INTRODUCTION. AN INQUIRY INTO THE ALLEGED ANTI-POETICAL TENDENCIES OF THE PRESENT AGE. THOUGH it may look like a truism to assert that poetry has been the preacher of virtue, the inciter of heroism, and the refiner of society; yet the fact needs repeating, in consequence of the misconception that seems to have arisen on the true nature of poetry, and the duty of the poet. Modern civilization is said to be weary of poetry; or, if not wearied with the poets of past ages, to be quite contented with them, and to wish for no more. The very name of poet has latterly been received with a sneer. The poet has been thought a trifler; the obstinate devotee of a defunct art, which, in its most vigorous time, was only fitted for the amusement of the idle and the frivolous. This misconception has arisen from various causes; partly from the ignorance or indifference of critics and philosophers; partly from the more unpardonable indifference of some, not unworthy of the name of poets, who have depreciated their own calling; and, in a still greater degree, from the incompetence of the vast multitude of persons who have been styled poets without the slightest right to the title-mere verse-makers, who have thrown discredit upon the name, not knowing that the hold of poetry upon the fancy and the imagination is secondary to its sway over the heart and the intellect, and that the true poet can preach and prophecy as well as sing. Lord Bacon did some harm in this respect. Being more conversant with the pretensions of the rhymers of his day than with the performances of the poets, he misstated the whole object of poetry. In his famous Essay on Truth, he asserted that the proper element of poetry was fiction, as distinguished from, and the oppo X site of, truth. "One of the later schools of the Grecians," said he, ADD A PLEASURE. great severity, called poesy, 'the wine of demons,' because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie." So said the great philo sopher; and so too many have believed, because they were told to believe by one who spoke with authority. Lord Bacon did not reflect on the abuse of this word, LIE. HE, of all men, ought not to have forgotten what he so well knew, that a fiction is not necessarily a LIE. He should have remembered that fables are truths to the wise. Plato, though he would have banished poets from his ideal republic, meaning thereby the writers of licentious and mischievous plays, and not the real poets, had more correct notions of the sublimity and divinity of poetry. He said that "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." And this, indeed, is the secret source of the power and grandeur of poetry. The highest poetry approaches nearest to vital truth; and poetry is only good and beautiful, and worthy to be loved and admired, in proportion as it identifies itself with the truth. No truth can be alien or inappropriate to it. It embraces all things, and has no other bounds than the aspirations of the soul of man, its knowledge and enjoyment of the actual, and its hopes of the possible. While the world has thus been led astray by inconsiderate criticism, and while rhymers have written and published piles of wearisome books, founded upon this misconception, it is no wonder that poetry has fallen into some disfavour with men who have something else to think of and to do than to read mere fictions, without any soul of truth; inane repetitions, teaching nothing, containing nothing, and as worthless as Lord Bacon imagined all poetry to be. While such ideas have been considered criticism, the province of poetry has been restricted as a necessary consequence. The poet, too commonly by his own consent, has been tethered with a critical string. Criticism has said to him, "You shall not touch upon religion; that is not within your province. You shall not meddle with politics; they are alien to you. You shall not travel into the regions of science; for science and poetry are antagonistic. You may listen to the birds singing, the streams flowing, or the sea roaring; you may make love verses, or write pastorals; you may be passionate or musical, or merry, or melancholy, if you will. All you have to do is to amuse us, and leave serious subjects alone." Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Akenside, informs us, that "with the philosophical or religious tenets of the author he had nothing to do; his business was with his poetry." And this he said, although his poetry could not be properly considered without the politics and religion which gave it a colour. Again, in his Life of Dr. Watts, he hinted, what is known to have been his belief, that good poetry could not be written upon a religious topic. "It is sufficient for Watts," said he, "to have done better than others, what no man has done well." To introduce politics into poetry is thought to be wrong by many critics, who would think you injured them if you questioned their acuteness. "The union of politics with poetry," say they, "is always hurtful to the politics, and fatal to the poetry." In fact, they consider it unpardonable to wed them together; or even to let the smallest love passage take place betwixt them; "as if," say the objectors, we have not politics enough in the newspapers, in public places, at the very corners of the streets." And they say right, if their idea of poetry be right; but not right for those who have notions more exalted, and sympathies more extended. These objectors confound politics with party, which is a mistake; and they think poetry destined for mere amusement, which is another. They do not think that there are politics far better than any parties that ever were formed; and that the amusement found in poetry is a mere accident an extrinsic adornment only-and that its object is to teach, exalt, and refine; to inspire, like religion, the humble with dignity, the sad with comfort, the oppressed with hope; to show the abundant and overflowing blessings of familiar thingsthe riches, the beauty, and the beneficence of nature; to fill all men with the love of God and of one another; and to encourage society in its onward career from bad into good, and from good into better, through all Time into Eternity. The lovers of mere amusement have not reached this pinnacle, and do not see so goodly a prospect around them. But they ought to educate their faculties, until their minds can soar to these high regions, before they pronounce what poetry ought not to be, and define the limits which it should not overstep. Yet, after all, it is not so surprising that critics should go wrong, when those who should be superior to the critics-the poets themselves—have set the bad example. When Charles II. objected to Edmund Waller, that his verses upon Cromwell were better than those he had written about his lawful sovereign, Waller replied, "Your Majesty knows that we poets succeed better is fiction than in truth." In this pretty speech, he behaved like a courtier and a man of the world, but not like a poet, and committed treason to the majesty of his art. too, seriously accommodating himself to the same error-Mr. Monckton Milnes, in his volume entitled Palm Leares, devotes a poem to the praise of Mahomet, as a prophet and a legislator. He speaks of him as We find a modern poet, "No poet he, weaving capricious dreams To please inconstant youth; But one who uttered without shows and seems The serious facts of Truth.' This, it must be admitted, is strange language to come from one claiming to have "the vision and the faculty divine." As if a poet could not utter "serious facts" without "shows" and "seems," and as if a poet were, of necessity, a vain dreamer, and an idler of no use or advantage to society! Mr. Wordsworth, whose writings testify loudly to the utter untenableness of this theory, has also uttered a sentence which He says, in an essay supplementary to one of his early prefaces, some have interpreted to the depreciation of his divine art. |