66

From Fraser's Magazine. THE PROPHETIC POWER OF POETRY.

BY J. C. SHAIRP.

HAZLITT has somewhere said that 'genius is some strong quality in the mind, aiming at and bringing out some new and striking quality in nature." The same thought seems to have possessed Coleridge when, in the third volume of "The Friend," he labors to reconcile Bacon's insistence on observation and experiment as the tests of truth with Plato's equal insistence on the truth of ideas independent of experience. In the prudens quæstio, says Coleridge, which the discoverer puts to nature, he is unconsciously feeling after and anticipating some hidden law of nature; and that he does so feel after it till he finds it is in virtue of some mysterious kinship between the guess of the discoverer's mind and the operations of nature.

In the physical world we observe that those guesses of genius which are the parents of discovery arise in some gifted minds, here or there, just when some new invention or discovery is required to carry on the course of human affairs. The mariner's compass, whoever may have been its discoverer, was introduced into Europe the century before Vasco da Gama and Columbus undertook their voyages, and, as it would seem, to enable them to Newton wrought out his system of fluxions, and published his "Principia," with its announcement of the law of gravitation, at a time when physical inquiry must have remained at a standstill had these discoveries been withheld. In the last generation James Watt's great invention and, within living memory, Robert Stephenson's, appeared, just at the time when society was ready to assume a new phase, but could not have assumed it till these discoveries were perfected.

do so.

But there are other social changes, more impalpable but not less real, more subtle but piercing deeper than the physical ones. These last, wrought on the world's surface, are visible and tangible, and all can appreciate them. But the invisible changes wrought in men's minds, the revolutions in sentiment which distinguish one age from another, are so

silent and so subtle that the mere practical man entirely ignores or despises them. Mere sentiment, forsooth! who cares for sentiment? But let the practical man know, those sentiments he despises are in human affairs more potent than all the physical inventions he so much venerates.

How these changes of feeling arise, from what hidden springs they come, who shall say? But that they do come forth and make themselves widely felt, and in the end change the whole face of society, none can doubt. They come, as changes in the weather come, as the sky changes from bright to dark and from dark to bright, from causes which we cannot penetrate, but with effects which all must feel.

"The thoughts they had were the parents of the deeds they did; their feelings were the parents of their thoughts." So it always has been and shall be. In the movements of man's being, the first and deepest thing is the sentiment which pos sesses him, the emotional and moral atmosphere which he breathes. The causes which ultimately determine what this atmosphere shall be are too hidden, too manifold and complex, for us to grasp, but among the human agents which produce them none are more powerful than great poets. Poets are the rulers of men's spirits more than the philosophers, whether mental or physical. For the reasoned thought of the philosopher appeals only to the intellect, and does not flood the spirit; the great poet touches a deeper part of us than the mere philosopher ever reaches, for he is a philosopher and something more a master of thought, but it is inspired thought, thought filled and made alive with emotion. He makes his appeal, not to intellect alone, but to all that part of man's being in which lie the springs of life.

places before us in the most true and attractive light the highest things which we can admire, hope for, love; and this he does mainly by unveiling some new truth to men, or, which is the same thing, by so quickening and vivifying old and neglected truths that he makes them live anew. To do this last requires quite as much of prophetic insight as to see new truths for the first time.

This is the poet's highest office- to be a prophet of new truth, or at least an unveiler of truths forgotten or hidden from common eyes. There is another function which poets fulfil, that of setting forth in beautiful form the beauty which all see, or giving to thoughts and sentiments in which all share beautiful and attractive expression. This last is the poet's artistic function, and that which some would assign to him as his only one.

These two aspects of the poet, the prophetic and the artistic, coexist in different proportions in all great poets; in one the prophetic insight predominates, in another the artistic gift. In the case of any single poet it may be an interesting question to determine in what proportions he possesses each of these two qualities. But without attempting this I shall now only try to show by examples of some of the greatest poets, ancient and modern, that to each has been granted some domain, of which he is the supreme master; that to each has been vouchsafed a special insight into some aspect of truth, a knowledge and a love of some side of life or of nature not equally revealed to any other; that he has taken this home to his heart and made it his own peculiar possession, and then uttered it to the world in a form more vivid and more attractive than had ever been done before.

permanent outstanding forms of what human nature is. The Homeric vision of Olympus and its immortals, splendid though it be, was still but transient. It had no root in the deepest seats of human nature. For even in his own land a time came when, in the interest of purer morality, Plato wished to dethrone Homer's gods. But his delineation of heroes and heroines remains true to human feeling as it exists to-day. Even Shakespeare, when, in his "Troilus and Cressida," he took up those world-old characters and touched them anew, was still constrained to preserve the main outlines as Homer had left them. It is this permanent truthfulness and consistency in the human characters of the Iliad which makes one believe, in spite of all the critics, that one master hand was at the centre of the work, and that it performed that which no agglomeration of bards could ever have achieved.

