Pilgrim" reached Beverly, Febru
ary 9, and was followed by her prize on the i3th. The
ship and cargo, having been duly condemned, were adver
tised for sale April 1 1 ; but owing to a severe storm the
auction was postponed until April 17. It was at this
sale that, with the friendly co-operation of Andrew and
John Cabot, owners, the philosophical library belonging
to Dr. Richard Kirwan of Dublin, was sold for a small
sum to the group of gentlemen and scholars, inspired
by the Rev. Joseph Willard of Beverly, who formed
themselves into a small association for its common use.
It was kept in the minister's house near the Common, in
a room which was in my boyhood still known as "Mr.

356 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

Willard's study," and where — and the memory makes
me feel less a stranger here — I used often to play as a
child. It was a remarkable body of men who gathered
in that room to form the association. We are apt to
think of those old elders as only less forbidding in their
lives and persons than in their portraits, and doubtless
they were very solemn folk; but by the time of the
Revolution other ranks of life had mixed with the old
clergy, and what strikes us in this particular gathering
was the infusion of learning and science in the circle.
It was less a clerical than a scholarly group; and it is
surprising to find on the obscure lane of a small colonial
town, such as Beverly then was, a group of seven men
gathered in the hard times of the Revolution to advance
the cause of science in its higher forms, and to use the
opportunity that the chance of war had cast their way
to prosper the great works of peace. It is remarkable,
too, to find such distinction in the group. Joseph Wil-
lard, the mover of the enterprise, was afterward the first
president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and also president of Harvard College; Joshua Fisher,
also of Beverly, was the first president of the Massa
chusetts Medical Society; Manassah Cutler, of Ipswich,
besides other claims to distinction, was the founder of
the State of Ohio. The remaining four, Barnard, Prince,
Holyoke and Orne, of this city, are too well known in
its traditions to require any reminder here of their honor
able careers. This little club of learned men, with addi
tions from time to time of other eminent names, con
tinued the library and finally handed it on to the Athe
naeum. At the conclusion of the war they offered an
indemnity to the original owner, Dr. Kirwan, who de
clined it with an expression of his happiness in finding

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 357

that his library had met with such good fortune and
served so excellent a use. To me this little story of how
the scientific library reached our coasts is a very pic
turesque incident of the Revolution; the gallant sea-
fight, the circle in Mr. Willard's study, the offer of rec
ompense make up a complete and romantic tale; it
carries off the honors of both war and peace.

I will not enter further into details of the history
of the Athenaeum. They are well known to you; but
on such an occasion as this it is proper, and belongs to
filial piety, to refresh our minds with the remembrance
of our debt to the past and to recall its character. The
library thus founded on the one hand after the example
of Franklin and on the other by the ardor for science,
with additions made by a new subscription, became
nearly a century ago the Athenaeum. It may truly be
described as one of the earliest hearths of culture in
our country; and its destiny was worthy of its origins.
It is a great distinction for this library that it sheltered
in their youth two of the first-born men of genius in this
country — one, foremost in science, and one foremost in
literature. Here Nathaniel Bowditch found at once the
broad horizons of science, and learned its dignity, its
compass and methods in the most effective way in which
they can appeal to the imagination and apprehension of
youth, by the mere sight of great monuments of its
literature in books; here he made his mind exact, search
ing and practical, and informed with true learning. He
was aware of his debt, the modes of which are easily
seen, and he remembered it throughout his life, and at
his death by a grateful bequest. Here Hawthorne, in
the bitter years of his solitude found society, and in his
poverty the riches that neither moth nor rust corrupt

358 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

and that pass not away. If the modes of his debt are
less plain in his works, that belongs to the secret of
the alchemy of genius which is wonderful in its processes
and transformations. He must have begun to read here
shortly after his return from college, if not earlier, for
his family had a connection with the library. One of
his name was a founder of the Athenaeum; his aunt, Mary
Manning, had a share in 1827, and the next year trans-
fered it to him, and he remained a proprietor until Feb
ruary 21, 1839, when he removed to Boston; and during
his second residence in Salem he again became a proprie
tor for nearly three years, from January 6, 1848, to
November 29, 1850, when with the winning of his fame
he left his native town to be the citizen of his country
forever. The lists of his borrowings from the library
are still in existence, and have been printed; but the
closest scrutiny shows little direct obligation in his tales
and romances to the books he read. He was a discursive
reader, and read — it seems to me — mostly to store his
mind with travel, history, literature. His genius is
singularly original, a brooding mind such as would natu
rally spring from his sea-ancestry; heredity underlay his
imagination; but the intellectual store that supported it,
all that one draws from books, was given by this library.
Yet were it only solace that he derived from his reading
here, it was a great honor to this library to have afforded
it to so solitary and unbefriended a genius through the
years of his trial. The memory of Hawthorne's presence
here is that which will longest abide.

