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Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books written by Charles W. Eliot

C >> Charles W. Eliot >> Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books




Is it the result of the whole, that, in the opinion of the Writer, the
judgement of the People is not to be respected? The thought is most
injurious; and, could the charge be brought against him, he would
repel it with indignation. The People have already been justified,
and their eulogium pronounced by implication, when it was said,
above--that, of _good_ poetry, the _individual_, as well as the
species, _survives_. And how does it survive but through the People?
What preserves it but their intellect and their wisdom?

--Past and future, are the wings
On whose support, harmoniously conjoined,
Moves the great Spirit of human knowledge--
_MS._

The voice that issues from this Spirit is that Vox Populi which the
Deity inspires. Foolish must he be who can mistake for this a local
acclamation, or a transitory out-cry--transitory though it be for
years, local though from a Nation. Still more lamentable is his error
who can believe that there is anything of divine infallibility in
the clamour of that small though loud portion of the community, ever
governed by factitious influence, which, under the name of the PUBLIC,
passes itself, upon the unthinking, for the PEOPLE. Towards the
Public, the Writer hopes that he feels as much deference as it is
entitled to: but to the People, philosophically characterized, and to
the embodied spirit of their knowledge, so far as it exists and moves,
at the present, faithfully supported by its two wings, the past and
the future, his devout respect, his reverence, is due. He offers it
willingly and readily; and, this done, takes leave of his Readers,
by assuring them--that, if he were not persuaded that the contents
of these Volumes, and the Work to which they are subsidiary, evince
something of the 'Vision and the Faculty divine'; and that, both in
words and things, they will operate in their degree, to extend the
domain of sensibility for the delight, the honour, and the benefit
of human nature, nothwithstanding the many happy hours which he
has employed in their composition, and the manifold comforts and
enjoyments they have procured to him, he would not, if a wish could
do it, save them from immediate destruction;--from becoming at this
moment, to the world, as a thing that had never been.


[Footnote 5: The learned Hakewill (a third edition of whose book bears
date 1635), writing to refute the error 'touching Nature's perpetual
and universal decay,' cites triumphantly the names of Ariosto,
Tasso, Bartas, and Spenser, as instances that poetic genius had not
degenerated; but be makes no mention of Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 6: This flippant insensibility was publicly reprehended by
Mr. Coleridge in a course of Lectures upon Poetry given by him at the
Royal Institution. For the various merits of thought and language in
Shakespeare's _Sonnets_, see Nos. 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 54, 64, 66, 68,
73, 76, 86, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114,
116, 117, 129, and many others.]

[Footnote 7: Hughes is express upon this subject in his dedication of
Spenser's Works to Lord Somers, he writes thus 'It was your Lordship's
encouraging a beautiful edition of _Paradise Lost_ that first brought
that incomparable Poem to be generally known and esteemed.']

[Footnote 8: This opinion seems actually to have been entertained by
Adam Smith, the worst critic, David Hume not excepted, that Scotland,
a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced.]

[Footnote 9: CORTES, _alone in a night-gown_.

All things are hush'd as Nature's self lay dead;
The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head.
The little Birds in dreams their songs repeat,
And sleeping Flowers beneath the Night-dew sweat:
Even Lust and Envy sleep; yet Love denies
Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes.

DRYDEN'S _Indian Emperor_.]

[Footnote 10: Since these observations upon Thomson were written, I
have perused the second edition of his _Seasons_, and find that even
_that_ does not contain the most striking passages which Warton points
out for admiration, these, with other improvements, throughout the
whole work, must have been added at a later period.]

[Footnote 11: Shenstone, in his _Schoolmistress_, gives a still more
remarkable instance of this timidity On its first appearance (see
D'Israeli's 2d Series of the _Curiosities of Literature_) the Poem was
accompanied with an absurd prose commentary, showing, as indeed some
incongruous expressions in the text imply, that the whole was intended
for burlesque. In subsequent editions, the commentary was dropped, and
the People have since continued to read in seriousness, doing for the
Author what he had not courage openly to venture upon for himself.]