Again, Æschylus and Sophocles were, each in their day, revealers of new and deeper truth to their generation. The Greek world, as it became self-conscious and reflective, had no doubt grown much in moral light since the time of Homer, and that light, which their age inherited, these two poets gathered up and uttered in the best form. But, besides this, they added to it something of their own. In the religion of their poems, though the mythologic and polytheistic conceptions of their country are still present, you can perceive the poet's own inner thought disengaging itself from these entanglements, and rising to the purer and higher idea of the unity of Zeus, the one all-powerful and all-wise ruler of heaven and earth; till in Sof hocles he stands forth as the "centre and source" of all truth and righteous

Then, as to the life of man, we see in Eschylus and Sophocles the Greek mind for the first time at work upon those great moral problems which at an earlier date had engaged the Hebrew mind in the Book of Job. The mystery of suffering, especially the suffering of the guiltless, is ever present to them. The popular conception held that such innocent suffering was the mere decree of a dark and un

moral destiny. Eschylus was not content with this, but taught that when the innocent man or woman suffers it is because there has been wrong-doing somewhere. He sought to give a moral meaning to the suffering, by tracing it back to sin, if not in the sufferer himself, at least in some one of his ancestors. The father has sinned, the son must suffer. "Yßpis there has been in some progenitor, urn and ruin fall on his descendants.

Sophocles looks on the same spectacle of innocent suffering, but carries his interpretation of it a step farther, and makes it more moral. Prosperity, he shows, is to the individual not always truly gain, but often proves itself an evil by the effects it produces on his character. Neither is adversity entirely an evil, for sometimes, though not always, it acts as a refining fire, purifying and elevating the nature of the sufferer. Its effects, at least in noble natures, are self-control, prudence, contentment, peace of soul. Philoctetes, after being ennobled by the things he had suffered, has his reward even here in being made the means of destroying Troy and then returning home healed and triumphant. Edipus, in his calm and holy death within the shrine of the Eumenides, and in the honor reserved for his memory, finds a recompense for his monstrous sufferings and his noble endurance. Antigone, though she has no earthly reward for her self-sacrifice, yet passes hence with sure hope the hope that in the life beyond she will find love waiting her, with all the loved ones gone before.

-

These few remarks may recall to some who read them some suggestive thoughts which fell from Professor Jebb in his two concluding lectures on Sophocles, given last summer in the hall of New College, Oxford. And all who desire to follow out this subject I gladly refer to the admirable essay on "The Theology and Ethics of Sophocles," which Mr. Abbot, of Balliol, has recently contributed to the book entitled "Hellenica."

We would not naturally turn to Roman literature to find the prophetic element. Speculation and imaginative dreaming, whence new thoughts are born, were alien

But

to the genius of that practical race. there is at least one of Rome's poets who is filled with something like true prophetic fire. On the mind of Lucretius there had dawned two truths, one learned from his own experience, the other from Greek philosophy; and both of these inspired him with a deep fervor, quite unlike anything else to be met with in his country's literature. One truth was the misery and hopelessness of human life around him, as it still clung to the decaying phantoms of an outworn mythology, and groped its way through darkness with no better guides than these. The other truth, gained from the teaching of Democritus and Epicurus, was the vision of the fixed order of the universe, the infinite sweep, the steadfastness, the immutability of its laws. As he contemplated the stately march of these vast, all-embracing uniformities, he felt as though he were a man inspired to utter to the world a new revelation. And the words in which he does utter it often rise to the earnestness and the glow of a prophet. He was, as far as I know, the earliest and most earnest expounder in ancient times of that truth which has taken so firm hold of the modern mind. In the full recognition by men of the new truth which he preached, he seemed to himself to see the sole remedy for all the ills which crush human life.

