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A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

P >> Percy Bysshe Shelley >> A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays




Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of
the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols
of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece.
The bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants
of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most
glorious reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious, like the odour
of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess
of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a
meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance all the flowers
of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its
own, which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme
delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is
correlative with that softness in statuary, music and the kindred
arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the
epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself,
or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to
be imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses
and the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and
Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed sensual and pathetic
images with irresistible attractions. Their superiority over these
succeeding writers consists in the presence of those thoughts which
belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the absence
of those which are connected with the external: their incomparable
perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It is not
what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their
imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, but
inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility
to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them
as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved.
For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility
to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself
thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very
appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense
survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and
its voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from
the world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men
are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the
source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place
in an evil time. It will readily be confessed that those among the
luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted
with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual
than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have
destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease.
The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined,
which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those
great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is
sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life
of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds
at once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not
circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within
the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed.
They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions,
simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more
finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as
episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating
thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of
the world.

The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to
have been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans
appear to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries
of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have
abstained from creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or
architecture, anything which might bear a particular relation to
their own condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the
universal constitution of the world. But we judge from partial
evidence, and we judge perhaps partially Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius,
and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the
highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen
delicacy of expressions of the latter, are as a mist of light which
conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions
of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus,
Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age,
saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The institutions also,
and the religion of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece,
as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence poetry in
Rome, seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of
political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in
its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic,
they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates
the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of
Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state,
of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the republic to make peace
with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences
of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to
result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those
who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas.
The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out
of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire,
and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetry
quid carent vate sacro. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem
written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their
harmony.

At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled
the circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into
utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among
the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and
religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before
conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become as
generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign
to the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these
systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the principles
already established, that no portion of it can be attributed to
the poetry they contain.

It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
of this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid
poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted.
At a certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions
founded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which
Plato had distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of
apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilized
world. Here it is to be confessed that 'Light seems to thicken,'
and

The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouze.

But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and
blood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection,
balancing itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has
reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen
to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and
invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with strength
and swiftness.

The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived
the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and
victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to
the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations.
Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress
of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be
here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will
had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the
slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and
fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found
capable of CREATING in form, language, or institution. The moral
anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged
upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those
events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve
it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot
distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have
been incorporated into our popular religion.

It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the
poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest
themselves. The principle of equality had been discovered and
applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the
mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power, produced by
the common skill and labour of human beings, ought to be distributed
among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted by him
to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility
to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and
Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine,
comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition
of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained
in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity,
became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the
poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic
nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed
upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and
institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of
all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that
no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating
into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of
personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from
a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among
the consequences of these events.

The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive.
The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love
became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present.
It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed
with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers;
so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world.
The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful
and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of
Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were
poets; and language was the instrument of their art: 'Galeotto fu
il libro, e chi lo scrisse.' The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors,
preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal the
inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of
love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of
that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain
how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these
sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise,
and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self.
Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch.
His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment
and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those
intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis
of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her
loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended
to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination
of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the
judgement of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the
'Divine Drama', in the measure of the admiration which they accord
to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual
hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato
alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the
greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated
the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance
of arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso,
Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers
of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting
as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory
over sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other
by the sexes into which human kind is distributed, has become
less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity
with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially
recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we
owe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was the
law, and poets the prophets.

The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over
the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The
distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival
Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which
these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised.
It is a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious
of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between
their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to
wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil
calls justissimns unus, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical
caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's
poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that
system, of which by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been
a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence
of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a
mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the
popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning,
and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest
anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial
in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed
by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by
all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as
a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres
in some purpose which he has conceived to be 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 alleged design of exasperating him to deserve
new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this
shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority
of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of
a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy
of Milton's genius. He mingled as it were the elements of human
nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them in 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. The Divina Commedia 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.

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
of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it:
developing itself in correspondence with their development. 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,
Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil
a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet.
For if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the
Aeneid, still less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the
Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen.

Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient
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. The one preceded and the
other followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals. 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. Dante was the first awakener of entranced
Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out
of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of
those great spirits who presided over the resurrection 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. 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. All
high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained
all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the
inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. 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 unforeseen and an unconceived delight.

The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture,
and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials
of Italian invention.

But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history
of poetry and its influence on society. 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.

But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise
of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that
of reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of this
distinction, what is here meant by utility. 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.
There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal and
permanent; the other transitory and particular. Utility may either
express the means of producing the former or the latter. In the
former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the affections,
enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But
a narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining
it to express that which banishes 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.

Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of
poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of
common life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions are
of the highest value, so long as they confine their administration
of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within the
limits due to the superior ones. 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. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the
political economist combines labour, let them beware that their
speculations, for want of correspondence 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. 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.' 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. Such are the
effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the
calculating faculty.

It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. 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. Sorrow, terror, anguish,
despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation
to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this
principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure
which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy
which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that
is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And
hence the saying, 'It is better to go to the house of mourning, than
to the house of mirth.' Not that this highest species of pleasure
is necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship,
the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception
and still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.

The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense
is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are
poets or poetical philosophers.

The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, [Footnote:
Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a
poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.] and their
disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled
to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree
of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have
exhibited, had they never lived. 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. We might not at this moment have
been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition
in Spain. 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 ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if
the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished
together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by
the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the
invention of the 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.

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