There is a twofold moral which so naturally flows from
the history of the Athenaeum that — though I had no
thought of bringing you counsel — yet I will not forbear
to draw. After all, too, this little group of Salem insti-

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 359

tutions is not only the crown of the city, but honors the
whole county; here its history is stored, its ideals illus
trated and its fame most borne through the world. The
first part of the moral is that this library is by its own
traditions dedicated, as it were, to science and literature.
It was agreed when the Athenaeum took over the Phil
osophical Library that it would continue to subscribe to
the great sets of publications; and this was done. The
city has certainly owed something of its scientific repute
in later days, to the presence of these books and to their
example. It would seem the mere fulfillment of its ro
mantic birth that here in this library there should always
be a body of sound science in its highest forms. In a
similar way it would seem natural that Hawthorne's
library should always hold the established literature of
the world. I was struck in reading over the titles of the
catalogue of 1858 with the excellence of the collection.
I trust that in the last half century the same standard
has been maintained. It might be thought that the duty
I indicate should be devolved on the Public Library,
since that, too, has been happily established in the city;
but a Public Library is necessarily bound to a popular
expenditure of its money. This little group of institu
tions, to which I have so often referred, offers an un
usual opportunity; it naturally suggests co-operation
and the further development of that associated effort
which Franklin wisely advised. In many Italian cities,
no larger if so large as Salem, there have long been
academies, which have bred scholars of distinction and
have advanced knowledge of all kinds; if the Athenaeum
were developed along the lines of its original design,
it might well be a powerful support of such associations.
The idea, however, may even take a larger scope. You

360 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

have, doubtless, observed that of late the university
in this country tends to become, what it was of old in
Italy and Europe generally, a municipal institution.
New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, Cleveland,
to name no others, have universities which are, ex
plicitly or practically, city institutions. Buffalo is now
considering the establishment of such a university. Our
neighborhood to Harvard, and other similar institutions,
precludes the necessity for such action here; but it is
plain that the group of institutions here might stand in
the place of much of the office of a university for the
city, with growth of time and an intelligent co-operation
among them. Public bequests are useful; but often
those who devise means of extending their usefulness,
of bringing what I have called the public wealth, meant,
however limited, for communal purposes, into contact
with the people — those who devise means of extract
ing the greatest possible utility out of such donations,
are hardly less to be thanked than the original donors,
as they are hardly less serviceable. The diffusion of
these riches is as important as their accumulation. I be
gan by saying that the scientific and literary institutions of
the city were to it in the place of a university, and so in
their measure they have proved; but having regard to
the future and keeping in mind the example here early
set of preparing the way on a high scale of hope and
purpose, it is becoming to the place and the occasion
tonight to hope that science and literature may here for
ever find a peculiar home and be generously stored for
the higher uses of the city's intellectual life as that is
fed from many kindred streams.

I was glad to observe in the collection a considerable
proportion of foreign books, whose presence, I suppose,

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 361

was partly due to the bequest of Miss Susan Burley
specially set apart for literature in foreign languages.
It was an enlightened policy that was thus followed.
It is singularly provincial to look on literature as limited
to English, and much more so if the whole field of
knowledge be included. It is as if one should be content
to know English history only and nothing of the conti
nent; for English literature itself is as much intertwined
with other literatures as English history is with the
history of the world. The times of narrow horizons have
gone by; they are out-of-date as much as the stage
coach; the whole world has been widely thrown open in
the last age, and is now accessible from end to end, and
is greatly growing into one broad dominion of man's
mind and heart. It is necessary to have on our shelves
the knowledge and life of nations and races that every
day grow more nigh to us than the sister states were
when this library was founded. I was interested to learn
in Buffalo last spring that the Public Library there
circulates hundreds of Polish books. Even our little
library in Beverly has French and Italian volumes. In
such a library as this, one might well hope to find, in
time, the entire standard literature of the European
world. It is not so very large a body, numbered in
volumes. It is obvious that this collection, that I indi
cate as the core of an endowed and privileged library
like this — a collection of the best of the world's science
and literature — would be mainly for a select class of
minds; and this might be thought an objection. The
objection, however, merely serves to bring out more
forcibly the second part of the moral which I said natu
rally flows from the history of the Athenaeum. It has
in the past fed two such minds, Bowditch and Haw-

