Essays Aesthetical Part 4

The poetical mood is always a visionary mood; so much so, that even when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward.

Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold, presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle and its glistening counterpart. In the best poetry there is vivid picture-making: reality is made more visible by being presented as a beautiful show. It is the power to present the beautiful show which const.i.tutes 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 poetic mind, with a firm, and at the same time free, easy hold, holds a subject at arm's length, where it can be turned round in the light; the prosaic mind grasps and hugs what it handles so close that there is no room for play of light or motion.

Contemplating synthetically the highest and choicest and purest, and at the same time actively endeavoring to embody it, the genuine poet has in his best work joy as exalted as the mind can here attain to; and in the reader who can attune himself to the high pitch, he enkindles the same kind of joyful exaltation. There is current a detestable phrase or definition, which even Coleridge allows himself to countenance, namely, that poetry is something which gives pleasure.

Pleasure! Do we speak of the pleasure of beholding the sun rise out of the Atlantic or from the top of Mount Was.h.i.+ngton, or the pleasure of standing beside Niagara, or of reading about the self-sacrifice of Regulus or Winkelried? Pleasure is a word limited to the animal or to the lighter feelings. "Let me have the pleasure of taking wine with you." A good dinner gives great pleasure to a circle of gourmets.

Even enjoyment, a higher word than pleasure, should, when applied to poetry, be conjoined with some elevating qualification; for all the feelings impart enjoyment through their simple healthy function, and there are people who enjoy a c.o.c.k-pit, or a bull-fight, or an execution. But poetry causes that refined, super-sensuous delight which follows the apprehension of any thought, sentiment, act, or scene, which rises towards the best and purest possible in the range of that thought, sentiment, act, or scene. 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 impa.s.sioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." It might be called the aromatic essence of all life.

A poem is the incarnation of this aroma, the condensation of it into form. A drop of dew symbolizes a poem; for a true poem should be oval, without angles, transparent, compact, complete in itself, graceful from inward quality and fullness. It may be of a few lines, or of hundreds or thousands; but there must be no superfluous line or word.

A poem drops out of the brain a fragrant distillation. A poem must be a spiritual whole; that is, not only with the parts organized into proportioned unity, but with the whole and the parts springing out of the idea, the sentiment, form obedient to substance, body to soul, the sensuous life to the inward. For enduring, ruddy incarnation, the subject, whether it be incident, scene, sentiment, or action, must have within its core this essential aroma. The poet (and the test of his poetic capacity is his gift to draw the fragrance out of such a core) keeps his conception distinctly and vividly before him. The conception or ideal prefigurement of his theme precedes him, like the pillar of fire in the night, drawing him onward surely and rapidly.

Otherwise he lags and flags and stumbles. 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 n.o.blest 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. Poetry purges and guides admiration; and the sounder and higher our admirations, the more admirable ourselves become.

The best poetry turns the mind inward upon itself, and sweetens its imaginations. Our imaginations, that is, our inward thoughts, plans, shaping our silent, interior doings, these are the chief part of us; for out of these come most of our outward acts, and all of their color. As is the preponderance of the man, will be this inward brood.

The timid man will imagine dangers, the anxious man troubles, the hopeful man successes, the avaricious man acc.u.mulations, the ambitious possession of power; and the poetic man will imagine all sorts of perfections, be ever yearning for a better and higher, be ever building beautiful air-castles, earthy or moral, material or ethereal, according as the sensuous or the spiritual predominates in his nature.

Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vast wealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzled his contemporaries with Fonthill Abbey. Not only are Fonthill Abbeys and all beautiful buildings achieved through the warm action of the poetic faculty, but all improvements are brought about by its virtue.

Out of this deep, inward, creative power issue all theories and practice for the bettering of human conditions. All original founders and discoverers are poets: the most poetic French mind I know is that of Fourier.

