“But there is more to be considered. The conduct which would be wise and right for man if immortal, would not be wise and right for him if viewed as a perishing animal. It is true that moral good is always good, and moral evil always evil; but with an essential change in our nature and relations, there must likewise be an essential change in what is morally good or evil. If all human hopes were limited to this world, it would be folly for any one to act as if he and others were to exist for ever. The whole plan of life and of its duties formed by a wise man, would be quite different in the one case from what it would be in the other; and the course of life actually pursued by the generality, if destitute of all religious belief, would be still more unlike that of men under its influence.

In the absence of religious faith, this is true philosophy. If this life were the limit of our being, its pleasures and pains would be the only objects of our concern. Nothing would be virtuous which tended not to the attainment and communication of those limited and perishing pleasures we might here partake; nothing morally evil, but what lessened our own capacity for enjoying them, or tended to prevent others from sharing them with us. There would be no sphere for the exercise of those powers, no object for those capacities of happiness, that belong to the imperishable part of our nature. There would be nothing to prompt one to great sacrifices or acts of moral heroism; for these have their source in the consciousness of immortality, in a sense of our connexion with the infinite, our look forward to good for ourselves and others beyond the limits of life. Earthly motives afford no soil in which the nobler virtues can strike their roots. It is true that the ancients, particularly the ancient philosophers, were not without the influence of truly religious conceptions; and, under almost any forms of opinion, the better nature of man will of itself occasionally break out into exhibitions of excellence. But the religious sentiment being so weak and perverted among the ancient poets, we find little in their works that can be regarded as morally noble, and scarcely an indistinct recognition of those deep feelings and unearthly virtues which have their source in our spiritual nature. The same remark is almost equally applicable to a large proportion of the modern poets: for true religion has been little understood or felt by them. Where, in any age preceding our own, may we hope to find such expressions of sentiment as in the following verses from Mrs Hemans’ ‘Vaudois Wife?’[453]

“With this, may be compared the speech of Alcestis in Euripides, when dying in the presence of her husband, under circumstances adapted to call forth all that power of expressing the tender emotions, for which Euripides has been thought to be distinguished.

“Under the influence of religion, we are acted upon by new motives, through the sense created within us, of the worth of our fellow-men. Religion invests them with a new character, strips off the disguise with which the accidents of mortality, imperfections, weaknesses, follies, miseries, and crimes hide their essential nature from our view, and presents them before us with all the interests and capacities of immortal beings. They who are dear to us are worthy of all love and self-devotion, worthy of affections unlimited by death or time. They are members with us of the imperishable family of God, in whose company we are to exist for ever, and with whom our union will become more entire, as we grow purer and more disinterested.

“Thus in later days there has been a growth of sentiments and affections, almost unknown before. Our better feelings toward our fellow-men have acquired far more strength, and assumed new forms. In other times, man has been comparatively an insulated being. Domestic life—that life in which now almost all our joys or sorrows are centred—was scarcely known to the ancients; and it has had but a sickly and artificial existence even in modern ages, through the operation of false notions of domestic government and discipline, and of the mutual relations of husband and wife, parents and children. Religion, by teaching us justly to estimate what is truly excellent in our nature, what is intellectual, moral, and ever-enduring, has given to woman the rank to which she is entitled. It has made her the friend of man; and our feelings are in harmony with the poet when he speaks of—