362 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

thorne; and this was perhaps, in the balances of the
world, its most important service. It is said sometimes
that the best school is that which best educates the best-
endowed boy in it. My own deep belief in individuality
and the immeasurable value of personal genius to the
world might not lead me to adopt so extreme a view in
practice; but I am quite sure that such a library as
this, with its happy experience, may well see to it that
its collection shall feed the highest class of minds that
approach it in youth or ripen in it in manhood, and may
even consider this as almost its hereditary privilege. It
is equally necessary in the ideal city to provide for the
best and for the humblest. It belongs to the Public
Library primarily to provide for the latter, and for such
a library as this to provide for the former. I have
observed abroad that it is easy in cloistered institutions
to be content with the riches of the past, and to regard
them as dusty heirlooms, with proud indolence. It is
rather for us to lead the lives our fathers led.

Having ventured so far in sketching the lines of a
noble city watching over the life of her citizens, I am
emboldened to add a few words more upon a related
matter, which like many things dear to my heart, I can
serve only by occasionally speaking of as I may have
opportunity. I am particularly led to it by another
trivial childish memory, associated in my mind with the
Athenaeum. You may remember there used to stand
in the yard, not far from the old Athenaeum building,
some images. Now the sight of those images was my
first vision of the world of art. I used to walk over from
Beverly in my boyhood to look at them, gazing (as it
seems to me now) through a fence that I was not tall
enough to look over. It is, as I say, a trivial memory;

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 363

but it helped me afterwards to understand why Mr.
Henry James, describing Hawthorne looking over with
some friends the designs of Flaxman here in Salem,
spoke of the incident as "pathetic." The thirst of a
child for beauty is always pathetic. I remember an
acquaintance telling me once, many years ago, of a
London child in the street saying to him, as the boy
looked wonderingly at the roses he carried, "How rich
you are!" I have wondered often on what crumbs and
herbs of the fields Italian children and Bedouin boys
can physically survive; but it is almost as surprising to
think on what thin fare a New England boy, with a
touch of imagination, hung to the life of art in those
old days. I was the more struck, on this account, when
a few years ago I visited the Exeter Academy, and was
amazed at the beauty of its halls and rooms; it seemed
an intellectual home — a home for the mind — filled as
it was with casts, great views and various ornaments.
It opened the world of the present and past to the eye;
the Greek room was a bodily entrance to a new world;
and I am quite sure that many a well-bred boy, when he
first passes those doors, feels that he has come to a new
and greater life, to a place where the life of the human
mind is visible in its noble history. I remembered the
grimness of my own Exeter days. Last year in Brusa,
in Asia Minor, I visited, one rainy day, a mosque, where
for many years there had been an old-established school,
and was allowed, when I explained that I, too, was a
teacher, to go to the boys' rooms. I climbed great flights
of stone steps without any guard-rails, through what
seemed desolate and neglected surroundings, to the roof,
where the two boys, fifteen or sixteen years old, who were
my temporary hosts, showed me the line of little rooms

364 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

running in an outside circle round the mosque, the inte
rior of which could be seen through apertures on the
other side. They took me to their room; a small, cell-
like place, with the straw mat on which, as an infidel,
I could not step, a low table hardly raised from the floor,
with an inkstand, a few worn books, and materials for
making coffee, a pallet on the floor — that was all, except
the little window framing in the most beautiful of May
landscapes and looking miles away over the fair country
— such a landscape view as we associate with Italian
monasteries. It was not so unlike my own Exeter days,
except that we had no landscape. There was great
charm in it, with the boys interested in my interest,
standing by; but it was a charm of old days, of foreign
things, of life long past lived in strange ways in the
mosque. I have made a long anecdote of it, but my
mind lingers happily on the scene. Now, if you will
pardon me, it seems to me that, rich as the city is in
the means of the intellectual life, if it be lacking in
anything, it is in the opportunity to satisfy the thirst
for beauty and to open the mind out in art. I dare say
your school-houses are supplied with objects such as
make Exeter beautiful for a boy to grow up in, but I
cannot think they are so rich in such things as I could
wish. There should be casts of sculpture and bronze
which give to physical beauty its soul, which add to
bodily perfection radiance and wings as it were, and teach
the boy's eye that perfection is not of the body after
all, but of what lives in it and looks from it, and is both
incarnated and released by it in its beauty. There
should be views of the great cities and squares of the
world, like the colored prints of Venice, which shall open
the greatness and romance of the world to the boy, and