When a mind, having the texture and expansibility to become surcharged with magnetic effluence, has moreover that aesthetic gift of rhythmic expression which involves a sense of the beautiful, that is, of the high and exquisite possibilities of created things,--when such a mind, under the pressure of inward needs, betakes it to embodying in verse its imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. _Poetry is thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in musical cadence._ 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.

III.

STYLE.

Thought, act, and speech are of one substance. Where the best things have been done, the best things have been said. The history of Attica is richer and more significant than that of her sister-states of old Greece, and among them her literature is supreme. So of England in modern Europe. And where good thoughts have been uttered the form of those will be finest which carry the choicest life. The tree gets its texture from the quality of its sap. Were I asked what author is the most profitable to the student of English on account of style, I should answer, study Shakespeare.

Have something to say, and say it in the best and fewest words, were a good recipe for style. In this brief precept there are more ingredients than at first view appear. To have something to say implies that a man must write out of himself, and not chiefly out of his memory; and so to write involves much more than many people are aware of; in order that his style have freshness, which is a primary need of a good style, the writer's thought must be fresh.

Then, to say his thought in the best and fewest words implies faculty of choice in words, and faculty of getting rid of all verbal superfluity; and these two faculties betoken proficiencies and some of the finer aesthetic forces.

Style itself is a gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts), not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to one with inharmonious or defective natural powers, you might as well attempt to teach a thrush to sing the songs of the nightingale. To be sure, like the poetical, or the scientific, or any mental gift, it requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most, as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get from others--whether through study of the best masters or through direct rhetorical instruction--is in the mechanical portion of the art; that is, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses, how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and awkwardness, and thus make most presentable and accessible what he has to give out. Even in these superficial lessons success imports something more than a superficial capacity. These lessons learnt, and you have still to go behind them for style, whose cradle is within you. _Le style c'est l'homme meme_ (a man's style is his very self), is the oft-quoted profound sentence of Buffon. Style comes out of the interior: beneath a genuinely good style are secret springs which give to the surface its movement and sparkle. Mostly when people talk of style 't is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath. In popularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springs beneath; in Tom Moore's, for example, or Southey's.

Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than others in presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shaping their utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plastic faculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style. Tact and craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some other writers of more substance; still, they are only capable of so doing by means of qualities which, however secondary, are interior and fervent, and the skill imparted by which cannot be acquired except through the presence of these qualities. This superiority of skill in form is ill.u.s.trated by the literature of France in comparison with the literature of Germany, and even with that of England. The French follow a precept thus embodied by Beranger: "Perfection of style should be sought by all those who believe themselves called to diffuse useful thoughts. Style, which is only the form appropriated to a subject by art and reflection, is the pa.s.sport of which every thought has need in order to circulate, expand, and lodge itself in people's brains. To neglect style is not to show sufficient love for the ideas one wishes to make others adopt." And so effective is the following of such a precept that, through careful devices and manipulating cleverness, a brilliant success, though transitory is achieved by some writers who range lightly over surfaces, their thoughts dipping no deeper than a flat stone thrown to skim along the water, which it keeps ruffling, making a momentary sprightly splash at each contact, until, its force being soon spent, it disappears and is seen no more.

The possession of certain mental gifts const.i.tutes a talent for writing, gifts which, with reference to the great primary powers of the mind, are secondary. Sainte-Beuve says of the Abbe Gerbet that he "had naturally the flowers of speech, movement and rhythm of phrase, measure and choice of expression, even figurative language, what, in short, makes a talent for writing." The possessor of these qualifications may, nevertheless, rise only a little above mediocrity.

Of the styles of many, even clever, accomplished writers, one gets a clear notion from the remark made of a certain polished actress, that she always played well, never better.

