excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security
of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy — not
from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity,
but with the alledged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. ?214
Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a
violation) as to have alledged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over
his Devil. ?215 And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose [[is]] the most
decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s {{Sig. 11v}} genius. ?216 He mingled
as it were the elements of human nature, as colours upon a single pallet, and
arranged them into the composition of his great picture according to the laws of
epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by which a series
of actions of the external universe, and of intelligent and ethical beings is
calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. ?217 The
Divina Comedia, and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a
systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition
to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators
will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only
not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of
genius.
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?218 Homer was the first, and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second
poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to
the knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and political condition of the age
in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it: developing itself in
correspondence with their developement. ?219 For Lucretius had limed the wings
of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world: and Virgil with a
modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator even
whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock
birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber,
Smyrn?us, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius or Claudian have sought even to fulfil a single
condition of epic truth. ?220 Milton was the third Epic Poet: for if the title
of epic in its highest sense be refused to the ?neid still less can it be
conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiad or the
Fairy Queen.
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?221 Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the antient religion of
the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry, probably in the same
proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship of modern Europe.
?222 The one preceeded and the other followed, the Reformation at almost equal
intervals. ?223 Dante was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him
rather in the rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness of his censures of
papal usurpation. ?224 Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he
created a language in itself music and persuasion out of a chaos of inharmonious
barbarisms. ?225 He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over
the restoration of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the
thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the
darkness of the benighted world. ?226 His very words are instinct with spirit;
each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie
covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet
found no conductor. ?227 All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn
which contained all oaks potentially. ?228 Veil after veil may be undrawn and
the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. ?229 A great Poem is a
fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after
one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their
peculiar relations enable them to share; another and yet another succeeds, and
new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforseen and an unconceived
delight.
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?230 The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch and {{Sig. 12r}}
Boccaccio was characterised by a revival of painting, sculpture, music and
architecture. ?231 Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the superstructure
of English literature is based upon the materials of Italian invention.
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?232 But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of poetry
and its influence on society. ?233 Be it enough to have pointed out the effects
of poets in the large and true sense of the word upon their own and all
succeeding times.
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?234 But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and
mechanists on another plea. ?235 It is admitted that the exercise of the
imagination is most delightful, but it is alledged that that of reason is more
useful. ?236 Let us examine as the ground of this distinction what is here meant
by Utility. ?237 Pleasure or good in a general sense, is that which the
consciousness of a sensitive and intelligent being seeks, and in which when
found it acquiesces. ?238 There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable,
universal and permanent; the other transitory and particular. ?239 Utility may
either express the means of producing the former, or the latter. ?00 In the
former sense whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the
imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. ?240 But the meaning in which
the author of the Four Ages of Poetry seems to have employed the word utility is
the narrower one of banishing the importunity of the wants of our animal nature,
the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions
of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among
men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage.
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?241 Undoubtedly the promoters of utility in this limited sense, have their
appointed office in society. ?242 They follow the [[footsteps]] foosteps of
poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life.
?243 They make space and give time. ?00 Their exertions are of the highest value
so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of the inferior
{{Sig. 12v}} powers of our own nature within the limits [[[of is]]] due to the
superior ones. ?244 But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him
spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths
charactered upon the imaginations of men. ?245 Whilst the mechanist abridges,
and the political œconomist combines, labour, let them beware that their
speculations, for want of correspondance with those first principles which
belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to
exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. ?246 They have exemplified
the saying; “To him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not
the little that he hath shall be taken away.” {{Mark, NT: Mark 4.25}} ?247 —
The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of
the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.
?248 Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of
the calculating faculty.
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?249 It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition
involving a number of apparent paradoxes. ?250 For, from an inexplicable defect
of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is
frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being.
?251 Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of
an approximation to the highest good. ?252 Our sympathy in tragic fiction,
depends on this principle: tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the
pleasure which exists in pain. ?253 This is the source also of the melancholy
which is inseperable from the sweetest melody. ?254 The pleasure that is in
sorrow, is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. ?255 And hence the
saying, “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of
mirth.” {{OT: Ecclesiastes 7.2}} ?256 Not that this highest species of pleasure
is necessarily linked with pain. ?257 The delight of love and friendship, the
extacy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception, and still more of
the creation of poetry is often wholly unalloyed.
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?258 The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
utility. ?259 Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or poetical
philosophers.
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?260 The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau {{Sig. 13r}} * and
their disciples in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity are entitled to the
gratitude {{Sig. 13v}} of mankind? ?261 Yet it is easy to calculate the degree
of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had
they never lived. ?262 A little more nonsense would have been talked for a
century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women and children burnt as
heretics. ?263 We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other
on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. ?264 But it exceeds all
imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if
neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon,
nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born;
if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of
Greek Literature had never taken place; if no monuments of antient sculpture had
been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the antient world
had been extinguished together with its belief. ?265 The human mind could never,
except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the
invention of those grosser sciences, and that application of analytical
reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over
the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.
* (to the name of Rousseau.) Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was
essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were reasoners.
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?266 We have more moral, political and historical wisdom than we know how to
reduce into practice: we have more scientific and œconomical knowledge than can
be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies.
?267 The poetry, in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation
of facts and calculating processes. ?268 There is no want of knowledge
respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government and political œconomy,
or at least what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. ?269
But we “let I dare not wait upon I would, “like the poor cat in the adage”.
{{Shakespeare, Macbeth I.vii.44-45}} ?270 We want the creative faculty to
imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we
imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we
have eaten more than we can digest. ?271 The cultivation of those sciences which
have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world has, for
want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal
world, and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. ?272 To
what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the
presence of the creative faculty which is the basis of all knowledge is to be
attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour, to the
exasperation of the inequality of mankind? ?273 From what other cause has it
arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to
the curse imposed on Adam? ?274 Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which
money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world.
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?275 The functions of the poetical faculty are two fold: by one it creates new
materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in
the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm
and order, which may be called the beautiful and the good. ?276 The cultivation
of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when from an excess of the
selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external
life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws
of human nature. ?277 The body has then become too unwieldy for that which
animates it.
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?278 Poetry is indeed something divine. ?279 It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that
to which all science must be referred. ?280 It is at the same time the root and
the blossom of all other systems of thought: it is that from which all spring,
and that which adorns all; and that which if blighted denies the fruit and the
seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of
the scions of the tree of life. ?281 It is the perfect and consummate surface
and bloom of things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the
texture of the elements which compose it; as the form and splendour of unfaded
beauty, to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. ?282 What were Virtue, Love,
Patriotism, Friendship — What were the scenery of this beautiful universe which
we inhabit – - what were our consolations on this side the grave — and what
were our aspirations beyond it — if Poetry did not ascend to bring light and
fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation,
dare not ever soar? ?283 Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted
according to the determination of the will. ?284 A man cannot say, “I will
compose poetry.” ?285 The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in
creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant
wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the
colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious
portions of our natures are unpropheti