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PART SECOND. | 137 |
LECTURE I.—INTRODUCTORY ON POETRY IN GENERAL.
The best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.
In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of the subject-matter of it, next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and afterwards of its connection with harmony of sound.
Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for any thing else. It is not a mere frivolous accomplishment, (as some persons have been led to imagine) the trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours—it has been the study and delight of mankind in all ages. Many people suppose that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that “spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun,”—there is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldly masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a branch of authorship: it is “the stuff of which our life is made.” The rest is “mere oblivion,” a dead letter: for all that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being: without it “man’s life is poor as beast’s.” Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who had always spoken prose without knowing it. The child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats
“The lunatic,
the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination
all compact.
One sees more
devils than vast hell can hold;
The madman.
While the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s
beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s
eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from
heav’n to earth, from earth to heav’n;
And as imagination
bodies forth
The forms of things
unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to
shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation
and a name.
Such tricks hath
strong imagination.”
If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality. Ariosto has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro: but was not Medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as much enamoured of her charms as he? Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the poets from his Commonwealth, lest their descriptions of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by any thing. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and Homer’s poetical world has outlived Plato’s philosophical Republic.
Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man’s nature. We shape things according to our wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind “which ecstacy is very cunning in.” Neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the heightenings of the imagination.
“That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy:
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy is each bush suppos’d a bear!”
When Iachimo says of Imogen,
“------The flame o’ th’ taper Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids To see the enclosed lights”—
this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord with the speaker’s own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally with the poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of shining gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from novelty and a sense
Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it; exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our being or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, “Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this;” what a bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the mad scene, “The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!” it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to torture and kill it! In like manner, the “So I am” of Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years. What a fine return of the passion upon itself is that in Othello—with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the last traces of departed happiness—when he exclaims,
------“Oh now, for ever Farewel the tranquil mind. Farewel content; Farewel the plumed troops and the big war, That make ambition virtue! Oh farewel! Farewel the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war: And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats Th’ immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit, Farewel! Othello’s occupation’s gone!”
How his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in its sounding course, when in answer to the doubts expressed of his returning love, he says,
“Never,
Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current
and compulsive course
Ne’er feels
retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic
and the Hellespont:
Even so my bloody
thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne’er
look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable
and wide revenge
Swallow them up.”—
The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that line [sic],
“But there
where I had garner’d up my heart,
To be discarded
thence!”—
One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our sympathy without raising our disgust is, that in proportion as it sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the desire of good. It enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by making us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion lays bare and shews us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the action and re-action are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate participation with the antagonist world of good; makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs at the heart-strings; loosens the pressure about them; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force.
Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive—of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The domestic or prose tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is in this sense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one of these faculties, our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo, for this reason, however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a dead weight upon the mind, a load of misery which it is unable to throw off: the tragedy of Shakspeare, which is true poetry, stirs our inmost affections; abstracts evil from itself by combining it with all the forms of imagination, and with the deepest workings of the heart, and rouses the whole man within us.
The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry, is not any thing peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing. It is not an anomaly of the imagination. It has its source and ground-work in the common love of strong excitement. As Mr. Burke observes, people flock to see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the next street, the theatre would very soon be empty. It is not then the difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose: nor do the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and executions about the streets, find it necessary to have them turned into penny ballads, before they can dispose of these interesting and authentic documents. The grave politician drives a thriving trade of abuse and calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies for no other end than that he may live by them. The popular preacher makes less frequent mention of heaven than of hell. Oaths and nicknames are only a more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric. We are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of others. We are as prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will be, Because we cannot help it. The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration.
“Masterless
passion sways us to the mood
Of what it likes
or loathes.”
Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant “satisfaction to the thought.” This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord Mayor’s shew,—
“Now night descending,
the proud scene is o’er,
But lives in Settle’s numbers one day
more!”
—when Collins makes Danger, “with limbs of giant mould,”
------“Throw him on the steep Of some loose hanging rock asleep:”
when Lear calls out in extreme anguish,
“Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted
fiend,
How much more hideous shew’st in a child
Than the sea-monster!”
—the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and of indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thing ourselves, and shew it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in spite of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. The imagination, by thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the indistinct and importunate cravings of the will.—We do not wish the thing to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledge is conscious power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe, though it may be the victim of vice or folly.
Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason: for the end and use of poetry, “both at the first and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature,” seen through the medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means of literal truth or abstract reason. The painter of history might as well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait, as the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of common conversation. Let who will strip nature of the colours and the shapes of fancy, the poet is not bound to do so; the impressions of common sense and strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference, cannot be the same, and they must have a separate language to do justice to either. Objects must strike differently upon the mind, independently of what they are in themselves, as long as we have a different interest in them, as we see them in a different point of view, nearer or at a greater distance (morally or physically speaking) from novelty, from old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening,
“And visions,
as poetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf
and cling to every bough.”
There can never be another Jacob’s dream. Since that time, the heavens have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become averse to the imagination, nor will they return to us on the squares of the distances, or on Doctor Chalmers’s Discourses. Rembrandt’s picture brings the matter nearer to us.—It is not only the progress of mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or “bandit fierce,” or to the unmitigated fury of the elements. The time has been that “our fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as life were in it.” But the police spoils all; and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only tolerated in this country for the sake of the music; and in the United States of America, where the philosophical principles of government are carried still farther in theory and practice, we find that the Beggar’s Opera is hooted from the stage. Society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very comfortable prose style.
“Obscurity
her curtain round them drew,
And siren Sloth
a dull quietus sung.”
The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead to a solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting and poetry. I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem that the argument which has been sometimes set up, that painting must affect the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much temerity, that poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or connoisseurs talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they shew that they know little about poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it. But this last is the proper province of the imagination. Again, as it relates to passion, painting gives the event, poetry the progress of events: but it is during the progress, in the interval of expectation and suspense, while our hopes and fears are strained to the highest pitch of breathless agony, that the pinch of the interest lies.