When Sainte-Beuve says _Rien ne vit que par le style_, he a.s.serts in fact the exclusive privilege of original thought to give permanence to literary work; for nothing but an interior source can give life to expression. The inward flow will shape itself adequately and harmoniously in proportion as it has at full command the auxiliary, what I have called the plastic literary qualities; but shape itself it will, effectively and with living force, without the fullest command, while the readiest mastery over these qualities can never give vitality to style when are wanting primary resources. Literary substance which does not shape itself successfully (it may not be with the fullest success) is internally defective, is insufficient; for if it throb with life, it will mold a form for its embodiment, albeit that form, from lack of complete command of the secondary agents, will not be so graceful or rich as with such command it would have been. Wordsworth has made to English literature a permanent addition which is of the highest worth, in spite of notable plastic deficiencies. A conception that has a soul in it will find itself a body, and if not a literary body, one furnished by some other of the fine arts; or, wanting that, in practical enterprise or invention. And the body or form will be stamped with the inward lineaments of the man. Style issues from within, and if it does not, it is not style, but manner. Words get all their force from the thoughts and feelings behind them. They are necessary media, created, molded, and combined by mental wants. Picking and polis.h.i.+ng words and phrases is ineffectual without the picking and polis.h.i.+ng of the thoughts: below the surface of words lies that which controls and vivifies style. And then between the substance, the mental material, and the executive faculties there must be lively harmony. The executive power is a purely intellectual composite instrument; the force that wields it is feeling. For the best style the wielding force must be fine as well as rich and strong, and the shaping, harmonizing instrument of superfine temper and smiling willingness.

Style, in writing, is the art of putting into words what you think or feel, in such a way as to make the best of it--presupposed, that what you think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are men who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity, will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a style which for their purposes is effective. Of this cla.s.s Jeffrey, Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. 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. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers had appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," Brougham, one of its founders and controllers, protested that if that man were permitted to write any more he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of the Review were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitrary proceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying the instinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius.

Not less than men of talent men of genius need to cultivate style; nay, from the copiousness and variousness of their material, and from its very inwardness, the molds into which it is to be thrown need the finest care. Coleridge, rich and incomparable as he is, would have made many of his prose pages still more effective by a studious supervision; and De Quincey tells us what labor his periods sometimes cost him. The following advice, given in a letter from Maurice de Guerin to his sister, may be addressed to all literary aspirants: "Form for yourself a style which shall be the expression of yourself. Study our French language by attentive reading, making it your care to mark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies of style, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In the works of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use it each in our own fas.h.i.+on."

One of the first const.i.tuents of a good style is what Coleridge calls "progressive transition," which implies a dynamic force, a propulsive movement, behind the pen. Hazlitt, for example, somewhat lacked this force, and hence De Quincey is justified to speak of his solitary flashes of thought, his "brilliancy, seen chiefly in separate splinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreous scintillation for a moment." One of the charms, in a high sense, of Coleridge's page is that in him this dynamic force was present in liveliest action. His intellect, ever enkindled by his emotions, exacted logical sequence, and thus a rapid forward movement is overspread by a glow of generous feeling, which, being refined by his poetic sensibility made his style luminous and flowing.

De Quincey, treating of aphoristic writing, says, "Any man [he of course means any man with good things in him] as he walks through the streets may contrive to jot down an independent thought, a short-hand memorandum of a great truth; but the labor of composition begins when you have to put your separate threads of thought into a loom; to weave them into a continuous whole; to connect, to introduce them; to blow them out or expand them; to carry them to a close."

Buffon attached the greatest importance to sequence, to close dependence, to continuous enchainment. He detested a chopped, jerky style, that into which the French are p.r.o.ne to fall. Certain it is, and from obvious causes, that much of the secret of style lies in aptness of sequence, thought and word, through an irresistible impulsion and pertinence, leaping forth nimbly, each taking its place promptly, because naturally and necessarily. Through fusion and close coherency and dependence, the flow is at once smooth and lively. The grace as well as the strength of the living physical body depends much, nay primarily, on the joints. So with the body of a good writer's thoughts, that is, his mode of utterance. To the linking of sentences and paragraphs (the links being self-wrought out of inward sap) is due much of the buoyancy and force of style. The springiness of the joints depends, in the body, on the quality of its nervous life; in style, much on the marrow and validity of the thoughts. By a sprightly stream of thought, fed from a full spring of feeling, the current of words is kept lively and graceful. Words, sentences, paragraphs, cannot be held closely, symmetrically, attractively together, without the unction invisibly distilled from brisk mental movement, movement starting from sentiment fresh and true. Soul is the source of style. Not sensibility alone is a prerequisite for style: the sensibility must be _active_, made active by the fine aspiring urgency which ever demands the best. A good style will have the sheen communicated by lubrication from within, not the gloss of outward rubbing.

