George Henry Calvert

“ Hence our emotion in presence of the truly beautiful, which calms and exalts us. Hence evil never is, cannot be, beautiful: the bad is, must be, ugly. Evil consists in the deficiency of the divine creative spirit, whose fullness gives, is, beauty. Evil is imperfection, unripeness, shapelessness, weakness in, or opposition to, the creative spirit. Evil is life that is unhealthy, short-coming. Wherever there is full, unperverted life, there is, there must be, beauty. The beautiful blossoms on every stem of unpoisoned power. The sap of sound life ever molds itself into forms of beauty. ”

“ But the task of the poet is more than this. To our imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. ”

“ In the poetical there always is exaltation, a reaching towards perfection, a subtle, blooming spirituality. The end of poetry is not pleasure,—this were to speak too grossly,—but refined enjoyment through emotion.
To him who has the finer sensibility to become aware of its presence, the poetical is everywhere. The beautiful is a kiss which man gives to Nature, who returns it; to get the kiss from her he must first give it. Wordsworth says, “Poetry is the breath and fine spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.” ”

“ Thus beauty only becomes visible—I might say only becomes actual—by the fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and an inward appetite therefor. And it is the flaming of this fire, thus kindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, the inward and the outward. This fire unlighted, and on the face of nature there is darkness, in our own minds there is darkness. For though all nature teems with the essence and the outward mold of beauty, to the unkindled mind beauty is no more present then was Banquo’s ghost to the guests of Macbeth. ”

“ Two words, sweet and sleep, put in the place of calm and lies, lift the line out of prose into poetry. A log lies on a bank; so does a dead dog, and the more dead a thing is the more it lies; but only what is alive sleeps, and thus the word, besides an image of extreme stillness, brings with it what strengthens the image, the idea of change from liveliness to quiet; for that which was awake now sleeps; and the more full the picture of stillness, the more awake is the mind of the reader, awakened by the fitness and felicity of the image. ”

“ Every one is taken at some time or other with the beauty of person or thing, and the thought is common; but that the winds of March be taken with the beauty of daffodils, this was a delicate secret which those winds would confide only to one so sympathetic as Shakespeare. This is poetic imagination, the intellect sent on far errands by a sensibility which is at once generous and bold, and fastidious through the promptings and the exactions of the beautiful. ”

“ Nature does not work so loosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is profuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence her ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency. Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her beauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. ”

“ The spring into poetry is on a flash, which not only lights up the thought on which it springs, but renews, recreates it.
A man’s chief aim in life should be to better himself, to keep bettering himself; and in this high duty the poet helps him. Poetry is the great educator of the feelings. By seizing and holding up to view the noblest and cleanest and best there is in human life, poetry elevates and refines the feelings. It reveals and strengthens the spirituality of our nature. Poetry tunes the mind. Faculty of admiration is one of our super-animal privileges. ”

“ There is no height in history but is illuminated by its gleam. Only through the beautiful can truth attain its full stature; only through the beautiful can the heart be perfectly purified; only with vision purged by the beautiful can anything be seen in its totality. All other faculties it makes prolific; it is the mental generator. It helps to unveil, and then welds, the link between the visible and the invisible. It inspires feeling (which is ever the source of deepest insight) to discover excellence; it quickens the mind to creative activity; it is forever striving upward. ”

“ The idea is the invisible; the embodiment thereof is the visible. Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces, represents, with more or less success, the idea out of which springs the object it illuminates: it brilliantly enrobes a germinal essence. It is thus a sparkling emanation out of the Infinite, and it leads us thither whence it has come.
Sensibility to the beautiful is thus the light of the whole mind, illuminating its labors. Without it we work in the dark, and therefore feebly, defectively. Infer thence the immensity of its function. ”

“ It is the power to present the beautiful show which constitutes the poet. To conceive a scene or person with such liveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception to paper with a distinctness and palpitation that shall make the reader behold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual—this implies a subtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test of poetic faculty. To stand this test there must be an inward sea of thought and sensibility, dipping into which the poet is enabled to hold up his conception or invention all adrip with sparkling freshness. ”

“ The mass of objects and relations presented to us in nature the intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life that incessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looks out from every object and every fact,—of the range and pitch of whose power we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake,—of this divine essence we should not have even an intimation through the intellect alone. ”