PREFACE TO CROMWELL

BY VICTOR HUGO. (1827)[A]


The drama contained in the following pages has nothing to commend
it to the attention or the good will of the public. It has not, to
attract the interest of political disputants, the advantage of the
veto of the official censorship, nor even, to win for it at the outset
the literary sympathy of men of taste, the honour of having been
formally rejected by an infallible reading committee.

It presents itself, therefore, to the public gaze, naked and
friendless, like the infirm man of the Gospel--_solus, pauper, nudus_.

Not without some hesitation, moreover, did the author determine to
burden his drama with a preface. Such things are usually of very
little interest to the reader. He inquires concerning the talent of
a writer rather than concerning his point of view; and in determining
whether a work is good or bad, it matters little to him upon what
ideas it is based, or in what sort of mind it germinated. One seldom
inspects the cellars of a house after visiting its salons, and when
one eats the fruit of a tree, one cares but little about its root.

On the other hand, notes and prefaces are sometimes a convenient
method of adding to the weight of a book, and of magnifying, in
appearance at least, the importance of a work; as a matter of tactics
this is not dissimilar to that of the general who, to make his
battle-front more imposing, puts everything, even his baggage-trains,
in the line. And then, while critics fall foul of the preface and
scholars of the notes, it may happen that the work itself will
escape them, passing uninjured between their cross-fires, as an army
extricates itself from a dangerous position between two skirmishes of
outposts and rear-guards.

These reasons, weighty as they may seem, are not those which
influenced the author. This volume did not need to be _inflated_, it
was already too stout by far. Furthermore, and the author does not
know why it is so, his prefaces, frank and ingenuous as they are, have
always served rather to compromise him with the critics than to shield
him. Far from being staunch and trusty bucklers, they have played him
a trick like that played in a battle by an unusual and conspicuous
uniform, which, calling attention to the soldier who wears it,
attracts all the blows and is proof against none.

Considerations of an altogether different sort acted upon the author.
It seemed to him that, although in fact, one seldom inspects the
cellars of a building for pleasure, one is not sorry sometimes to
examine its foundations. He will, therefore, give himself over once
more, with a preface, to the wrath of the _feuilletonists. Che sara,
sara_. He has never given much thought to the fortune of his works,
and he is but little appalled by dread of the literary _what will
people say_. In the discussion now raging, in which the theatre and
the schools, the public and the academies, are at daggers drawn, one
will hear, perhaps, not without some interest, the voice of a solitary
_apprentice_ of nature and truth, who has withdrawn betimes from the
literary world, for pure love of letters, and who offers good faith in
default of good taste, sincere conviction in default of talent, study
in default of learning.

He will confine himself, however, to general considerations concerning
the art, without the slightest attempt to smooth the path of his own
work, without pretending to write an indictment or a plea, against or
for any person whomsoever. An attack upon or defence of his book is
of less importance to him than to anybody else. Nor is personal
controversy agreeable to him. It is always a pitiful spectacle to
see two hostile self-esteems crossing swords. He protests, therefore,
beforehand against every interpretation of his ideas, every personal
application of his words, saying with the Spanish fablist:--

Quien haga aplicaciones
Con su pan se lo coma.

In truth, several of the leading champions of "sound literary
doctrines" have done him the honour to throw the gauntlet to him, even
in his profound obscurity--to him, a simple, imperceptible spectator
of this curious contest He will not have the presumption to pick it
up. In the following pages will be found the observations with which
he might oppose them--there will be found his sling and his stone;
but others, if they choose, may hurl them at the head of the classical
Goliaths.

This said, let us pass on.

Let us set out from a fact. The same type of civilization, or to use
a more exact, although more extended expression, the same society, has
not always inhabited the earth. The human race as a whole has grown,
has developed, has matured, like one of ourselves. It was once a
child, it was once a man; we are now looking on at its impressive old
age. Before the epoch which modern society has dubbed "ancient," there
was another epoch which the ancients called "fabulous," but which it
would be more accurate to call "primitive." Behold then three great
successive orders of things in civilization, from its origin down to
our days. Now, as poetry is always superposed upon society, we
propose to try to demonstrate, from the form of its society, what the
character of the poetry must have been in those three great ages of
the world--primitive times, ancient times, modern times.