“Between
the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first
motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma
or a hideous dream.
The mortal instruments
are then in council;
And the state
of man, like to a little kingdom,
Suffers then the
nature of an insurrection.”
But by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. Faces are the best part of a picture; but even faces are not what we chiefly remember in what interests us most.—But it may be asked then, Is there anything better than Claude Lorraine’s landscapes, than Titian’s portraits, than Raphael’s cartoons, or the Greek statues? Of the two first I shall say nothing, as they are evidently picturesque, rather than imaginative. Raphael’s cartoons are certainly the finest comments that ever were made on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same if we were not acquainted with the text? But the New Testament existed before the cartoons. There is one subject of which there is no cartoon, Christ washing the feet of the disciples the night before his death. But that chapter does not need a commentary! It is for want of some such resting place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart. They have not an informing principle within them. In their faultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty they are deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration.
Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined with passion and fancy. In its mode of conveyance, it combines the ordinary use of language with musical expression. There is a question of long standing, in what the essence of poetry consists; or what it is that determines why one set of ideas should be expressed in prose, another in verse. Milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single line—
“Thoughts
that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers.”
As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change “the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo.” There is a striking instance of this adaptation of the movement of sound and rhythm to the subject, in Spenser’s description of the Satyrs accompanying Una to the cave of Sylvanus.
“So from the ground she
fearless doth arise
And walketh forth without suspect of crime.
They, all as glad as birds of joyous prime,
Thence lead her forth, about her dancing
round,
Shouting and singing all a shepherd’s
rhyme;
And with green branches strewing all the
ground,
Do worship her as queen with olive garland crown’d.
And all the way their merry pipes
they sound,
That all the woods and doubled echoes ring;
And with their horned feet do wear the ground,
Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring;
So towards old Sylvanus they her bring,
Who with the noise awaked, cometh out.”
Faery Queen,
b. i. c. vi.
On the contrary, there is nothing either musical or natural in the ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the inequalities, and harshnesses of prose, are fatal to the flow of a poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs the reverie of an absent man. But poetry makes these odds all even. It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as it were “the secret soul of harmony.” Wherever any object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;— wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion, to the sounds that express it—this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also. There is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing. As often as articulation passes naturally into intonation, there poetry begins. Where one idea gives a tone and colour to others, where one feeling melts others into it, there can be no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the
“Sailing
with supreme dominion
Through the azure
deep of air—”
without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that poetry was invented. It is to common language, what springs are to a carriage, or wings to feet. In ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by the modulations of the voice: in poetry the same thing is done systematically by a regular collocation of syllables. It has been well observed, that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose. The merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way “sounding always the increase of his winning.” Every prose-writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who, when deprived of the regular mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation left in their writings.
An excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner. It is but fair that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of images. It is allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit and shrewdness has been heard to say, that the only four good lines of poetry are the well known ones which tell the number of days in the months of the year.
“Thirty days hath September,” &c.
But if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken the fancy? and there are other things worth having at our fingers’ ends, besides the contents of the almanac.—Pope’s versification is tiresome, from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. Shakspeare’s blank verse is the perfection of dramatic dialogue.
All is not poetry that passes for such: nor does verse make the whole difference between poetry and prose. The Iliad does not cease to be poetry in a literal translation; and Addison’s Campaign has been very properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar, and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary impulse to the imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the understanding, as do not admit of the wayward or violent movements either of the imagination or the passions.
I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible without absolutely being so, namely, the Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated some of the last into English rhyme, but the essence and the power of poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being “married to immortal verse.” If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pass for poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and reality in the Pilgrim’s Progress was never equalled in any allegory. His pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what beauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feeling in the description of Christian’s swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the Shining Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes! The writer’s genius, though not “dipped in dews of Castalie,” was baptised with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in this book are no small part of it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos was a subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies, what shall we say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he says,
“As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two together, and this was still worse to me, for if I could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it would go off, and the grief having exhausted itself would abate.” P. 50.
The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey, it is true; but the relator had the true genius of a poet. It has been made a question whether Richardson’s romances are poetry; and the answer perhaps is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance. The interest is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an infinite number of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is unforced and spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The story does not “give an echo to the seat where love is throned.” The heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the Lilliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.—Sir Charles Grandison is a coxcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles—she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination. There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted from a caput mortuum of circumstances: it does not evaporate of itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out. Shakspeare says—
“Our
poesy is as a gum
Which issues whence
’tis nourished, our gentle flame
Provokes itself,
and like the current flies
Each bound it
chafes.” [1]
I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of the principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of history—Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. In Homer, the principle of action or life is predominant; in the Bible, the principle of faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a personification of blind will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life, and the lag end of the world. Homer’s poetry is the heroic: it is full of life and action: it is bright as the day, strong as a river. In the vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of nature, and enters into all the relations of social life.
___ [1] Burke’s writings are not poetry, notwithstanding the vividness of the fancy, because the subject matter is abstruse and dry, not natural, but artificial. The difference between poetry and eloquence is, that the one is the eloquence of the imagination, and the other of the understanding. Eloquence tries to persuade the will, and convince the reason: poetry produces its effect by instantaneous sympathy. Nothing is a subject for poetry that admits of a dispute. Poets are in general bad prose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not to the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetry wants the forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic. And some of our own poetry which has been most admired, is only poetry in the rhyme, and in the studied use of poetic diction. ___
He saw many countries, and the manners of many men; and he has brought them all together in his poem. He describes his heroes going to battle with a prodigality of life, arising from an exuberance of animal spirits: we see them before us, their number, and their order of battle, poured out upon the plain “all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and gorgeous as the sun at midsummer,” covered with glittering armour, with dust and blood; while the Gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or mingle in the fray; and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy rise up with reverence as Helen passes by them. The multitude of things in Homer is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force, and variety. His poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form: he describes the bodies as well as the souls of men.
