The Bard Has In A Great Measure
Lost The Dignity And Sacredness Of His Office.
Formerly he was
called a _seer_, but now it is thought that one man sees as much
as another.
He has no longer the bardic rage, and only conceives
the deed, which he formerly stood ready to perform. Hosts of
warriors earnest for battle could not mistake nor dispense with
the ancient bard. His lays were heard in the pauses of the
fight. There was no danger of his being overlooked by his
contemporaries. But now the hero and the bard are of different
professions. When we come to the pleasant English verse, the
storms have all cleared away and it will never thunder and
lighten more. The poet has come within doors, and exchanged the
forest and crag for the fireside, the hut of the Gael, and
Stonehenge with its circles of stones, for the house of the
Englishman. No hero stands at the door prepared to break forth
into song or heroic action, but a homely Englishman, who
cultivates the art of poetry. We see the comfortable fireside,
and hear the crackling fagots in all the verse.
Notwithstanding the broad humanity of Chaucer, and the many
social and domestic comforts which we meet with in his verse, we
have to narrow our vision somewhat to consider him, as if he
occupied less space in the landscape, and did not stretch over
hill and valley as Ossian does. Yet, seen from the side of
posterity, as the father of English poetry, preceded by a long
silence or confusion in history, unenlivened by any strain of
pure melody, we easily come to reverence him. Passing over the
earlier continental poets, since we are bound to the pleasant
archipelago of English poetry, Chaucer's is the first name after
that misty weather in which Ossian lived, which can detain us
long. Indeed, though he represents so different a culture and
society, he may be regarded as in many respects the Homer of the
English poets. Perhaps he is the youthfullest of them all. We
return to him as to the purest well, the fountain farthest
removed from the highway of desultory life. He is so natural and
cheerful, compared with later poets, that we might almost regard
him as a personification of spring. To the faithful reader his
muse has even given an aspect to his times, and when he is fresh
from perusing him, they seem related to the golden age. It is
still the poetry of youth and life, rather than of thought; and
though the moral vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet
banished the sun and daylight from his verse. The loftiest
strains of the muse are, for the most part, sublimely plaintive,
and not a carol as free as nature's. The content which the sun
shines to celebrate from morning to evening, is unsung. The muse
solaces herself, and is not ravished but consoled. There is a
catastrophe implied, and a tragic element in all our verse, and
less of the lark and morning dews, than of the nightingale and
evening shades.
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