Class .P^Sajaiii 
 
 Book nij. 
 
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 COFmiGHT DEPOSm 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/torchotherlecturOOwood 
 
THE TORCH 
 
 AND OTHER LECTURES AND 
 ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 m 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 
 
 1920 
 
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 <. 
 
 ^a* 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1905, 1910, 1916, BY 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 
 
 •NOV 12 1320 
 
 ©CI,A604070 
 
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.EUM, 351 
 
THE TORCH 
 
Eight lectures on Race Power in Litera- 
 ture, delivered before the Lowell Institute 
 of Boston, 1903 
 
 AUGESCUNT ALIAE GENTES, ALIAE MINITTTNTUR, 
 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 in 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 the 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 
 
10 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 briUiant 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 ii 
 
 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 
 1 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 
 
14 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- 
 
i6 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 in 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 Briareus, 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. WTiat 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 bUnd 
 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 ov;n 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 beheve, 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 WHiitman 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 Vv^ord 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 
 
THE 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 imiverse, 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 
 
THE 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, in large measure, un- 
 intelligible without this key. 
 
 The second great transformation of history is chivalry. 
 Here the phenomenon is nearer in time 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 ^Taerie 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 
 t3^es, 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 law 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 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 imiverse, 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 t5^e 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 witli 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 Lapithae, 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 'Trometheus." 
 
 "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. 
 
 iEschylus 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 defined 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 ^s tar ry-kir tied night' (if I remember my 
 iEschylus 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 Trometheus' of iEschylus," 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 'Trometheus" 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 
 Hfe — 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 
 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, in 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 ^schylean speech, phrases from iEschylus 
 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? W^ill 
 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, mi'^hty 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. 
 
S6 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] 
 
 loNE. 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 thou observe how the fiends torture him? 
 
 Panthea. Alas! I looked forth twice, but will no more. 
 
 loNE. What didst thou see? 
 
 Panthea. A woful sight: a youth 
 
 With patient looks nailed to a crucifix. 
 
 loNE. 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? 
 
S8 . 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. 
 
6o 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 6i 
 
 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. 
 
IV 
 
 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, in 
 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- 
 
 63 
 
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 Hfe 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 'Tetters 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 tlie 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 't 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 — 
 
 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 fiU'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'd 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 
 i — 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 
 
8o THE TORCH 
 
 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, Kke 
 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?" 
 
 — and Shelley answers, it is all-enduring and all-for- 
 giving love toward all ; and Herder answ^ers 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 wdse 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 8i 
 
 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 tliey possessed the hving 
 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 "^neid," 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 
 
86 THE TORCH 
 
 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 
 
88 THE TORCH 
 
 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 
 
90 THE TORCH 
 
 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 yirtue. 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 v/orld 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 tlie 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 ^'H3^erion" 
 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 
 
96 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 EUzabethan 
 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 in 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- 
 
100 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 loi 
 
 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. 
 
I 
 
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'AUegro" 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 yORCH 
 
 potently dramatic power; and in Shakespeare this was 
 accomplished, and you know how besides he used its 
 material and lived in its atmosphere. Spenser, also, as 
 I said in 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- 
 uaUty 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 'Taradise 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 III 
 
 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 in 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, 
 
112 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- 
 
114 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 in 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 in 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 Bower of 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 
 
ii6 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 
 iEneas for Dido, in the "^neid," 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, 
 
ii8 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, and 
 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 scheii'ies, 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 in me — not merely for its 
 unrivalled music, nor for its style 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." 
 
vn 
 
 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 realm of 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 wdll 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 us, 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. 
 
 Wi^ 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." 
 
130 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 
 
132 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 S3mipathy 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 v/ood 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" — 
 
 Thiraly, it is a discipline of the moral sense. Hei e, 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 
 
140 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 the 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- 
 mmousness 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 gloiy 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 m 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- 
 
 J43 
 
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 
 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, bo5dsh 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, 
 quick to act, to be doing something. His imagination 
 was 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 Lockers 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 iEschylus and Plato; and the contact was an 
 electrical discharge of power: the flash of that discharge 
 was the ^Trometheus 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 life of the 
 soul that he seemed like an imprisoned spirit, 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 
 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 his marvelous intellectual 
 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 fron; 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 forth; 
 