But man has never regarded woman with respect and true love, except so far as he has regarded her as a spiritual and immortal being. Without this, no conception can exist of that inseparable union which blends all the interests and affections of one being with those of another. The poetry of the ancients that expresses any sentiments toward the female sex is, with rare exceptions, of the grossest kind, sensual, coarse, indecent, brutal. We can pick out only a few passages from the mass, which shadow forth anything like real affection. The same character has continued to cleave to much of our modern poetry, rendering it at once pernicious and disgusting. But wherever the power of true religion has been felt, there woman, more disinterested, more pure, and more moral than man, has exerted a constant influence to raise the character of society. Where it has not been felt, woman has been treated as a mere creature of this earth, an object only of sensual passion, courted, wronged, and insulted; her character has sunk, and the infection of the evil has spread itself every where. It would be difficult, in as few words, to suggest to a reflecting mind a more melancholy picture of the state of society at Athens, than that of which Aristotle affords us a glimpse in a short passage of his ‘Art of Poetry,’ where he remarks, with his usual brevity and dryness, that ‘the manners (character) of a woman or slave may be good; though in general, perhaps, women are rather bad than good, and slaves altogether bad.’[454] Where women are thus estimated, the domestic charities, our best school of virtue, cannot exist; those affections which are at once the gentlest and the strongest have no place; nor will there be any true refinement, nor quick and generous feeling in the intercourse between man and man: the first and strongest link in the chain of human sympathy is wanting.

“When Jesus Christ pronounced these words, ‘What God has joined together, let not man put asunder,’ he laid down the fundamental law of human civilisation. But it would have been impossible to render marriage the most solemn and indissoluble of connexions if his religion had not at the same time restored to woman the character designed for her by nature, and raised her to that place she now holds, wherever the truths he taught have had somewhat of their proper influence.

“When the feelings that give sanctity to marriage are wanting, the parental affections operate but feebly. The new-born child, instead of being regarded as a gift and a trust from God, a new creature with whom we have become for ever connected, and a living bond of common interest to strengthen the union of its parents, is either looked at, on the one hand, as a present incumbrance, or, on the other, as a probable future support. The whole history of the domestic relations of the ancients establishes this truth. What must have been the state of parental affection among those who practised and tolerated the destruction of infants as a common custom? The absence of such affection is not to be estimated by the number of victims to that custom, but by the fact of its being generally viewed without horror or reprobation. It was a shocking trait of barbarity in the character of the elder Cato, that he recommended that worn-out and disabled slaves should be exposed to perish; but an exposure more inhuman, which showed that man had lost even the feelings of the lower animals, was constantly going on, and was enjoined, under certain circumstances, both by Plato and Aristotle, as a law of their imagined republics. There is a famous saying in one of the comedies of Terence, which has been often quoted as a fine expression of philanthropy: Homo sum—humani nihil a me alienum puto.[455] It is put into the mouth of a man whose wife is afterwards represented as in fear before him, because she had not destroyed her female infant as he had commanded, but given it a chance for preservation by causing it to be exposed alive. Maternal love cannot be wholly extinguished; but it is the glow of modern feeling only which pours its beauty over the following lines, to which nothing parallel can be found in the poets of Greece or Rome, though Mrs Hemans apostrophises the Elysium of their imagining:—

“The ancient popular faith was indeed destitute of consolation; but in the absence of those associations which shed a holy light round an infant, such consolation is less needed. Even the fountain of maternal affection flows with but a scanty and interrupted stream.

“Thus religion, by making man of more worth to man, and by strengthening our assurance in each other’s sympathy and virtue, has called forth affections which lay folded up in our nature, or had put forth only a stinted growth. The finer productions of modern poetry are coloured throughout with expressions of their beauty and strength. Moral qualities, good or bad, as they exist in men, unformed directly or indirectly by religion, owe their strength principally to impulse and passion, or depend, like the inconsistent hospitality of the Arab, or the pride of the Roman, on what he thought the glory of his country, upon prejudices which spring partly from generous feelings and partly from selfish regards, and are made strong and binding upon the individual by universal consent. It is only when quickened by religious sentiment, that the human character displays all its complicated variety of feelings. Then affections, which had before seemed almost powerless, become essential elements of our being. Associations, till then unknown, link together their invisible chains; and the feeling with which they thrill us when touched, presents a new phenomenon in our nature. The love of our youthful home may seem to us an universal sentiment, likely to appear in the poetry of all times; yet how little reference to it do we find in any poetry before our own age, and especially how little reference, like the following, to its moral power!