That style varies in pitch and tone according to the subject treated ought to be self-evident. In every page of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" we recognize Shakespeare not less palpably than in "King Lear." In his "Recollections of Charles Lamb" De Quincey writes, "Far be it from me to say one word in praise of those--people of how narrow a sensibility--who imagine that a simple (that is, according to many tastes, an unelevated and _unrhythmical_) style--take, for instance, an Addisonian or a Swiftian style--is _unconditionally_ good. Not so: all depends upon the subject; and there is a style, transcending these and all other modes of simplicity, by infinite degrees, and, in the same proportion, impossible to most men, the rhythmical, the continuous--what in French is called the _soutenu_--which, to humbler styles stands in the relation of an organ to a shepherd's pipe. This also finds its justification in its subject; and the subject which _can_ justify it must be of a corresponding quality--loftier--and therefore, rare."

I quote De Quincey because he has written more, and more profoundly as well as more copiously, on style than any writer I know. To this point,--the adaption of style to subject,--he returns, laying down with clearness and truth the law which should here govern. In a paper on Schlosser's "Literary History of the Eighteenth Century" he reaffirms--what cannot be too strongly insisted on--the falsity of the common opinion that Swift's style is, for all writers, a model of excellence, showing how it is only fitted to the kind of subjects on which Swift wrote, and concluding with this characteristic pa.s.sage: "That nearly all the blockheads with whom I have at any time had the pleasure of conversing upon the subject of style (and pardon me for saying that men of the most sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz., poetry and style, to talk _most_ like blockheads) have invariably regarded Swift's style not as if _relatively_, (i.e., _given_ a proper subject), but as if _absolutely_ good--good unconditionally, no matter what the subject. Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the dean had been required to write a pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh's immortal apostrophe to Death, or to many pa.s.sages in Sir Thomas Brown's 'Religio Medici' and his 'Urn-Burial,' or to Jeremy Taylor's inaugural sections of his 'Holy Living and Dying,' do you know what would have happened? Are you aware what sort of a ridiculous figure your poor bald Jonathan would have cut? About the same that would be cut by a forlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if suddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival of Belshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords."

That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of high excellence ought to be a truism. Through a certain equilibrium among his faculties, and a.s.siduous literary culture, such a one may excel colleagues who move on the same bounded plane; but that is all.

From the shallowest utterance, where, thoughts and feelings lying just below the surface, there can be no strong lights and shadows, no splendid play in the exposition, styles range, with the men who make them, through all degrees of liveliness and significance and power, up to that simple grandeur which conceals a vast volume of thought, and implies a divine ruling of multiplicity.

In a good style, on whatever degree it stands, there must be a full marriage between word and thought, so clean an adjustment of expression to material as to leave no rough edges or nodes. The words must not be too big or too s.h.i.+ny for the thought; they must not stand out from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter. A style can hardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, was sometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting.

A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer be one; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a free sympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; his subject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject. That he be sincere is not enough; he must be cordial; then he will be magnetic, attractive. You must love your work to do it well.

A good style is a stream, and a lively stream: it flows ever onward actively. The worst vice a style can have is languor. With some writers a full stop is a double full stop: the reader does not get forward. Much writing consists of little more than sluggish eddies. In many minds there is not leap enough for a style. Excellence in style demands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve a somewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy and poetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolable sequence.

Writers there are who get to be partially self-enslaved by a routine of phrases and words under the repet.i.tion of which thought is hardened by its molds. Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness, even when there is a current of intellectual activity. Writers most liable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves to set opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow,--a sad condition for man or writer.

