I LECTURE II. ON THE POETRY IN WORDS. SAID in my last lecture, or rather I quoted another who had said, that language is fossil poetry. It is true that for us very often this poetry which is bound up in words has in great part or altogether disappeared. We fail to recognize it, partly from long familiarity with it, partly from insufficient knowledge, partly, it may be, from never having had our attention called to it. None have pointed it out to us; we may not ourselves have possessed the means of detecting it; and thus it has come to pass that we have been in close vicinity to this wealth, which yet has not been ours. Margaret has not been for us the Pearl,' nor Esther 'the Star,' nor Susanna the Lily,'* nor Stephen 'the Crown,' nor Albert'the illustrious in birth.' 'In our ordinary language,' as Montaigne has said, 'there are several excellent phrases and metaphors to * See Jacob Grimm, Ueber Frauennamen aus Blumen, in his Kleinere Schriften, vol. ii. pp. 366-401 ; and on the subject of this paragraph more generally, Schleicher, Die Deutsche Sprache, p. 115 sqq. be met with, of which the beauty is withered by age, and the colour is sullied by too common handling; but that takes nothing from the relish to an understanding man, neither does it derogate from the glory of those ancient authors, who, 'tis likely, first brought those words into that lustre.' We read in one of Molière's most famous comedies of one who was surprised to discover that he had been talking prose all his life without being aware of it. If we knew all, we might be much more surprised to find that we had been talking poetry, without ever having so much as suspected this. For indeed poetry and passion seek to insinuate, and do insinuate themselves everywhere in language; they preside continually at the giving of names; they enshrine and incarnate themselves in these: for 'poetry is the mother tongue of the human race,' as a great German writer has said. My present lecture shall contain a few examples and illustrations, by which I would make the truth of this appear. 'Iliads without a Homer,' some one has called, with a little exaggeration, the beautiful but anonymous ballad poetry of Spain. One may be permitted, perhaps, to push the exaggeration a little further in the same direction, and to apply the same language not merely to a ballad but to a word. For poetry, which is passion and imagination embodying themselves in words, does not necessarily demand a com bination of words for this. Of this passion and imagination a single word may be the vehicle. As the sun can image itself alike in a tiny dewdrop or in the mighty ocean, and can do it, though on a different scale, as perfectly in the one as in the other, so the spirit of poetry can dwell in and glorify alike a word and an Iliad. Nothing in language is too small, as nothing is too great, for it to fill with its presence. Everywhere it can find, or, not finding, can make, a shrine for itself, which afterwards it can render translucent and transparent with its own indwelling glory. On every side we are beset with poetry. Popular language is full of it, of words used in an imaginative sense, of things called-and not merely in transient moments of high passion, and in the transfer which at such moments finds place of the image to the thing imaged, but permanently, by names having immediate reference not to what they are, but to what they are like. All language is in some sort, as one has said, a collection of faded metaphors. * Jean Paul: Ist jede Sprache in Rücksicht geistiger Beziehungen ein Wörterbuch erblasster Metaphern. We regret this, while yet it is not wholly matter of regret. Gerber (Sprache als Kunst, vol. i. p. 387) urges that language would be quite unmanageable, that the words which we use would be continually clashing with and contradicting one another, if every one of them retained a lively impress of the image on which it originally rested, and recalled this to our mind. His words, somewhat too strongly put, are these: Für den Usus der Sprache, für Sometimes, indeed, they have not faded at all. Thus at Naples it is the ordinary language to call the lesser storm-waves 'pecore,' or sheep; the larger 'cavalloni,' or big horses. Who that has watched the foaming crests, the white manes, as it were, of the larger billows as they advance in measured order, and rank on rank, into the bay, but will own not merely the fitness, but the grandeur, of this last image? Let me illustrate my meaning more at length by the word tribulation.' We all know in a general way that this word, which occurs not seldom in Scripture and in the Prayer Book, means affliction, sorrow, anguish ; but it is quite worth our while to know how it means this, and to question 'tribulation' a little closer. It is derived from the Latin 'tribulum,' which was the threshing instrument or harrow, whereby the Roman husbandman separated the corn from the husks; and 'tribulatio' in its primary signification was the act of this separation. But some Latin writer of the Christian Church appropriated the word and image for ihren Verstand und ihre Verständlichkeit ist allerdings das Erblassen ihrer Lautbilder, so dass sie allmählig als blosse Zeichen für Begriffe fungiren, nothwendig. Die Ueberzahl der Bilder würde, wenn sie alle als solche wirkten, nur verwirren und jede klarere Auffassung, wie sie die praktischen Zwecke der Gegenwart fordern, unmöglich machen. Die Bilder würden ausserdem einander zum Theil zerstören, indem sie die Farben verschiedener Sphären zusammenfliessen lassen, und damit für den Verstand nur Unsinn bedeuten. E the setting forth of a higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the separating in men of whatever in them. was light, trivial, and poor from the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat,* he therefore called these sorrows and trials tribulations,' threshings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no fitting him for the heavenly garner. Now in proof of my assertion that a single word is often a concentrated poem, a little grain of pure gold capable of being beaten out into a broad extent of gold-leaf, I will quote, in reference to this very word 'tribulation,' a graceful composition by George Wither, a prolific versifier, and occasionally a poet, of the seventeenth century. You will at once perceive that it is all wrapped up in this word, being from first to last only the explicit unfolding of the image and thought which this word has implicitly given; it is as follows: 'Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat, 'Triticum' itself may be connected with 'tero, tritus;' [so Curtius, Greek Etym., No. 239]. |