“It is under the continued influence of Christianity, however imperfect that influence may have been, that the human character, which had before manifested itself partially and irregularly in the rudeness and inconsistency of its elementary passions, has begun to struggle toward its full development. It has become alive to feelings, and is putting forth powers, which belong to its immortal nature. We may perceive this unfolding of man in the very structure of language, which, enlarged as it has been with new terms, yet presents so imperfect a means for expressing the different qualities and shades of character, and the modes and combinations of feeling. The study of human nature has thus become a science of far more interest and complexity. Many forms of character now appear, that belong to no period in the progress of the human race preceding that at which we have arrived. To the eye of the poet, man presents himself in new aspects of strength and weakness in multiform relations to the finite and the infinite, and with all the variety of sentiments resulting from the change in his prospects and hopes. He is now ‘a traveller between life and death;’ his highest interests connect him with the boundless, the unearthly, and the mysterious; with all that has most power to affect the imagination, and excite the strongest and deepest feelings. It is only through his relations to God and eternity that man becomes an exhaustless subject of high poetry. When thus viewed, his ruined home may be repeopled with thoughts and images such as these:—

“The recognition of the higher relations of man has given a characteristic to modern poetry, particularly English poetry, through which it has peculiar power over the heart. Expressions and descriptions of human suffering, instead of depressing us with melancholy, become sublime or touching, when that suffering is brought into direct or indirect contrast with man’s nature and hopes as an immortal being, or is represented as calling into exercise those virtues which can exist in such a being alone. There is no pathos in the mere lamentations of an individual over his own particular lot, or over the condition of a race to which he feels it an unhappiness to belong. There is nothing that excites any tender or elevating feeling in such verses as the following from an ancient poet:—

“The sufferings to which we are here exposed cease to be a subject that leads to any grateful or ennobling state of mind, when man regards the pleasures of this life as his only good. Among the ancient poets, the contemplation of its evils, when viewed at a distance, is associated with sentiments simply disheartening, or altogether superficial and trifling. Let us take for example a famous ode of Horace. It begins:—

“It ends:—

“No modern poet would, or rather could, construct verses after this fashion.

“It is in representations of the triumph of our immortal nature over the ills of mortality, of the patience with which they are borne, of the power by which they are overcome—in one word, of the moral qualities which suffering alone brings into action, and in those touches that awaken our best and tenderest affections for the sufferings of others, especially the innocent and helpless, that the sources of the highest pathos are to be found. All that is morally sublime springs upward from our severer trials; and then, only when man feels the nobleness of his nature. Present the calamity nakedly to our view, and its contemplation is merely distressing; picture it in connexion with some effort of virtue, and a glory is spread over the whole. In the Fall of D’Assas by Mrs Hemans, (not one of the most remarkable of her productions,) a young officer, full of the thoughts of his home and the scenes of his earlier years, is represented as surprised and massacred by his enemies. The simple narrative of such a death naturally excites painful emotion, but this emotion is so wholly overborne, as but to give additional strength to the exaltation of feeling produced by the concluding verses:—

“We may compare the poem just quoted with a passage from Virgil, which refers to circumstances somewhat similar, and has been praised as very pathetic, in the episode of Nisus and Euryalus, where Nisus perceives that Euryalus has fallen into the hands of his foes, and is just about to be slain.

“However conspicuous such a passage may be in an ancient poet, it would not, we believe, be regarded with great admiration in a modern.

“In one of Miss Edgeworth’s little stories for children, which are far better worth reading than most books for grown people, she says of the cottage of some poor woman that it was as clean as misery could make it. There is a pathos in these few words, not unusual in her writings, but such as we can find in but a scanty number of writers before our own age. It has not been well understood, that the indirect expressions of suffering are far more powerful than the direct, and that we are much more affected by suppressed, than by unrestrained emotion. In but little of the poetry of past times is there any trace of quickness or delicacy of perception in regard to the modes or expressions of human feeling and passion; for man himself had not become sufficiently refined for the exercise of such observation. Plato objects to Homer, and the tragic poets of Greece, that they degraded men’s minds by representing their heroes, when suffering, as pouring forth long lamentations, singing their sorrows, and beating their breasts. So far as they did so, there was nothing pathetic in their writings. Who, indeed, in modern times, was ever able to imagine himself affected by the sorrows of Achilles for the death of Patroclus, or those of his mother, Thetis, in consequence?