Again, Virgil, though with him the love of beauty, as all know, and the artistic power of rendering it, are paramount, yet laid hold of some new truth which none before him had felt so deeply. No one had till then conceived so grandly of the growth of Rome's greatness, and the high mission with which heaven had entrusted her. And who else among ancient poets has felt so deeply and expressed so tenderly the pathos of human life, or so gathered up and uttered the highest sentiment towards which the world's whole history had been tending sentiment which was the best flower of the travail of the old world, and which Christianity took up and carried on into the new? In these two directions Virgil made his own contribution to human progress.

If any other poet deserves the name of prophet, it is he whose voice was heard the earliest in the dawn of modern poetry. In the "Divine Comedy," Dante gave voice to "all the thoughts and speculations, as well as to the action," of the stirring thirteenth century. I suppose that no age has ever been summed up so fully and melodiously by any singer. On Dante's work I cannot do better than quote the words in which one of the most accomplished of its interpreters has expressed his feeling regarding it. Dean Church, in his well-known essay on Dante, has said:

Those who have studied that wonderful poem know its austere yet subduing beauty; they know what force there is in its free and earnest yet solemn verse, to strengthen, to tranquillize, to console. It is a small thing that it has the secret of nature and man; that a few keen words have opened their eyes to new sights in earth, and sea, and sky; have taught them new mysteries of sound; have made them recognize, in distinct image and thought, fugitive feelings, or their unheeded expression by look, or gesture, or motion; that it has enriched the public and collective memory of society with new instances, never to be lost, of human feelings and fortune; has charmed ear and mind by the music of its stately march, and the variety and completeness of its plan. But, besides this, they know how often its seriousness has put to shame their trifling, its magnanimity their faintheartedness, its living energy their indolence, its stern and sad grandeur rebuked low thoughts, its thrilling tenderness overcome sullenness and assuaged distress, its strong faith quelled despair and soothed perplexity, its vast grasp imparted harmony to the view of clashing

truths.

To review the great poets of our own country, and consider what new elements of thought and sentiment each in his turn imported into the minds of his countrymen, would be an interesting study, but one not to be overtaken in a single essay, if it could be in many. I shall therefore pass at once to that great outburst of song which ushered in the dawn of the present century in England, and try to show, somewhat more in detail, some of the original and creative impulses which the poets of that time let loose upon society. This I shall do by taking the examples of two poets of that generation. Other poets, their contemporaries, were not without some touch of the prophetic gift; but the two I shall name have exerted an influence, the one wider, the other more deep, and both more distinctly healthful, than any of their brethren.

It was nothing short of a new revelation when Scott turned back men's eyes on their own past history and national life, and showed them there a field of human interest and poetic creation that had long lain neglected. Since the days of Shakespeare a veil had been upon it, and Scott removed the veil. Quinet has spoken of the impassable gulf which the age of Louis Quatorze has placed between medieval France and the modern time. It has parted the literature of France, he says, into two distinct periods, between which no communion is possible. Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, owe nothing to the earlier thought of France, draw nothing from it. Because of this separation Quinet thinks that all modern French literature, both prose and poetry, is more real and more fitted to interpret the modern spirit than if it had grown continuously. We may well doubt this, especially whether it has not been the death of French poetry - the cause why modern France possesses so little that seems to us poetry at all. It would seem as if at one time a like calamity threatened English literature. earlier part of last century, under the influence of Pope and Bolingbroke, a false cosmopolitanism seemed creeping over it, which might have done for our literature what the French wits of the Louis Quatorze age did for theirs. But from this we were saved by that continuity of feeling and of purpose which happily governs our literary not less than our political life. All through last century the ancient spirit was never wholly dead in England,

In the

and it would have revived. That immense sentiment, that turning back of affection upon the past, was coming — no doubt it would have come - even if Scott had never been born. But he was the chosen vessel to gather up and concentrate within himself the whole force of this retrospective tendency, and to pour it in full flood upon the heart of European society. More profoundly than any other man or poet he felt the significance of the past, brooded over it, was haunted by it, and in his poems and romances expressed it so broadly, so felicitously, with such genial human interest, that even in his own lifetime he won the world to feel as he did. One among many results of Scott's work was to turn the tide against the illumination, of which Voltaire, Diderot, and the whole host of Encyclopædists were the high priests. Another result was that he changed men's whole view of history, and of the way in which it should