In primitive times, when man awakes in a world that is newly created,
poetry awakes with him. In the face of the marvellous things that
dazzle and intoxicate him, his first speech is a hymn simply. He is
still so close to God that all his meditations are ecstatic, all his
dreams are visions. His bosom swells, he sings as he breathes.
His lyre has but three strings--God, the soul, creation; but this
threefold mystery envelopes everything, this threefold idea embraces
everything. The earth is still almost deserted. There are families,
but no nations; patriarchs, but no kings. Each race exists at its own
pleasure; no property, no laws, no contentions, no wars. Everything
belongs to each and to all. Society is a community. Man is restrained
in nought. He leads that nomadic pastoral life with which all
civilizations begin, and which is so well adapted to solitary
contemplation, to fanciful reverie. He follows every suggestion,
he goes hither and thither, at random. His thought, like his life,
resembles a cloud that changes its shape and its direction according
to the wind that drives it. Such is the first man, such is the first
poet. He is young, he is cynical. Prayer is his sole religion, the ode
is his only form of poetry.

This ode, this poem of primitive times, is Genesis.

By slow degrees, however, this youth of the world passes away. All
the spheres progress; the family becomes a tribe, the tribe becomes a
nation. Each of these groups of men camps about a common centre, and
kingdoms appear. The social instinct succeeds the nomadic instinct.
The camp gives place to the city, the tent to the palace, the ark to
the temple. The chiefs of these nascent states are still shepherds,
it is true, but shepherds of nations; the pastoral staff has already
assumed the shape of a sceptre. Everything tends to become stationary
and fixed. Religion takes on a definite shape; prayer is governed by
rites; dogma sets bounds to worship. Thus the priest and king share
the paternity of the people; thus theocratic society succeeds the
patriarchal community.

Meanwhile the nations are beginning to be packed too closely on the
earth's surface. They annoy and jostle one another; hence the clash
of empires--war. They overflow upon another; hence, the migrations of
nations--voyages. Poetry reflects these momentous events; from ideas
it proceeds to things. It sings of ages, of nations, of empires. It
becomes epic, it gives birth to Homer.

Homer, in truth, dominates the society of ancient times. In that
society, all is simple, all is epic. Poetry is religion, religion is
law. The virginity of the earlier age is succeeded by the chastity
of the later. A sort of solemn gravity is everywhere noticeable, in
private manners no less than in public. The nations have retained
nothing of the wandering life of the earlier time, save respect
for the stranger and the traveller. The family has a fatherland;
everything is connected therewith; it has the cult of the house and
the cult of the tomb.

We say again, such a civilization can find its one expression only in
the epic. The epic will assume diverse forms, but will never lose its
specific character. Pindar is more priestlike than patriarchal, more
epic than lyrical. If the chroniclers, the necessary accompaniments
of this second age of the world, set about collecting traditions and
begin to reckon by centuries, they labour to no purpose--chronology
cannot expel poesy; history remains an epic. Herodotus is a Homer.

But it is in the ancient tragedy, above all, that the epic breaks out
at every turn. It mounts the Greek stage without losing aught, so to
speak, of its immeasurable, gigantic proportions. Its characters
are still heroes, demigods, gods; its themes are visions, oracles,
fatality; its scenes are battles, funeral rites, catalogues. That
which the rhapsodists formerly sang, the actors declaim--that is the
whole difference.

There is something more. When the whole plot, the whole spectacle
of the epic poem have passed to the stage, the Chorus takes all that
remains. The Chorus annotates the tragedy, encourages the heroes,
gives descriptions, summons and expels the daylight, rejoices,
laments, sometimes furnishes the scenery, explains the moral bearing
of the subject, flatters the listening assemblage. Now, what is the
Chorus, this anomalous character standing between the spectacle and
the spectator, if it be not the poet completing his epic?