“From the want of sentiment and of moral associations, the descriptive language of the ancient poets is, in general, scanty and poor. It is for the most part drawn immediately from the perceptions of the senses, and has little to do with the invisible feelings and images, of which outward things become the symbols to a reflecting mind. It rarely gives them a moral being; its epithets are seldom imaginative; it paints to the eye; it calls up recollections of bodily rest and pleasure; but it does not often address the heart.

“Horace begins one of his odes thus:—

“The epithets white mountain, deep snow, sharp frost, are all taken without addition immediately from the perception of the senses; nor, considering the common prosaic use of laboro, in a similar sense, is the epithet labouring much more poetical; yet the passage is as striking of its kind as most that may be found in Latin poetry. The lines are thus rendered by Dryden,—

“Dryden was not eminent for his love of nature, or power of describing its beauties; and a poet of livelier perceptions would hardly have changed the name of Soracte for the faint generalisation, ‘yon mountain;’ yet something of the difference which we wish to point out between ancient and modern poetry is here perceptible. Let us take from Mrs Hemans an example of the richly imaginative character of that of later times. We will give the beginning of the verses in which she describes herself as reading, in an arbour, ‘The Talisman’ of Scott. A particular interest attaches to them from the circumstance that, in the best portrait of her, she is represented in this real or imaginary situation.

“Every subject becomes rich in proportion to the wealth of the mind by which it is contemplated. The intellectual light that shines upon it gives it its colours. Deficient as the ancient poets were in so many sources of thought and feeling that exist in modern times, they discover as imperfect a sensibility to most of the other pleasures of a refined taste, as to those derived from the objects of nature. There is to be found, for instance, in their works, scarcely a single passage, perhaps not one, in which the power of music, as blending in intimate union sensible and intellectual pleasures, is described with strong expression; yet what a treasury of glowing images and solemn thoughts this subject has opened to modern poets. We need not quote for illustration Mrs Hemans’s ‘Triumphant Music.’

“Through our strong sympathy with our fellow-men, we are deeply interested in the remains of antiquity, in the ruins that recall it to our thoughts, and in the histories which have come down to us—or rather in those histories as fashioned anew by our imagination, effacing and softening, filling up the rude outline, and colouring and embellishing at pleasure. In proportion as we have a more vivid conception of the virtues and excellences of which man is capable, so man, as such, becomes more an object of our regard. In looking back through the obscurity of time, the depravity that would have shocked us, if forced upon our observation, is partially lost in the darkness, and the bright traits of character shine out more distinctly. The dead of past ages are regarded with something of the same tenderness that we feel toward the dead whom we have known: at least we consent for a time to sacrifice our philosophy to an illusion, and, instead of the Richard Cœur-de-Lion of history, whose only marked characteristics were bodily strength and brutal hardihood, with those few gleams of goodness which nothing but the grossest sensuality can utterly extinguish, we consent for a time to take the Richard of Scott’s Ivanhoe; or, in fancying the Augustan age, are willing to forget that it took its name from

“Conformably to the laws of our better nature, our imagination is most readily attracted by what is most excellent in man. While viewing a beautiful tract of country with which we are not familiar, we can hardly refrain from idealising its supposed inhabitants, and giving them somewhat of a poetical character, or, in other words, a character agreeable to our best feelings. So it is in casting our view over past ages. Our sympathies are excited for the hopes, and fears, and the virtues, such as they were, of those who have lost all power to injure; and we may even fashion dim images of what they now are, as existing somewhere in the creation of God, divested, perhaps, of the evil that clung to them on earth. The idea of that moral purification and development, which, we believe, is continually going on in the universe, may thus mingle with the contemplation of the past. It is in transferring us into a world in which grateful imaginations are blended with truth, and the harshness of present reality is shut out, that the poetic interest of antiquity principally consists.