Hypocrites in writing, as in talking and doing, end badly. A writer who through his style aims to seem better or other than himself is soon found out. The desire so to seem argues a literary incapacity; it looks as though the very self--which will s.h.i.+ne through the style--lacked confidence in its own substance. And after all, in writing as in doing and talking, a man must be himself, will be himself in spite of himself. One cannot put on his neighbor's style any more than he can put on his neighbor's limbs.

Not only has prose its melody as well as verse, but there is no _style_ unless sentences are pervaded, I might say animated, by rhythm; lacking appropriate movement, they are inelastic, inert, drowsy. Rhythm implies a soul behind it and in it. The best style will have a certain rotundity imparted by the ceaseless rocking of thought in the deep ocean of sentiment. Without some music in them sentences were torpid, impracticable. To put thoughts and words so together that there shall be a charm in the presentation of them, there needs a lively harmony among certain faculties, a rhythm in the mind. Hence Cicero said that to write prose well, one must be able to write verse.

The utterance of music in song or tune, in artful melody or choral harmony, is but the consummation of a power which is ever a sweetener in life's healthily active exhibitions, the power of sound. Nature is alive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life.

On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from unseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing, unseen, and ever rhythmical.

The heartier and deeper the thought, the more melody will there be in its fit expression, and thence the higher range of style is only reached by poets, or by men who, though poetically minded, yet lack "the accomplishment of verse." The sudden electric injection of light into a thought or object or sentiment--in this consists the gift poetical, a gift which implies a sensibility so keen and select as to kindle the light, and an intellect fine and firm enough to hold and transmit it. A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardly rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is utterly devoid of the faculty of style (_denue de la faculte du style_). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great Moliere. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too, some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers, have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities, with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the exclusive property of the poetic idiom."

A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to the better, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy in presence of the defective or the incomplete. This endowment implies a mind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements of thought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes the writer exacting towards himself. Hence only he attains to a genuine correctness; he was correct by instinct before he was so by discipline. In the whole as well as the parts he requires finish and proportion. Within him there is a momentum which fills out his thought and its worded envelope to warm convexity. Only he has the fine tact and discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses. The best style is organic in its details as well as its structure; it shows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy and plastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor. Goethe says that only poets and artists have method, because they require to see a thing before them in a completed, rounded form. Writing is a fine art, and one of the finest; and he who would be a master in this art must unite genial gifts with conscientious culture.

Of style the highest examples, therefore, are to be found in the verse of the great poets, of the deep rhythmic souls who make a sure, agile intellect their willing Ariel; and no prose writer gets to be a master in style but through kindred endowment. The compact, symmetrical combination of gifts and acquirements, of genius with talent, demanded for the putting forth of a fresh, priceless poem, this he need not have; but his perceptions must be brightened by the light whose fountain is the inward enjoyment of the more perfect in form, deed, and sentiment, and his best thoughts suffused with that fragrance whose only source is the ravishment of the beautiful.

IV.

DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS.[5]

[5] Putnam's Magazine, 1868.

"Ghosts and witches are the best machinery for a modern epic." So said Charles Fox, who fed his imagination on verse of this aspiring cla.s.s.

Fox was no literary oracle, and his opinion is here cited only as evidence that the superearthly is an acknowledged element in the epopee. The term "machinery" implies ignorance of the import of the super-earthly in epic poetry, an ignorance attendant on materialism and a virtual unbelief. No poet who should accept the term could write an epic, with or without the "machinery." Such acceptance would betoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a want of faith in the invisible supervisive energies.

A genuine epic, of the first cla.s.s, is a world-poem, a poem of depth and height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation of a race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare the method of the divine intervention in the momentous work. The epic poet, worthy of the lofty task, has such large sympathies, together with such consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpret and incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some of them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls--

"Light half-believers in our casual creeds."

Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, active presence on the earth of the G.o.d Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Had they not, there would have been no "Iliad," no "Paradise Lost."