The theatre of the ancients is, like their dramas, huge, pontifical,
epic. It is capable of holding thirty thousand spectators; the plays
are given in the open air, in bright sunlight; the performances last
all day. The actors disguise their voices, wear masks, increase their
stature; they make themselves gigantic, like their roles. The stage is
immense. It may represent at the same moment both the interior and
the exterior of a temple, a palace, a camp, a city. Upon it,
vast spectacles are displayed. There is--we cite only from
memory--Prometheus on his mountain; there is Antigone, at the top of
a tower, seeking her brother Polynices in the hostile army (_The
Phoenicians_); there is Evadne hurling herself from a cliff into the
flames where the body of Capaneus is burning (_The Suppliants_ of
Euripides); there is a ship sailing into port and landing fifty
princesses with their retinues (_The Suppliants_ of AEschylus).
Architecture, poetry, everything assumes a monumental character. In
all antiquity there is nothing more solemn, more majestic. Its history
and its religion are mingled on its stage. Its first actors are
priests; its scenic performances are religious ceremonies, national
festivals.

One last observation, which completes our demonstration of the epic
character of this epoch: in the subjects which it treats, no less than
in the forms it adopts, tragedy simply re-echoes the epic. All
the ancient tragic authors derive their plots from Homer. The same
fabulous exploits, the same catastrophes, the same heroes. One and
all drink from the Homeric stream. The Iliad and Odyssey are always
in evidence. Like Achilles dragging Hector at his chariot-wheel, the
Greek tragedy circles about Troy.

But the age of the epic draws near its end. Like the society that
it represents, this form of poetry wears itself out revolving upon
itself. Rome reproduces Greece, Virgil copies Homer, and, as if to
make a becoming end, epic poetry expires in the last parturition.

It was time. Another era is about to begin, for the world and for
poetry.

A spiritual religion, supplanting the material and external paganism,
makes its way to the heart of the ancient society, kills it, and
deposits, in that corpse of a decrepit civilization, the germ of
modern civilization. This religion as complete, because it is true;
between its dogma and its cult, it embraces a deep-rooted moral. Arid
first of all, as a fundamental truth, it teaches man that he has two
lives to live, one ephemeral, the other immortal; one on earth, the
other in heaven. It shows him that he, like his destiny, is twofold:
that there is in him an animal and an intellect, a body and a soul; in
a word, that he is the point of intersection, the common link of
the two chains of beings which embrace all creation--of the chain
of material beings and the chain of incorporeal beings; the first
starting from the rock to arrive at man, the second starting from man
to end at God.

A portion of these truths had perhaps been suspected by certain wise
men of ancient times, but their full, broad, luminous revelation dates
from the Gospels. The pagan schools walked in darkness, feeling their
way, clinging to falsehoods as well as to truths in their haphazard
journeying. Some of their philosophers occasionally cast upon certain
subjects feeble gleams which illuminated but one side and made the
darkness of the other side more profound. Hence all the phantoms
created by ancient philosophy. None but divine wisdom was capable of
substituting an even and all-embracing light for all those flickering
rays of human wisdom. Pythagoras, Epicurus, Socrates, Plato, are
torches: Christ is the glorious light of day.

Nothing could be more material, indeed, than the ancient theogony. Far
from proposing, as Christianity does, to separate the spirit from the
body, it ascribes form and features to everything, even to impalpable
essences, even to the intelligence. In it everything is visible,
tangible, fleshly. Its gods need a cloud to conceal themselves from
men's eyes. They eat, drink, and sleep. They are wounded and their
blood flows; they are maimed, and lo! they limp forever after. That
religion has gods and halves of gods. Its thunderbolts are forged on
an anvil, and among other things three rays of twisted rain (_tres
imbris torti radios_) enter into their composition. Its Jupiter
suspends the world by a golden chain; its sun rides in a four-horse
chariot; its hell is a precipice the brink of which is marked on the
globe; its heaven is a mountain.

Thus paganism, which moulded all creations from the same clay,
minimizes divinity and magnifies man. Homer's heroes are of almost the
same stature as his gods. Ajax defies Jupiter, Achilles is the peer
of Mars. Christianity on the contrary, as we have seen, draws a broad
line of division between spirit and matter. It places an abyss between
the soul and the body, an abyss between man and God.

