The Best of the Worlds Classics, Vol. V - Great Britain and Ireland III | Page 9

greatest
poet to possess, there can not be a doubt but that the language which it
will suggest to him must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that
which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those
passions, certain shadows of which the poet thus produces, or feels to
be produced, in himself.
However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of
the poet, it is obvious that, while he describes and imitates passions, his
situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the
freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that
it will be the wish of the poet to bring his feelings near to those of the
persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time,
perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound
and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the language
which is thus suggested to him by a consideration that he describes for
a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. Here, then, he will apply
the principle on which I have so much insisted, namely, that of
selection; on this he will depend for removing what would otherwise be
painful or disgusting in the passion; he will feel that there is no
necessity to trick out or elevate nature; and, the more industriously he
applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith that no words which
his fancy or imagination can suggest will bear to be compared with
those which are the emanations of reality and truth.
But it may be said by those who do not object to the general spirit of
these remarks, that, as it is impossible for the poet to produce upon all
occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as that which
the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he should consider
himself as in the situation of a translator, who deems himself justified
when he substitutes excellences of another kind for those which are
unattainable by him; and endeavors occasionally to surpass his original,
in order to make some amends for the general inferiority to which he
feels that he must submit. But this would be to encourage idleness and
unmanly despair. Further, it is the language of men who speak of what
they do not understand; who talk of poetry as of a matter of amusement
and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for

poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste
for rope-dancing, or Frontignac, or Sherry. Aristotle, I have been told,
hath said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing; it is so: its
object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative; not
standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by
passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and
divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the
same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles
which stand in the way of the fidelity of the biographer and historian,
and of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those
which are to be encountered by the poet who has an adequate notion of
the dignity of his art. The poet writes under one restriction only,
namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human
being possest of that information which may be expected from him, not
as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural
philosopher, but as a man. Except this one restriction, there is no object
standing between the poet and the image of things: between this and the
biographer and the historian there are a thousand.
Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as
a degradation of the poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an
acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the
more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and
easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is an
homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand
elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and
lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by
pleasure. I would not be misunderstood, but wherever we sympathize
with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on
by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is,
no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts,
but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure
alone.