62 Poetry for Students
The same remark I shd be inclined to make upon the
fraudulent banker. You have painted a very vigorous
picture, but there is something in the details which
are too inharmonious with the ideal—I suppose that
you will not agree with me, and very likely it is some
narrowness on my part or over squeamishness—but
the particulars of a modern dinner party, refuse to
make poetry to my imagination—The more life like
they are (and nothing can be more vivid than your
sketch) the more does my mind rebel at them—At
the same time, I beg you to believe that I feel as
warmly as anyone can do the genial flow of the at-
mosphere & the genuine ring of the verse, even in
the passages which I put below the other parts of the
poem in comparison—
Indeed the description of the ruined home on Apple
Island, is almostthe best thing in the poem....
Underlying the preferences here—aside from
political disapproval of Webster—is the familiar
opposition of the Ideal and the Actual. Having as
its subject the mother of Jesus, “The Mother’s Se-
cret” could not escape being satisfactorily Ideal; an
American politician, with or without feet of clay,
and a banker, even an honest one, were bound to
be grossly Actual. Motley was less sure of himself
when he came to “The Exile’s Secret.” For reasons
shortly to be noted, he was pleased with a passage
clearly “beautiful” but put off by the fact that he
could call the rumored exile by his actual name,
William Marsh, and could identify the island, al-
though Holmes had refrained from naming either
and had idealized the location by referring to
Boston as St. Botolph’s town. So fixed in Motley’s
mind was the opposition of the Ideal and the Ac-
tual that he found “inharmonious with the ideal”
any detail that seemed to speak or even to hint of
actuality. With few exceptions, Motley’s marginal
protests and injunctions to “omit” or “change” are
directed against such details as “refuse to make po-
etry” to an imagination instructed by Blair and a
sensibility nurtured on the assumed opposition of
Ideality and Actuality. The kind of picture Motley
wanted was a Claude Lorrain. From Eckermann’s
Gespräche mit Goethehe could have taken a text
for his criticism:
These paintings have the highest Truth, but no trace
of Actuality. Claude Lorrain knew the real world by
heart down to the smallest detail, and he used it as
the means to express the world of his beautiful soul.
And this is the true Ideality: in knowing how to use
realistic means to reveal the True and make it create
the illusion of the Actual.
For his criticism Motley did not need a text;
the paired opposites, disassociated from their philo-
sophical and literary sources, had become cant by
1857; as catchwords, they had been frequentlyevoked to praise Schiller as the poet of the Ideal
and to disparage Goethe as the poet of the Actual.
Longfellow exclaimed:
But who has told them [Goethe’s admirers] that
books are to be nothing more than an exact reflexion
of what passes in real life? There is enough misery
in this world to make our hearts heavy;—in books let
us have something more than this—something to
strengthen and elevate and purify us. Schiller—the
beautiful Schiller does this. He is the prophet of the
ideal—Goethe the prophet of the real.
Emerson made the same judgment: “Goethe, then,
must be set down as the poet of the Actual, not of
the Ideal; the poet of limitation, not of possibility;
of this world, and not of religion and hope; in short,
if I may say so, the poet of prose, and not of poetry.”
The adored Schiller had offered the paired op-
posites as to indicate a standard for the artist’s as-
piration: “But how does the artist protect himself
from the corruptions of his time, which beset him
from all sides? By disdaining its judgments. He
should look upward to his dignity and divine law,
not downward to Fortune and material need.... He
should relinquish to the Understanding, which is
here at home, the sphere of the Actual; he should
strive instead to effect the birth of the Ideal from
the union of the possible and the necessary.”
In Carlyle’s prefatory comments on the writ-
ers he translated for his German Romance,the op-
position is implied in his final judgment of the
humoristic Musäus: “His imagination is not pow-
erless: it is like a bird of feeble wing, which can
fly from tree to tree; but never soars for a moment
into the æther of Poetry, to bathe in its serene splen-
dour, with the region of the Actual lying far below,
and brightened into beauty by radiance not its own.
He is a man of fine and varied talent, but scarcely
of any genius.”
Motley could not have expected Holmes al-
ways to reach the heavenly “æther of Poetry,” but
his criticism shows that he wished his friend to
make the attempt. Wherever he found Holmes
“spiritualizing the grossness of this actual life,”
Motley was content. We borrow the phrase from
Hawthorne, for in Hawthorne’s vein is a passage
in “The Exile’s Secret” that Motley marked with
parallel lines of approval “as Channing used to do
our themes”:
Who sees unmoved,—a ruin at his feet,—
The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain
A century’s showerly torrents wash in vain;
Its starving orchard, where the thistle blows
And elbowed spectres stand in broken rows;
Its chimney-loving poplar, never seenThe Chambered Nautilus