office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards
providence no less than as regards creation.
20
?133 Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the
Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms were so many symbols of the extinction or
suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. ?134 The bucolic writers who found
patronage under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Œgypt were the latest
representatives of its most glorious reign. ?135 Their poetry is intensely
melodious; like the odour of the tuberose it overcomes and sickens the spirit
with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a
meadow-gale of June which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field
and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense
with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. ?136 The bucolic and erotic
delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music,
and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions which distinguished
the epoch to which we now refer. ?137 Nor is it the poetical faculty itself or
any misapplication of it to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. ?138 An
equal sensibility to the influence of the senses |&| the affections is to be
found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles. ?139 the {{Sig. 8r}} former
especially has clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresistible
attractions. ?140 Their superiority over these succeeding writers consists in
the presence of those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our
nature, not in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. ?141 lt is
not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their
imperfection consists. ?142 It is not inasmuch as they were Poets, but inasmuch
as they were not Poets, that they can be considered with any plausibility as
connected with the corruption of their age. ?143 Had that corruption availed so
as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion and natural
scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil
would have been atchieved. ?144 For the end of social corruption is to destroy
all sensibility to pleasure; and therefore it is corruption. ?145 It begins at
the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence
as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all
become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. ?146 At the approach of
such a period, Poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the
last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the foot steps of Astr?a,
departing from the world. ?147 Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which
men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of
whatever beautiful, or generous, or true can have place in an evil time. ?148 It
will readily [[be]] confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of
Syracuse and Alexandria who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus were
less cold, cruel and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. ?149 But
corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before Poetry
can ever cease. ?150 The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely
disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those
great minds whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth which
at once connects, animates and sustains the life of all. ?151 It is the faculty
which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social
renovation. ?152 And let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and
erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was
addressed. ?153 They may have perceived the beauty {{Sig. 8v}} of these immortal
compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more
finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to
that great poem, which all poets like the co-operating thoughts of one great
mind have built up since the beginning of the world.
21
?154 The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in Antient Rome:
but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have been perfectly
saturated with the poetical element. ?155 The Romans appear to have considered
the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of
nature and to have abstained from creating in measured language, sculpture,
music or architecture any thing which might bear a particular relation to their
own condition whilst it should bear a general one to the universal constitution
of the world. ?156 But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps
partially. ?157 Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius and Accius, all great poets, have been
lost. ?158 Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a
creator. ?00 The chosen delicacy of the expressions of the latter are as a mist
of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his
conceptions of nature. ?159 Livy is instinct with poetry. ?00 Yet Horace,
Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age, saw
man and nature in the mirror of Greece. ?160 The institutions also and the
religion of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less
vivid than the substance. ?161 Hence Poetry in Rome seemed to follow rather than
accompany the perfection of political and domestic society. ?162 The true Poetry
of Rome lived in its [[institutions]] instituons; for whatever of beautiful,
true and majestic they contained could have sprung only from the faculty which
creates the order in which they consist. ?163 The life of Camillus; the death of
Regulus; the expectation of the senators in their godlike state of the
victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal after
the battle of Cann?, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the
probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shews
of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these im{{Sig.
9r}} mortal dramas. ?164 The imagination beholding the beauty of this order,
created it out of itself according to its own idea: the consequence was empire,
and the reward everliving fame. ?165 These things are not the less poetry quia
carent vate sacro {{i.e., “because they lack a sacred poet”}}. They are the
episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men. ?166 The
Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations
with their harmony.
22
?167 At length the antient system of religion and manners had [[fulfilled]]
fufilled the circle of its revolutions. ?168 And the world would have fallen
into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the
authors of the Christian and Chivalric systems of manners and religion, who
created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which copied into
the imaginations of men became as generals to the bewildered armies of their
thoughts. ?169 It is foreign to the present purpose to touch upon the evil
produced by these systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the
principles already established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the
poetry they contain.