At this point--to omit nothing from the sketch upon which we have
ventured--we will call attention to the fact that, with Christianity,
and by its means, there entered into the mind of the nations a new
sentiment, unknown to the ancients and marvellously developed
among moderns, a sentiment which is more than gravity and less than
sadness--melancholy. In truth, might not the heart of man, hitherto
deadened by religions purely hierarchical and sacerdotal, awake and
feel springing to life within it some unexpected faculty, under the
breath of a religion that is human because it is divine, a religion
which makes of the poor man's prayer, the rich man's wealth, a
religion of equality, liberty and charity? Might it not see all things
in a new light, since the Gospel had shown it the soul through the
senses, eternity behind life?

Moreover, at that very moment the world was undergoing so complete
a revolution that it was impossible that there should not be a
revolution in men's minds. Hitherto the catastrophes of empires
had rarely reached the hearts of the people; it was kings who fell,
majesties that vanished, nothing more. The lightning struck only in
the upper regions, and, as we have already pointed out, events seemed
to succeed one another with all the solemnity of the epic. In the
ancient society, the individual occupied so lowly a place that, to
strike him, adversity must needs descend to his family. So that he
knew little of misfortune outside of domestic sorrows. It was an
almost unheard of thing that the general disasters of the state should
disarrange his life. But the instant that Christian society became
firmly established, the ancient continent was thrown into confusion.
Everything was pulled up by the roots. Events, destined to destroy
ancient Europe and to construct a new Europe, trod upon one another's
heels in their ceaseless rush, and drove the nations pell-mell, some
into the light, others into darkness. So much uproar ensued that it
was impossible that some echoes of it should not reach the hearts
of the people. It was more than an echo, it was a reflex blow. Man,
withdrawing within himself in presence of these imposing vicissitudes,
began to take pity upon mankind, to reflect upon the bitter
disillusionments of life. Of this sentiment, which to Cato the heathen
was despair, Christianity fashioned melancholy.

At the same time was born the spirit of scrutiny and curiosity. These
great catastrophes were also great spectacles, impressive cataclysms.
It was the North hurling itself upon the South; the Roman world
changing shape; the last convulsive throes of a whole universe in
the death agony. As soon as that world was dead, lo! clouds of
rhetoricians, grammarians, sophists, swooped down like insects on its
immense body. People saw them swarming and heard them buzzing in that
seat of putrefaction. They vied with one another in scrutinizing,
commenting, disputing. Each limb, each muscle, each fibre of the huge
prostrate body was twisted and turned in every direction. Surely it
must have been a keen satisfaction to those anatomists of the mind, to
be able, at their debut, to make experiments on a large scale; to have
a dead society to dissect, for their first "subject."

Thus we see melancholy and meditation, the demons of analysis and
controversy, appear at the same moment, and, as it were, hand-in-hand.
At one extremity of this era of transition is Longinus, at the other
St. Augustine. We must beware of casting a disdainful eye upon that
epoch wherein all that has since borne fruit was contained in germs;
upon that epoch whose least eminent writers, if we may be pardoned a
vulgar but expressive phrase, made fertilizer for the harvest that was
to follow. The Middle Ages were grafted on the Lower Empire.

Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold
foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry. Previously---
we beg pardon for setting forth a result which the reader has probably
already foreseen from what has been said above--previously, following
therein the course pursued by the ancient polytheism and philosophy,
the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a
single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art
which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had not relation to a
certain, type of beauty. A type which was magnificent at first, but,
as always happens with everything systematic, became in later times
false, trivial and conventional. Christianity leads poetry to the
truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and
broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not
humanly _beautiful_, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the
unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the
sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if
the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the
infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct
God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for the
mutilation; if art has the right to duplicate, so to speak, man, life,
creation; if things will progress better when their muscles and their
vigour have been taken from them; if, in short, to be incomplete is
the best way to be harmonious. Then it is that, with its eyes fixed
upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the
influence of that spirit of Christian melancholy and philosophical
criticism which we described a moment ago, poetry will take a
great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an
earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It
will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations--but
without confounding them--darkness and light, the grotesque and the
sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and
the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the
starting-point of poetry. All things are connected.