The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing: “If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from it.” Man is thus aggrandised in the image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon
Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it to burst the thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every page. He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its passage to the other world. He was lost in wonder at what had been done before him, and he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been indebted to the Bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is utterly unlike Homer. His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the sullen heat of a furnace. He is power, passion, self-will personified. In all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies like a dead weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe, from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity, like that which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest, which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul,—that make amends for all other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to the mind are not much in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they become every thing by the force of the character he impresses upon them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the
Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihed, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of the past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country—he is even without God in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter’s wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things as in a mock-embrace, is
LECTURE II. ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER.
Having, in the former Lecture, given some account of the nature of poetry in general, I shall proceed, in the next place, to a more particular consideration of the genius and history of English poetry. I shall take, as the subject of the present lecture, Chaucer and Spenser, two out of four of the greatest names in poetry, which this country has to boast. Both of them, however, were much indebted to the early poets of Italy, and may be considered as belonging, in a certain degree, to the same school. The freedom and copiousness with which our most original writers, in former periods, availed themselves of the productions of their predecessors, frequently transcribing whole passages, without scruple or acknowledgment, may appear contrary to the etiquette of modern literature, when the whole stock of poetical common-places has become public property, and no one is compelled to trade upon any particular author. But it is not so much a subject of wonder, at a time when to read and write was of itself an honorary distinction, when learning was almost as great a rarity as genius, and when in fact those who first transplanted the beauties of other languages into their own, might be considered as public benefactors, and the founders of a national literature.—There are poets older than Chaucer, and in the interval between him and Spenser; but their genius was not such as to place them in any point of comparison with either of these celebrated men; and an inquiry into their particular merits or defects might seem rather to belong to the province of the antiquary, than be thought generally interesting to the lovers of poetry in the present day.
Chaucer (who has been very properly considered as the father of English poetry) preceded Spenser by two centuries. He is supposed to have been born in London, in the year 1328, during the reign of Edward III. and to have died in 1400, at the age of seventy-two. He received a learned education at one, or at both of the universities, and travelled early into Italy, where he became thoroughly imbued with the spirit and excellences of the great Italian poets and prose-writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccace; and is said to have had a personal interview with one of these, Petrarch. He was connected, by marriage, with the famous John of Gaunt, through whose interest he was introduced into several public employments. Chaucer was an active partisan, a religious reformer, and from the share he took in some disturbances, on one occasion,
It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite in this respect. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment; Chaucer, in severe activity of mind. As Spenser was the most romantic and visionary, Chaucer was the most practical of all the great poets, the most a man of business and the world. His poetry reads like history. Every thing has a downright reality; at least in the relator’s mind. A simile, or a sentiment, is as if it were given in upon evidence. Thus he describes Cressid’s first avowal of her love.
“And as
the new abashed nightingale,
That stinteth
first when she beginneth sing,
When that she
heareth any herde’s tale,
Or in the hedges
any wight stirring,
And after, sicker,
doth her voice outring;
Right so Cresseide,
when that her dread stent,
Open’d her
heart, and told him her intent.”
This is so true and natural, and beautifully simple, that the two things seem identified with each other. Again, it is said in the Knight’s Tale—
“Thus passeth
yere by yere, and day by day,
Till it felle
ones in a morwe of May,
That Emelie that
fayrer was to sene
Than is the lilie
upon his stalke grene;
And fresher than
the May with floures newe,
For with the rose-colour
strof hire hewe:
I n’ot which
was the finer of hem two.”
This scrupulousness about the literal preference, as if some question of matter of fact was at issue, is remarkable. I might mention that other, where he compares the meeting between Palamon and Arcite to a hunter waiting for a lion in a gap;—
“That stondeth
at a gap with a spere,
Whan hunted is
the lion or the bere,
And hereth him
come rushing in the greves,
And breking both
the boughes and the leves:”—
or that still finer one of Constance, when she is condemned to death:—
“Have ye
not seen somtime a pale face
(Among a prees)
of him that hath been lad
Toward his deth,
wheras he geteth no grace,
And swiche a colour
in his face hath had,
Men mighten know
him that was so bestad,
Amonges all the
faces in that route;
So stant Custance,
and loketh hire aboute.”
The beauty, the pathos here does not seem to be of the poet’s seeking, but a part of the necessary texture of the fable. He speaks of what he wishes to describe with the accuracy, the discrimination of one who relates what has happened to himself, or has had the best information from those who have been eye-witnesses of it. The strokes of his pencil always tell. He dwells only on the essential, on that which would be interesting to the persons really concerned: yet as he never omits any material circumstance, he is prolix from the number of points on which he touches, without being diffuse on any one; and is sometimes tedious from the fidelity with which he adheres to his subject, as other writers are from the frequency of their digressions from it. The chain of his story is composed of a number of fine links, closely connected together, and rivetted by a single blow. There is an instance of the minuteness which he introduces into his most serious descriptions in his account of Palamon when left alone in his cell:
“Swiche
sorrow he maketh that the grete tour
Resouned of his
yelling and clamour:
The pure fetters
on his shinnes grete
Were of his bitter
salte teres wete.”
The mention of this last circumstance looks like a part of the instructions he had to follow, which he had no discretionary power to leave out or introduce at pleasure. He is contented to find grace and beauty in truth. He exhibits for the most part the naked object, with little drapery thrown over it. His metaphors, which are few, are not for ornament, but use, and as like as possible to the things themselves. He does not affect to shew his power over the reader’s mind, but the power which his subject has over his own. The readers of Chaucer’s poetry feel more nearly what the persons he describes must have felt, than perhaps those of any other poet. His sentiments are not voluntary effusions of the poet’s fancy, but founded on the natural impulses and habitual prejudices of the characters he has to represent. There is an inveteracy of purpose, a sincerity of feeling, which never relaxes or grows vapid, in whatever they do or say. There is no artificial, pompous display, but a strict parsimony of the poet’s materials, like the rude simplicity of the age in which he lived. His
“There was
also a nonne, a Prioresse,
That of hire smiling
was ful simple and coy;
Hire gretest othe
n’as but by seint Eloy:
And she was cleped
Madame Eglentine.