“ But if on the canvas you have a Christ’s head by Leonardo, out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block of marble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the works of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so through the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators, that is, poets. ”

“ Consider what a spring of life to European people have been the books of the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?
To be good, books must be generic. They may be, in subject, in tone, and in color, national; but in substance they must be so universally human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them. Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a proof of their breadth and depth—of their high humanity. ”

“ In all intellectual activity, beyond bare perception and memory, imagination in some degree is and must be present. It is in fact the mind handling its materials, and in no sphere, above the simplest, can the mind move without this power of firmly holding and molding facts and relations, phenomena and interior promptings and suggestions. To the forensic reasoner, to the practical master-worker in whatever sphere, such a power is essential not less than to the ideal artist or to the weaver of fictions. Imagination is thus the abstract action, that is, the most intense action, of the intellect. ”

“ Had there ever before been heard in the world such accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar address to the Father who is in heaven? ”

“ In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration and not mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbing over phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links of association. This gives sure note of the presence of the matrix out of which poetry molds itself, that is, sensibility warm and deep, penetrating sympathy. Where evolution and upward movement are not, it is a sign that the spring lacks depth and is too much fed by surface streams from without. ”

“ As all our doings are but exhibitions of our minds, so ourselves are manifestations of God. Through all things shines the eternal soul. The more perfect the embodiment, the more translucent is the soul; and when this is most transparent, making the body luminous with the fullness of its presence, there is beauty, which may be said to be the most intense and refined incarnation and exhibition of the divine spirit.
Behind and within every form of being is immanent the creative power; and thence, in proportion as this power discloses itself, is object, act, or emotion beautiful. ”

“ By the story of Ugolino the chords of the heart are so thrilled that pity and awe possess us wholly; and by that of Francesca they are touched to tenderest sympathy. But Ugolino is to Lear what a single fire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes is to a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape with a hundred flashes.
All the personages of Dante’s poem (unless we regard himself as one) are spirits. Shakespeare, throughout his many works, gives only a few glimpses into the world beyond the grave; but how grandly by these few is the imagination expanded. ”

“ This vigor of flight in the poet, bearing on his wing the reader, whom he ushers to new, sudden vistas, is a test of poetic genius. Some poets never carry you to heights, but rather make you feel while reading them as if you were moving through shut-in valleys: their verse wants sky. They are not poetically imaginative, are not strung for those leaps which the great poet at times finds it impossible not to make. They have more poetic fancy than poetic imagination. Poetic fancy is a thin flame kindled deliberately with gathered materials ”

“ There can be no freshness of expression without freshness of thought; the sparkle on the skin comes from new blood in the heart.
Tennyson’s poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches, and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots. There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion to keep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant. Wordsworth’s poetry has for the most part roots deeply hidden.
Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to a body. ”

“ Truly, the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued as generously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped by the light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of the Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be susceptible of such shaping. ”

“ And when we consider that thought is the gathering of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some sound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuine poem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind, and involves in its production a beatific visionariness. ”

“ In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they are radiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is often the measure of its usefulness. How beautiful is a field of golden wheat—whereby our bodies live—and the more beautiful the closer it stands and the fuller are its heads. The oak and the pine owe their majestic beauty to that which is the index of their usefulness, the solid magnitude of their trunks. The proportions which give the horse his highest symmetry of form, give him his fleetness and endurance and strength. ”

“ Memory could only re-give her, with single, passive fidelity, what she had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture of her boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase above memory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes a changeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights and shadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plastic power, varying the image in position and expression, obedient to the demands of the feelings, of which it is ever the ready instrument. This third process is imagination. ”

“ Theirs are not winged minds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent, illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finer insight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even when most vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, by imaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not by freshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius, creativeness. ”

“ Juxtaposition beside Shakespeare, even if it bring out the superiorities of the English bard, is the highest honor paid to any other great poet. Glory enough is it if admiration can lift Dante so high as to take him into the same look that beholds Shakespeare; what though the summit of the mighty Englishman shine alone in the sky, and the taller giant carry up towards heaven a larger bulk and more varied domains. ”