“Of this, modern poetry and fiction have abundantly availed themselves. But though a shadowy antiquity lay as a background to Greek and Roman civilisation, yet it was rarely resorted to by the ancient poets as a source of pleasing or solemn emotions. To them the remoter ages were little more than a desert abounding with monstrous fictions, with licentious and savage divinities, half-brutal demigods, and heroes, and chiefs hardly human, whose fabulous deeds and sufferings present nothing to recommend them to our sense of beauty. In the period following, history assumed at least an air of truth, and men appeared on the stage with human feelings, passions, and virtues. But, in looking back upon their earlier history, the ancients seem to have felt but slightly those peculiar sentiments and trains of feeling, which the contemplation of antiquity now awakens in our breasts. In no ancient poet is there a celebration of a hero of his country to be compared with Mrs Hemans’ lines on the Scottish patriot, Wallace, beginning

There is no appeal to the deeds of their fathers equal to her Spanish war-song—

No poetic conception of antiquity is to be found resembling the introduction of her ‘Cathedral Hymn’—

And above all, there is nothing so morally ennobling, so adapted to raise the character of a people, as the verses by which she has conferred a great obligation on our country—her ‘Pilgrim Fathers.’

“But, beside the advantages afforded to a modern poet by the religious and moral improvement of our race, which it has been principally our object to point out, there are others at which we may glance. He may look back over many ages, and around upon all countries, and acquaint himself with man, as he has existed and exists under circumstances the most dissimilar. He may possess himself of all that knowledge of human nature, which has been gathered from long experience, and wide observation, and multiplied opportunities of comparison. He may, like Southey, construct poems, as wild and wondrous, and as morally beautiful, as ‘Thalaba,’ or as rich with barbaric splendour as ‘The Curse of Kehama,’ from the rude materials of Arabian fiction or Hindoo mythology. The treasures of learning and science, so poor in ancient times, have, through succeeding ages, been accumulating to furnish him with thoughts, illustrations, and images. Our conceptions are enlarged, our views raised, the physical as well as the moral universe has been continually opening to the view of man, and knowledge unfolding her ever-lengthening scroll, of which the ancients had scarcely read the first lines. It was a dream, ridiculed by Plato,[456] of the extravagant admirers of Homer, that all human and divine learning was to be found in his writings.

“In the nature of things, art is progressive; its theory and practice are gradually better understood, errors are discovered and corrected, new objects of attainment proposed, and visions of higher excellence revealed to the mind; and thus we may believe, that the character, principles, purposes, and means of poetry are now comprehended more justly than they were in former times.

“But it may be said that, in perfection of language at least, the poets of Greece and Rome must remain unsurpassed. It may be doubted, however, whether we are qualified to pronounce this judgment in their favour. The harmonious flow of articulate sounds in the Greek and Latin languages, particularly in the Latin, is not to be readily attained in some of the principal languages of literary Europe. But if we speak of poetical beauty of expression and harmony of thought, we must recollect that it is necessary to be acquainted with the train of shadowy associations which follow the direct meaning of a poetical word, before we can determine that word to be well chosen. But such acquaintance implies an intimate knowledge of the use of language and of the state of mind in those addressed, which, as regards the poetry of the ancients, it is very difficult to acquire, and, in many particulars, impossible, yet without which we are liable to fall into great mistakes, and may often be left in much uncertainty. Take, for example, the line—

It has been admired from the consonance of the sound with the sense. We understand the epithet putris to mean dusty, the dusty plain; but this epithet is elsewhere applied to a rich, mellow soil, easily broken up, or to a sandy plain. According to either of these uses, it is apparently an epithet unsuitable, from its associations, to be given to a field described as shaken and resounding with the trampling of a body of horse. As respects, likewise, the epithet quadrupedans, we may doubt whether any modern critic can explain why quadrupedante sonitu is more poetical in Virgil than its equivalent, ‘the sound of quadrupeds,’ would be in a modern poet, if used to express the sound of horses.