Ful wel she sange
the service divine
Entuned in hire
nose ful swetely;
And Frenche she
spake ful fayre and fetisly,
After the scole
of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frenche of
Paris was to hire unknowe.
At mete was she
wel ytaughte withalle;
She lette no morsel
from hire lippes falle,
Ne wette hire
fingres in hire sauce depe.
* * * * * *
And sikerly she
was of great disport,
And ful plesant,
and amiable of port,
And peined hire
to contrefeten chere
Of court, and
ben estatelich of manere,
And to ben holden
digne of reverence.
But
for to speken of hire conscience,
She was so charitable
and so pitous,
She wolde wepe
if that she saw a mous
Caughte in a trappe,
if it were ded or bledde.
Of smale houndes
hadde she, that she fedde
With rosted flesh,
and milk, and wastel brede.
But sore wept
she if on of hem were dede,
Or if men smote
it with a yerde smert:
And all was conscience
and tendre herte.
Ful
semely hire wimple ypinched was;
Hire nose tretis;
hire eyen grey as glas;
Hire mouth ful
smale; and therto soft and red;
But sickerly she
hadde a fayre forehed.
It was almost
a spanne brode, I trowe.”
“A Monk
there was, a fayre for the maistrie,
An out-rider,
that loved venerie:
A manly man, to
ben an abbot able.
Ful many a deinte
hors hadde he in stable:
And whan he rode,
men mighte his bridel here,
Gingeling in a
whistling wind as clere,
And eke as loude,
as doth the chapell belle,
Ther as this lord
was keper of the celle.
The
reule of Seint Maure and of Seint Beneit,
Because that it
was olde and somdele streit,
This ilke monk
lette olde thinges pace,
And held after
the newe world the trace. [*]
He yave not of
the text a pulled hen,
That saith, that
hunters ben not holy men;—
Therfore he was
a prickasoure a right:
Greihoundes he
hadde as swift as foul of flight:
Of pricking and
of hunting for the hare
Was all his lust,
for no cost wolde he spare.
I
saw his sleves purfiled at the hond
With gris, and
that the finest of the lond.
And for to fasten
his hood under his chinne,
He had of gold
ywrought a curious pinne:
A love-knotte
in the greter end ther was.
His hed was balled,
and shone as any glas,
And eke his face,
as it hadde ben anoint.
He was a lord
ful fat and in good point.
His eyen stepe,
and rolling in his hed,
That stemed as
a forneis of a led.
His botes souple,
his hors in gret estat,
Now certainly
he was a fayre prelat.
He was not pale
as a forpined gost.
A fat swan loved
he best of any rost.
His palfrey was
as broune as is a bery.”
___ [*] PG transcriber’s note: “space” instead of “trace” in some editions. ___
The Serjeant at Law is the same identical individual as Lawyer Dowling in Tom Jones, who wished to divide himself into a hundred pieces, to be in a hundred places at once.
“No wher
so besy a man as he ther n’as,
And yet he semed
besier than he was.”
The Frankelein, in “whose hous it snewed of mete and drinke”; the Shipman, “who rode upon a rouncie, as he couthe”; the Doctour of Phisike, “whose studie was but litel of the Bible”; the Wif of Bath, in
“All whose
parish ther was non,
That to the offring
before hire shulde gon,
And if ther did,
certain so wroth was she,
That she was out
of alle charitee;”
—the poure Persone of a toun, “whose parish was wide, and houses fer asonder”; the Miller, and the Reve, “a slendre colerike man,” are all of the same stamp. They are every one samples of a kind; abstract definitions of a species. Chaucer, it has been said, numbered the classes of men, as Linnaeus numbered the plants. Most of them remain to this day: others that are obsolete, and may well be dispensed with, still live in his descriptions of them. Such is the Sompnoure:
“A Sompnoure
was ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fire-red
cherubinnes face,
For sausefleme
he was, with eyen narwe,
As hote he was,
and likerous as a sparwe,
With scalled browes
blake, and pilled berd:
Of his visage
children were sore aferd.
Ther n’as
quicksilver, litarge, ne brimston,
Boras, ceruse,
ne oile of tartre non,
Ne oinement that
wolde clense or bite,
That him might
helpen of his whelkes white,
Ne of the knobbes
sitting on his chekes.
Wel loved he garlike,
onions, and lekes,
And for to drinke
strong win as rede as blood.
Than wolde he
speke, and crie as he were wood.
And whan that
he wel dronken had the win,
Than wold he speken
no word but Latin.
A fewe termes
coude he, two or three,
That he had lerned
out of som decree;
No wonder is,
he heard it all the day.—
In
danger hadde he at his owen gise
The yonge girles
of the diocise,
And knew hir conseil,
and was of hir rede.
A gerlond hadde
he sette upon his hede
As gret as it
were for an alestake:
A bokeler hadde
he made him of a cake.
With him ther
rode a gentil Pardonere—
That hadde a vois
as smale as hath a gote.”
It would be a curious speculation (at least for those who think that the characters of men never change, though manners, opinions, and institutions may) to know what has become of this character of the Sompnoure in the present day; whether or not it has any technical representative in existing professions; into what channels and conduits it has withdrawn itself, where it lurks unseen in cunning obscurity, or else shews its face boldly, pampered into all the insolence of office, in some other shape, as it is deterred or encouraged by circumstances. Chaucer’s characters modernised, upon this principle of historic derivation, would be an useful addition to our knowledge of human nature. But who is there to undertake it?