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- 
 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 w^as a poet of nature, and es- 
 pecially he had the power to vivify nature almost as the 
 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 
 
158 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 onel 
 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 
 
i6o 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, S3mibols, 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 i6i 
 
 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- 
 
 i6s 
 
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 3ocial 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 wuich 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 
 
170 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 
 while we 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 lives 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 in 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 
 
i8o 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 Hfe 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 i8i 
 
 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, in 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 in 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 
 
i82 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 Hfe 
 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 
 
i84 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 hterature 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 ^i 
 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 in 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 in 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 
 sjmipathy, 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, in 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 Tam- 
 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 ^Ethiopean 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 
 
196 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 
 
 i 
 
MARLOWE 197 
 
 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 
 
igS THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 
 
 his idea of himself; but Edward suffers in his heart, and 
 is in 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 20I 
 
 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 IMoors 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." 
 
2o6 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 lifers 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, 
 
2o8 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 
 
210 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 211 
 
 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 reahzation 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 Virgil's 
 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 'Xusiads" 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." Camoens 
 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 
 
2i6 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 i^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. MoraHty, 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 "^Eneid." 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 
 ^neas, you remember, at Carthage — are here found 
 spread on the banners of the festally decorated Portu- 
 
2i8 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 ^Xusiads," 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 ^Xusiads" 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 
 wme. 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 
 
2 20 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. 
 
 J 
 
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 
 
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 B5n'on 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 in 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 kno wedge 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 t3TDe, 
 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- 
 hme," 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 of tenest forgotten — that great 
 Hterature 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 
 anon3nnous 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. ^Titt'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; v/ith 
 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. 
 *T 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 
 
 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 
 tradition, 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 idylhc 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 
 
2 50 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 
 
 such a poem as ^^L'Allegro" and its companion piece. 
 The method is most famiHar 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 
 
2 52 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 iiowers among 
 
 Wanders the hoary Thames along 
 
 His silver-winding way." 
 
 Generally, hov^ever, it is by a brief stroke that the effect, 
 the idyllic picture, is given. He v^^as 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: — 
 
 *Tar, 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 2 53 
 
 Hark, how each giant oak and desert cave 
 Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!" 
 
 Or, again, the virell-knowii 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 Dry den'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 
 
2 56 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 originaHty, 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 otiier 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 pubHshed 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 
 
2 64 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 
 
 the fact of his fame and his favor in the earHer 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, '7^" 
 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 
 wotry 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 com.e 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 'Taerie 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, 
 
2 72 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, v^^ere v^ound 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 the 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 lite, 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 
 an)7where 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, in a word, of the unaccomplished — 
 that most remains with the reader. The feeling of the 
 inexpressible — the non so che 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- 
 ionary 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 
 
2 76 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 pov/er 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 grelatest 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 
 
2 78 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 
 
TASSO 279 
 
 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, unintelHgible 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 
 prim^ary 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 Ol5mipian 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 beheved, 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 in 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 in 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 v/orld 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 
 
 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 defined, 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 
 ^ir tramp arises, and the mountains, struck by their 
 
290 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 
 
 donij 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: — 
 
 "0 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 
 Hfe 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 in the ^Taerie 
 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, in 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 
 
 301 
 
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 imi- 
 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 
 
 any idea of solving it at aU, 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 
 
 notic 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 
 aboutj 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 fo 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 
 
 J 
 
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 INSriRATION 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 
 atn 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 a«imal 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 tlie 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 in 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, in 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 INSPIIL\TION 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 
 
3i8 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 
 in 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. 
 
I 
 
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 CENTENARY* 
 
 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 
 coimtry. 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 
 
 * 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 in 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 tiot 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! Flow 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 clus- 
 
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, w^here 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 
 earthly 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 
 imiversal 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 everlastingness. 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 imfathomed 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 imderstood, 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 modem civilization. Impalpable as any 
 ideal commonwealth of old thinkers, this State is a 
 
SHAKESPEARE 339 
 
 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 intellec- 
 
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 
 Europ3. 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 "Paradiso." 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! 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" 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. Formahsm 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. Wliolly 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 Plummet 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 'Tilgrim," 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 13th. 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 aiways 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 
 
36o 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 Hfe, 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 bovs, 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 Sabsean 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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