23
?170 It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon and Isaiah had
produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples. ?171 The
scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers of this extraordinary
person, are all instinct with the most vivid poetry. ?172 But his doctrines seem
to have been quickly distorted. ?173 At a certain period after the prevalence of
a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into
which Plato had distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of
apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilised world. ?174
Here it is to be confessed that — “Light seems to thicken,[["]] {{Shakespeare,
Macbeth III.ii.50-53.}}
the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowze
And nights black agents to their preys do rouze.
{{Shakespeare, Macbeth III.ii.50-53}}
24
?175 But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this
fierce chaos! ?176 how the World, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on
the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its yet unwearied
flight into the Heaven of time! ?177 Listen to {{Sig. 9v}} the music, unheard by
outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind nourishing its
everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
25
?178 The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman Empire, out lived the
darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and
blended themselves into a new fabric of manners and opinions. ?179 It is an
error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or to
the predominance of the Celtic nations. ?180 Whatever of evil their agencies may
have contained sprung from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected
with the progress of despotism and superstition. ?181 Men, from causes too
intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own
will had become feeble and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of
the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty and fraud characterised a race
amongst whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, language or
institution. ?182 The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not justly
to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and
those events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most
expeditiously. ?183 It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish words
from thoughts that many of these anomalies have been incorporated into our
popular religion.
26
?184 It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of the
Christian and the Chivalric systems began to manifest them selves. ?185 The
principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his republic,
as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the materials of pleasure and of
power produced by the common skill and labour of human beings ought to be
distributed among them. ?186 The limitations of this rule were asserted by him
to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility to result to
all. ?187 Plato, following the doctrines of Tim?us and Pythagoras, taught also a
moral and intellectual system of doctrine comprehending at once the past, the
present and the future condition of man. ?188 Jesus Christ divulged the sacred
and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its
abstract purity, became {{Sig. 10r}} the exoteric expression of the esoteric
doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. ?189 The incorporation of the
Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the South, impressed upon it the
figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. ?190 The
result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it;
for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any
other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes.
?191 The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of
women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity were among the
consequences of these events.
27
?192 The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political
hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. ?193 The freedom of
women produced the poetry of sexual love. ?194 Love became a religion, the idols
of whose worship were ever present. ?00 It was as if the statues of Apollo, and
the muses had been endowed with life and motion and had walked forth among their
worshippers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world.
?195 The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and
heavenly; and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. ?196 And as
this creation itself is poetry, so its creations were poets; and language was
the instrument of their art: “Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse”. {{Dante,
Inferno V.137}} The Proven?al Trouveurs, or inventors preceeded Petrarch, whose
verses are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight
which is in the grief of Love. ?197 It is impossible to feel them without
becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to
explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred
emotions can render men more amiable, more generous, and wise, and lift them out
of the dull vapours of the little world of self. ?198 Dante understood the
secret things of love even more than Petrarch. ?00 His Vita Nuova is an
inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized
history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to
love. ?199 His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradations of his own
love and her loveliness by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended
to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most {{Sig. 10v}} glorious
imagination of modern poetry. ?200 The acutest critics have justly reversed the
judgement of the vulgar and the order of the great acts of the “Divine Drama” in
the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell, Purgatory and
Paradise. ?201 The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. ?202 Love
which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the antients has been celebrated
by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has
penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of
arms, and superstition. ?203 At successive intervals Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespear,
Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau and the great writers of our own age have celebrated
the dominion of love; planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that
sublimest victory over sensuality and force. ?204 The true relation borne to
each other by the senses into which human kind is distributed has become less
misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity with in equality of
the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and
institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which
Chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.
28
?205 The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream
of time which unites the modern and the antient world. ?206 The distorted
notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealised, are
merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity
enveloped and disguised. ?207 It is a difficult question to determine how far
they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds
between their own creeds and that of the people. ?208 Dante at least appears to
wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riph?us whom Virgil calls
justissimus unus {{Virgil, Aeneid II.426}} in Paradise, and observing a most
heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. ?209 And
Milton’s poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system
of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular
support. ?210 Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character as
expressed in Paradise Lost. ?211 It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever
have been intended for the popular personification of evil. ?212 Implacable
{{Sig. 11r}} hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to
inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and although
venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much
that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his
conquest in the victor. ?213 Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior
to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be