The descriptions of the equipage, and accoutrements of the two kings of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight’s Tale, are as striking and grand, as the others are lively and natural:
“Ther maist
thou se coming with Palamon
Licurge himself,
the grete king of Trace:
Blake was his
berd, and manly was his face,
The cercles of
his eyen in his hed
They gloweden
betwixen yelwe and red,
And like a griffon
loked he about,
With kemped heres
on his browes stout;
His limmes gret,
his braunes hard and stronge,
His shouldres
brode, his armes round and longe
And as the guise
was in his contree,
Ful highe upon
a char of gold stood he,
With foure white
bolles in the trais.
Instede of cote-armure
on his harnais,
With nayles yelwe,
What a deal of terrible beauty there is contained in this description! The imagination of a poet brings such objects before us, as when we look at wild beasts in a menagerie; their claws are pared, their eyes glitter like harmless lightning; but we gaze at them with a pleasing awe, clothed in beauty, formidable in the sense of abstract power.
Chaucer’s descriptions of natural scenery possess the same sort of characteristic excellence, or what might be termed gusto. They have a local truth and freshness, which gives the very feeling of the air, the coolness or moisture of the ground. Inanimate objects are thus made to have a fellow-feeling in the interest of the story; and render back the sentiment of the speaker’s mind. One of the finest parts of Chaucer is of this mixed kind. It is the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf, where he describes the delight of that young beauty, shrowded in her bower, and listening, in the morning of the year, to the singing of the nightingale; while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of pleasure, and still increases, and repeats, and prolongs itself, and knows no ebb. The coolness of the arbour, its retirement, the early time of the day, the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouring bushes, the eager delight with which they devour and rend the opening buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth and feeling, which make the whole appear like the recollection of an actual scene:
“Which as
me thought was right a pleasing sight,
And eke the briddes
song for to here,
Would haue rejoyced
any earthly wight,
And I that couth
not yet in no manere
Heare the nightingale
of all the yeare,
Ful busily herkened
with herte and with eare,
If I her voice
perceiue coud any where.
And I that all
this pleasaunt sight sie,
Thought sodainly
I felt so sweet an aire
Of the eglentere,
that certainely
There is no herte
I deme in such dispaire,
Ne with thoughts
froward and contraire,
So ouerlaid, but
it should soone haue bote,
If it had ones
felt this savour sote.
And as I stood
and cast aside mine eie,
I was ware of
the fairest medler tree
That ever yet
in all my life I sie
As full of blossomes
as it might be,
Therein a goldfinch
leaping pretile
Fro bough to bough,
and as him list he eet
Here and there
of buds and floures sweet.
And to the herber
side was joyning
This faire tree,
of which I haue you told,
And at the last
the brid began to sing,
Whan he had eaten
what he eat wold,
So passing sweetly,
that by manifold
It was more pleasaunt
than I coud deuise,
And whan his song
was ended in this wise,
The nightingale
with so merry a note
Answered him,
that all the wood rong
So sodainly, that
as it were a sote,
I stood astonied,
so was I with the song
Thorow rauished,
that till late and long,
I ne wist in what
place I was, ne where,
And ayen me thought
she song euen by mine ere.
Wherefore I waited
about busily
On euery side,
if I her might see,
And at the last
I gan full well aspie
Where she sat
in a fresh grene laurer tree,
On the further
side euen right by me,
That gaue so passing
a delicious smell,
According to the
eglentere full well.
Whereof I had
so inly great pleasure,
That as me thought
I surely rauished was
Into Paradice,
where my desire
Was for to be,
and no ferther passe
As for that day,
and on the sote grasse,
I sat me downe,
for as for mine entent,
The birds song
was more conuenient,
And more pleasaunt
to me by manifold,
Than meat or drinke,
or any other thing,
Thereto the herber
was so fresh and cold,
The wholesome
sauours eke so comforting,
That as I demed,
sith the beginning
Of the world was
neur seene or than
So pleasaunt a
ground of none earthly man.
And as I sat the
birds harkening thus,
Me thought that
I heard voices sodainly,
The most sweetest
and most delicious
That euer any
wight I trow truly
Heard in their
life, for the armony
And sweet accord
was in so good musike,
That the uoice
to angels was most like.”
There is here no affected rapture, no flowery sentiment: the whole is an ebullition of natural delight “welling out of the heart,” like water from a crystal spring. Nature is the soul of art: there is a strength as well as a simplicity in the imagination that reposes entirely on nature, that nothing else can supply. It was the same trust in nature, and reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucer to describe the grief and patience of Griselda; the faith of Constance; and the heroic perseverance of the little child, who, going to school through the streets of Jewry,
“Oh Alma Redemptoris mater, loudly sung,”
and who after his death still triumphed in his song. Chaucer has more of this deep, internal, sustained sentiment, than any other writer, except Boccaccio. In depth of simple pathos, and intensity of conception, never swerving from his subject, I think no other writer comes near him, not even the Greek tragedians. I wish to be allowed to give one or two instances of what I mean. I will take the following from the Knight’s Tale. The distress of Arcite, in consequence of his banishment from his love, is thus described:
“Whan
that Arcite to Thebes comen was,
Ful oft a day
he swelt and said Alas,
For sene his lady
shall he never mo.
And shortly to
concluden all his wo,
So mochel sorwe
hadde never creature,
That is or shall
be, while the world may dure.
His slepe, his
mete, his drinke is him byraft.
That lene he wex,
and drie as is a shaft.
His eyen holwe,
and grisly to behold,
His hewe salwe,
and pale as ashen cold,
And solitary he
was, and ever alone,
And wailing all
the night, making his mone.
And if he herde
song or instrument,
Than wold he wepe,
he mighte not be stent.
So feble were
his spirites, and so low,
And changed so,
that no man coude know
His speche ne
his vois, though men it herd.”