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 365

there should be portraits of heroic figures and pictures
of historic action; and these should be, not like oasis spots
flung on a desert of wall, as I have sometimes seen them,
but abundant, and arranged with home-like refinement,
so that these rooms and building shall be, as I have said,
homes for the minds of the children and youth, and
homes that prepare them for the greatness of the world
and of man's life. In the old days of the India trade,
what romance there was in these communities; every
home knew the sound of magical Eastern names; no
closet or chest could open but what Sabaean odors came
forth on the air; there were ivories, sandal-wood and
curious and delicate carvings; a thousand things, to stir
the imagination, to give the sense of the distant, the
strange, the adventurous — the feeling of a world of
men. This effect can still be gained by the use of such
means as I have described. The value of it is worth
at least an added year to the curriculum; and more than
that, for it feeds what nothing else can feed — what
starves. For having been much in colleges and near to
education I must bear my hard testimony — the brain
thrives and the head; but the soul dies. My creed is a
brief one; but I do completely believe in Plato's doctrine
that the sight and presence of beauty shapes the soul
in childhood and youth, in beautiful forms. If there
cannot be a great museum of art here, it is easy, and to
my mind it is practically a better thing, to adorn the
schools freely with the admirable reproductions of art
which are to be had; and I believe that such a policy
commonly adopted through the county would be a civi
lizing power among the very first for efficiency in the
life of our youth. .

It is obvious that in the wandering and natural re-

366 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM

flections which this occasion has brought to my mind —
and which are meant less as a formal address than as
a neighborly talk — what has emerged more and more
is the ideal of the noble city, which has gradually clari
fied itself in my phrases as I have spoken. Yet it does
not seem to me that anything in that ideal is the con
scious work of my own thought or will; its features have
come forth as the statue from the native rock; it is an
ancestral face, the hope of the fathers, the issue and the
heir of their toils. Looking back, we have seen in the
history of this institution their humble but wise begin
nings for a larger and communal intellectual life; the
sea-fortune wisely availed of to lift the ideal of what
was possible in a pioneer land; the molding of the genius
of the sons of the city; and generation after generation
caring for and enriching the trust left to their charge.
One should specially mention Caroline Plummer in hon
orable remembrance tonight, who gave a home to this
library, and housed with it the kindred societies under
one roof. Now a new change has come, and the Athe
naeum formally opens its own peculiar home. It is a
time for congratulation; but I should not be a New
Englander, if I did not add that it is also a time to
remember that the penalty of success is more work, the
penalty of privilege is duty, the penalty of power is
responsibility. These three — work, duty, responsi
bility — are tonight yours in large measure. It may
seem that the lines in which I have broadly forecast the
future are a dream. It is a dream that the touch of gold
would quickly make real; and far less a dream than the
reality would seem tonight, could those old scholars look
upon this scene and the city in which it is set. The
history of Salem wealth gives every warrant that we

THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 367

<*

should believe that the springs of public spirit will not
dry up in the life and work of this and later generations,
that the civic ideal will yet find its wisely self-denying
servants whose perennial gifts have in this city assuaged
the eternal inward strife of society and brought nearer
that social justice I began by speaking of, which shall
secure to all her citizens an equal ownership in the accu
mulated civilizing power of the state, which seems to me
in the present stage of our world the rational end of
democracy, as a political idea. It is in this spirit that
in our hearts, if not in formal words, we dedicate this
house to be a home of the intellectual life, and a hearth
of the fine traditions of Salem; and we see, if dimly, yet
clearer than our fathers saw, the face of the noble city
that in time shall be — the Puritan city accomplished
in its own ideal.

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