“Let us take another example:

Why is the word traheret used, which, as employed elsewhere, would imply the taking away of Helen against her will? Does it refer to one version of the story according to which Paris did bear her away by force? Were this the case, one would naturally expect, considering the reproachful and denunciatory character of the ode, to find that idea brought out more distinctly. Is it intended to express the reluctance with which, though yielding to her love for Paris, she left her husband and her home? This conception is too refined for an ancient poet to trust to its being made apparent by so light a touch, if indeed we may suppose it to have entered his mind. Was traheret then intended, by its associations with an act of violence, to denote the rapidity and fear of the flight of Paris? or was it merely employed abusively, to use a technical term—only with reference to a part of its signification, as words are not unfrequently used in poetry, though it is always an imperfection?

“Such cases are very numerous, in which no modern reader can pronounce with just confidence upon the character of the poetical language of the ancients. Instances are frequently occurring in which, if we admire at all, we must admire at second-hand, upon trust. The meaning and effect of words have undergone changes which it is often not easy, and often not possible, to ascertain with precision. Even in our own language this is the case. Shakspeare says—

“Here Johnson understands him as presenting the ludicrous conception of ‘the ministers of vengeance peeping through a blanket;’ and Coleridge, as we see by his Table-Talk, conjectured that instead of ‘blanket,’ ‘blank height’ was perhaps written by Shakspeare. But by ‘Heaven’ we conceive to be meant not the ministers of vengeance, but the lights of heaven; and it is not unpoetical to speak of the moon and stars as peeping through clouds. With the word ‘blanket,’ our associations are trivial and low; but understand it merely as denoting a thick covering of darkness which closely enwraps the lights of heaven, and it suits well to its place. But our associations with the word are accidental: there is nothing intrinsically more mean in a blanket than a sheet, yet none would object to the expression of ‘a sheet of light.’ The fortunes of the words only have been different, and that, in all probability, since the time of Shakspeare, considering his use of this word, and the corresponding use of the word rug by Drayton.[457]

“If such be the character of poetical language, it is clear that, to judge with critical accuracy of that of a distant age or even a foreign Land, requires uncommon knowledge and discrimination, as well as an accurate taste; while unfortunately, profound scholarship and cultivated and elegant habits of mind have very rarely been united in the study of the ancient poets. The supposition of a peculiar felicity of expression in their writings is to be judged of, in most cases, rather by extrinsic probabilities, which do not favour it, than by any direct and clear evidence of it that can be produced. We are very liable in this particular to be biassed by prepossession and authority; our imaginations often deceive us; we create the beauty which we fancy that we find.

“There is perhaps no poet, in whose productions the characteristics of which we have spoken as giving a superiority to the poetry of later times over that which has preceded, appear more strikingly than in those of Mrs Hemans. When, after reading such works as she has written, we turn over the volumes of a collection of English poetry, like that of Chalmers, we cannot but perceive that the greater part of it appears more worthless and distasteful than before. Much is evidently the work of barren and unformed, vulgar and vicious minds, of individuals without any conception of poetry as the glowing expression of what is most noble in our nature, and often with no title to the name of poet, but from having put into metre thoughts too mean for prose. Such writings as those of Mrs Hemans at once afford evidence of the advance of our race, and are among the most important means of its further purification and progress. The minds, which go forth from their privacy to act with strong moral power upon thousands and ten thousands of other minds, are the real agents in advancing the character of man, and improving his condition. They are instruments of the invisible operations of the Spirit of God.”—Christian Examiner, Jan. 1836.