This picture of the sinking of the heart, of the wasting away of the body and mind, of the gradual failure of all the faculties under the contagion of a rankling sorrow, cannot be surpassed. Of the same kind is his farewel to his mistress, after he has gained her hand and lost his life in the combat:
“Alas
the wo! alas the peines stronge,
That I for you
have suffered, and so longe!
Alas the deth!
alas min Emilie!
Alas departing
of our compagnie;
Alas min hertes
quene! alas my wif!
Min hertes ladie,
ender of my lif!
What is this world?
what axen men to have?
Now with his love,
now in his colde grave
Alone withouten
any compagnie.”
The death of Arcite is the more affecting, as it comes after triumph and victory, after the pomp of sacrifice, the solemnities of prayer, the celebration of the gorgeous rites of chivalry. The descriptions of the three temples of Mars, of Venus, and Diana, of the ornaments and ceremonies used in each, with the reception given to the offerings of the lovers, have a beauty and grandeur, much of which is lost in Dryden’s version. For instance, such lines as the following are not rendered with their true feeling.
“Why shulde
I not as well eke tell you all
The purtreiture
that was upon the wall
Within the temple
of mighty Mars the rede—
That highte the
gret temple of Mars in Trace
In thilke colde
and frosty region,
Ther as Mars hath
his sovereine mansion.
First on the wall
was peinted a forest,
In which ther
wonneth neyther man ne best,
With knotty knarry
barrein trees old
Of stubbes sharpe
and hidous to behold;
In which ther
ran a romble and a swough,
As though a storme
shuld bresten every bough.”
And again, among innumerable terrific images of death and slaughter painted on the wall, is this one:
“The statue
of Mars upon a carte stood
Armed, and looked
grim as he were wood.
A wolf ther stood
beforne him at his fete
With eyen red,
and of a man he ete.”
The story of Griselda is in Boccaccio; but the Clerk of Oxenforde, who tells it, professes to have learned it from Petrarch. This story has gone all over Europe, and has passed into a proverb. In spite of the barbarity of the circumstances, which are abominable, the sentiment remains unimpaired and unalterable. It is of that kind, “that heaves no sigh, that sheds no tear”; but it hangs upon the beatings of the heart; it is a part of the very being; it is as inseparable from it as the breath we draw. It is still and calm as the face of death. Nothing can touch it in its ethereal purity: tender as the yielding flower, it is fixed as the marble firmament. The only remonstrance she makes, the only complaint she utters against all the ill-treatment she receives, is that single line where, when turned back naked to her father’s house, she says,
“Let me not like a worm go by the way.”
The first outline given of the character is inimitable:
“Nought
fer fro thilke paleis honourable,
Wher as this markis
shope his marriage,
Ther stood a thorpe,
of sighte delitable,
In which that
poure folk of that village
Hadden hir bestes
and her herbergage,
And of hir labour
toke hir sustenance,
After that the
erthe yave hem habundance.
Among this poure
folk ther dwelt a man,
Which that was
holden pourest of hem all:
But highe God
sometime senden can
His grace unto
a litel oxes stall:
Janicola men of
that thorpe him call.
A doughter had
he, faire ynough to sight,
And Grisildis
this yonge maiden hight.
But for to speke
of vertuous beautee,
Than was she on
the fairest under Sonne:
Ful pourely yfostred
up was she:
No likerous lust
was in hire herte yronne;
Ful ofter of the
well than of the tonne
She dranke, and
for she wolde vertue plese,
She knew wel labour,
but non idel ese.
But though this
mayden tendre were of age,
Yet in the brest
of hire virginitee
Ther was enclosed
sad and ripe corage:
And in gret reverence
and charitee
Hire olde poure
fader fostred she:
A few sheep spinning
on the feld she kept,
She wolde not
ben idel til she slept.
And whan she homward
came she wolde bring
Wortes and other
herbes times oft,
The which she
shred and sethe for hire living,
And made hire
bed ful hard, and nothing soft:
And ay she kept
hire fadres lif on loft
With every obeisance
and diligence,
That child may
don to fadres reverence,
Upon Grisilde,
this poure creature,
Ful often sithe
this markis sette his sye, [sic]
As he on hunting
rode paraventure:
And whan it fell
that he might hire espie,
He not with wanton
loking of folie
His eyen cast
on hire, but in sad wise
Upon hire chere
he wold him oft avise,
Commending in
his herte hire womanhede,
And eke hire vertue,
passing any wight
Of so yong age,
as wel in chere as dede.
For though the
people have no gret insight
In vertue, he
considered ful right
Hire bountee,
and disposed that he wold
Wedde hire only,
if ever he wedden shold.
Grisilde of this
(God wot) ful innocent,
That for hire
shapen was all this array,
To fetchen water
at a welle is went,
And cometh home
as sone as ever she may.
For wel she had
herd say, that thilke day
The markis shulde
wedde, and, if she might,
She wolde fayn
han seen som of that sight.
She thought, “I
wol with other maidens stond,
That ben my felawes,
in our dore, and see
The markisesse,
and therto wol I fond
To don at home,
as sone as it may be,
The labour which
longeth unto me,
And than I may
at leiser hire behold,
If she this way
unto the castel hold.”
And she wolde
over the threswold gon,
The markis came
and gan hire for to call,
And she set doun
her water-pot anon
Beside the threswold
in an oxes stall,
And doun upon
hire knees she gan to fall.
And with sad countenance
kneleth still,
Till she had herd
what was the lordes will.”
The story of the little child slain in Jewry, (which is told by the Prioress, and worthy to be told by her who was “all conscience and tender heart,”) is not less touching than that of Griselda. It is simple and heroic to the last degree. The poetry of Chaucer has a religious sanctity about it, connected with the manners and superstitions of the age. It has all the spirit of martyrdom.
