less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of
a semi-barbarous age: and Self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which
luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as
the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without
concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is
understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient armor or the modern
uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either.
The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but
that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the
shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions
will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of
the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth
and splendor; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary
to temper this planetary music for mortal ears.
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception
of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical
science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and
proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines
that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But
poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by
rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry
lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they
were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in
its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated
them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all
thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going
out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in
thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine
intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many
others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument
of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the
cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with
thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their
own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void
forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral
nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would
do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his
place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. By this assumption
of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit
himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in the cause. There
was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far
misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion.
Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan,
Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is
diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this
purpose.