Essays, Second Series | Page 4

ground of
historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and
conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a
safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the
world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say

the quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of
every sensuous fact; Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch,
Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry.
For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and
torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same
divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least
about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river
of Time and its creatures floweth are intrinsically ideal and beautiful,
draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or
the man of Beauty; to the means and materials he uses, and to the
general aspect of the art in the present time.
The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He
stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of
his wealth, but of the common wealth. The young man reveres men of
genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They
receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances
her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is
beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his
contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his
pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by
truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in
politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The
man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is
rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter, but the great
majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into
possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation
they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a
supersensual utility in the sun and stars, earth and water. These stand
and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruction
or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer
them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature
on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should
be so much an artist that he could report in conversation what had
befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have
sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the
quick and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is

the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without
impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of,
traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in
virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear
under different names in every system of thought, whether they be
called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto,
Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but
which we will call here the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These
stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the
love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is
essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of
these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own,
patent.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a
sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted or
adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made
some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.
Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his
own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which
assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and
disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact that some men,
namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of
expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action
but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But