It has also all the extravagance and the utmost licentiousness of comic humour, equally arising out of the manners of the time. In this too Chaucer resembled Boccaccio that he excelled in both styles, and could pass at will “from grave to gay, from lively to severe”; but he never confounded the two styles together (except from that involuntary and unconscious mixture of the pathetic and humorous, which is almost always to be found in nature,) and was exclusively taken up with what he set about, whether it was jest or earnest. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (which Pope has very admirably modernised) is, perhaps, unequalled as a comic story. The Cock and the Fox is also excellent for lively strokes of character and satire. January and May is not so good as some of the others. Chaucer’s versification, considering the time at which he wrote, and that versification is a thing in a great degree mechanical, is not one of his least merits. It has considerable strength and harmony, and its apparent deficiency in the latter respect arises chiefly from the alterations which have since taken place in the pronunciation or mode of accenting the words of the language. The best general rule for reading him is to pronounce the final e, as in reading Italian.
It was observed in the last Lecture that painting describes what the object is in itself, poetry what it implies or suggests. Chaucer’s poetry is not, in general, the best confirmation of the truth of this distinction, for his poetry is more picturesque and historical than almost any other. But there is one instance in point which I cannot help giving in this place. It is the story of the three thieves who go in search of Death to kill him, and who meeting with him, are entangled in their fate by his words, without knowing him. In the printed catalogue to Mr. West’s (in some respects very admirable) picture of Death on the Pale Horse, it is observed, that “In poetry the same effect is produced by a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching, as it were with fire, the features and edges of a general mass of awful obscurity; but in painting, such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply that the artist wanted the power to pourtray the conceptions of his fancy. Mr. West was of opinion that to delineate a physical form, which in its moral impression would approximate to that of the visionary Death of Milton, it was necessary to endow it, if possible, with the appearance of super-human strength and energy. He has therefore exerted the utmost force and perspicuity of his pencil on the central figure.”—One might suppose from this, that the way to represent a shadow was to make it as substantial as possible. Oh, no! Painting has its prerogatives, (and high ones they are) but they lie in representing the visible, not the invisible. The moral attributes of Death are powers and effects of an infinitely wide and general description, which no individual or physical
“Ne Deth,
alas! ne will not han my lif.
Thus walke I like
a restless caitiff,
And on the ground,
which is my modres gate,
I knocke with
my staf, erlich and late,
And say to hire,
“Leve mother, let me in.
Lo, how I vanish,
flesh and blood and skin,
Alas! when shall
my bones ben at reste?
Mother, with you
wolde I changen my cheste,
That in my chambre
longe time hath be,
Ye, for an heren
cloute to wrap in me.”
But yet to me
she will not don that grace,
For which ful
pale and welked is my face.”
They then ask the old man where they shall find out Death to kill him, and he sends them on an errand which ends in the death of all three. We hear no more of him, but it is Death that they have encountered!
The interval between Chaucer and Spenser is long and dreary. There is nothing to fill up the chasm but the names of Occleve, “ancient Gower,” Lydgate, Wyatt, Surry, and Sackville. Spenser flourished in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and was sent with Sir John Davies into Ireland, of which he has left behind him some tender recollections in his description of the bog of Allan, and a record in an ably written paper, containing observations on the state of that country and the means of improving it, which remain in full force to the present day. Spenser died at an obscure inn in London, it is supposed in distressed circumstances. The treatment he received from Burleigh is well known. Spenser, as well as Chaucer, was engaged in active life; but the genius of his poetry was not active: it is inspired by the love of ease, and relaxation from
“In green vine leaves he was right fitly clad.”
At times he becomes picturesque from his intense love of beauty; as where he compares Prince Arthur’s crest to the appearance of the almond tree:
“Upon the
top of all his lofty crest,
A
bunch of hairs discolour’d diversely
With sprinkled
pearl and gold full richly drest
Did
shake and seem’d to daunce for jollity;
Like to an almond
tree ymounted high
On
top of green Selenis all alone,
With blossoms
brave bedecked daintily;
Her
tender locks do tremble every one
At every little
breath that under heav’n is blown.”
The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the moving principle of his mind; and he is guided in his fantastic delineations by no rule but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriates equally in scenes of Eastern magnificence; or the still solitude of a hermit’s cell—in the extremes of sensuality or refinement.
In reading the Faery Queen, you see a little withered old man by a wood-side opening a wicket, a giant, and a dwarf lagging far behind, a damsel in a boat upon an enchanted lake, wood-nymphs, and satyrs, and all of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace, with tapers burning, amidst knights and ladies, with dance and revelry, and song, “and mask, and antique pageantry.” What can be more solitary, more shut up in itself, than his description of the house of Sleep, to which Archimago sends for a dream:
“And more
to lull him in his slumber soft
A
trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
And ever-drizzling
rain upon the loft,
Mix’d
with a murmuring wind, much like the sound
Of swarming Bees,
did cast him in a swound.
No
other noise, nor people’s troublous cries.
That still are
wont t’ annoy the walled town
Might
there be heard; but careless Quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal
silence, far from enemies.”
It is as if “the honey-heavy dew of slumber” had settled on his pen in writing these lines. How different in the subject (and yet how like in beauty) is the following description of the Bower of Bliss:
“Eftsoones
they heard a most melodious sound
Of
all that mote delight a dainty ear;
Such as at once
might not on living ground,
Save
in this Paradise, be heard elsewhere:
Right hard it
was for wight which did it hear,
To
tell what manner musicke that mote be;
For all that pleasing
is to living eare
Was
there consorted in one harmonee:
Birds, voices,
instruments, windes, waters, all agree.
The joyous birdes
shrouded in chearefull shade
Their
notes unto the voice attempred sweet:
The angelical
soft trembling voices made
To
th’ instruments divine respondence meet.
The silver sounding
instruments did meet
With
the base murmur of the water’s fall;
The water’s
fall with difference discreet,
Now
soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;
The gentle warbling
wind low answered to all.”
The remainder of the passage has all that voluptuous pathos, and languid brilliancy of fancy, in which this writer excelled:
“The whiles
some one did chaunt this lovely lay;
Ah!
see, whoso fayre thing dost thou fain to see,
In springing flower
the image of thy day!
Ah!
see the virgin rose, how sweetly she
Doth first peep
forth with bashful modesty,
That
fairer seems the less ye see her may!
Lo! see soon after,
how more bold and free
Her
bared bosom she doth broad display;
Lo! see soon after,
how she fades and falls away!
So passeth in
the passing of a day
Of
mortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower;
Ne more doth flourish
after first decay,
That
erst was sought to deck both bed and bower
Of many a lady
and many a paramour!
Gather
therefore the rose whilst yet is prime,
For soon comes
age that will her pride deflower;
Gather
the rose of love whilst yet is time,
Whilst loving
thou mayst loved be with equal crime. [2]
He ceased; and
then gan all the quire of birds
Their
divers notes to attune unto his lay,
As in approvance
of his pleasing wordes.
The
constant pair heard all that he did say,
Yet swerved not,
but kept their forward way
Through
many covert groves and thickets close,
In which they
creeping did at last display [3]
That
wanton lady with her lover loose,
Whose sleepy head
she in her lap did soft dispose.
Upon a bed of
roses she was laid
As
faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin;
And was arrayed
or rather disarrayed,
All
in a veil of silk and silver thin,
That hid no whit
her alabaster skin,
But
rather shewed more white, if more might be:
More subtle web
Arachne cannot spin;
Nor
the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew,
do not in the air more lightly flee.
Her snowy breast
was bare to greedy spoil
Of
hungry eyes which n’ ote therewith be fill’d,
And yet through
languor of her late sweet toil
Few
drops more clear than nectar forth distill’d,
That like pure
Orient perles adown it trill’d;
And
her fair eyes sweet smiling in delight
Moisten’d
their fiery beams, with which she thrill’d
Frail
hearts, yet quenched not; like starry light,
Which sparkling
on the silent waves does seem more bright.”
___ [2] Taken from Tasso. [3] This word is an instance of those unwarrantable freedoms which Spenser sometimes took with language. ___
The finest things in Spenser are, the character of Una, in the first book; the House of Pride; the Cave of Mammon, and the Cave of Despair; the account of Memory, of whom it is said, among other things,
“The wars
he well remember’d of King Nine,
Of old Assaracus
and Inachus divine”;
the description of Belphoebe; the story of Florimel and the Witch’s son; the Gardens of Adonis, and the Bower of Bliss; the Mask of Cupid; and Colin Clout’s vision, in the last book. But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pike-staff. It might as well be pretended that we cannot see Poussin’s pictures for the allegory, as that the allegory prevents us from understanding Spenser. For instance, when Britomart, seated amidst the young warriors, lets fall her hair and discovers her sex, is it necessary to know the part she plays in the allegory, to understand the beauty of the following stanza?
“And eke
that stranger knight amongst the rest
Was
for like need enforc’d to disarray.
Tho when as vailed
was her lofty crest,
Her
golden locks that were in trammels gay
Upbounden, did
themselves adown display,
And
raught unto her heels like sunny beams
That in a cloud
their light did long time stay;
Their
vapour faded, shew their golden gleams,
And through the
persant air shoot forth their azure streams.”
Or is there any mystery in what is said of Belphoebe, that her hair was sprinkled with flowers and blossoms which had been entangled in it as she fled through the woods? Or is it necessary to have a more distinct idea of Proteus, than that which is given of him in his boat, with the frighted Florimel at his feet, while
“------the cold icicles from his rough beard Dropped adown upon her snowy breast!”
Or is it not a sufficient account of one of the sea-gods that pass by them, to say—
“That was
Arion crowned:—
So went he playing
on the watery plain.”
Or to take the Procession of the Passions that draw the coach of Pride, in which the figures of Idleness, of Gluttony, of Lechery, of Avarice, of Envy, and of Wrath speak, one should think, plain enough for themselves; such as this of Gluttony:
“And by
his side rode loathsome Gluttony,
Deformed
creature, on a filthy swine;
His belly was
up blown with luxury;
And
eke with fatness swollen were his eyne;
And like a crane
his neck was long and fine,
With
which he swallowed up excessive feast,
For want whereof poor people
oft did pine.
In green vine
leaves he was right fitly clad;
For
other clothes he could not wear for heat:
And on his head
an ivy garland had,
From
under which fast trickled down the sweat:
Still as he rode,
he somewhat still did eat.
And
in his hand did bear a bouzing can,
Of which he supt
so oft, that on his seat
His
drunken corse he scarce upholden can;
In shape and size more like
a monster than a man.”
Or this of Lechery:
“And next
to him rode lustfull Lechery
Upon
a bearded goat, whose rugged hair
And whaly eyes
(the sign of jealousy)
Was
like the person’s self whom he did bear:
Who rough and
black, and filthy did appear.
Unseemly
man to please fair lady’s eye:
Yet he of ladies
oft was loved dear,
When
fairer faces were bid standen by:
O! who does know the bent
of woman’s fantasy?
In a green gown
he clothed was full fair,
Which
underneath did hide his filthiness;
And in his hand
a burning heart he bare,
Full
of vain follies and new fangleness;
For he was false
Inconstant man
that loved all he saw,
And
lusted after all that he did love;
Ne would his looser
life be tied to law;
But
joyed weak women’s hearts to tempt and prove,
If from their loyal loves
he might them move.”
This is pretty plain-spoken. Mr. Southey says of Spenser:
“------Yet not more sweet Than pure was he, and not more pure than wise; High priest of all the Muses’ mysteries!”
On the contrary, no one was more apt to pry into mysteries which do not strictly belong to the Muses.
Of the same kind with the Procession of the Passions, as little obscure, and still more beautiful, is the Mask of Cupid, with his train of votaries:
“The first
was Fancy, like a lovely boy
Of
rare aspect, and beauty without peer;
His garment neither
was of silk nor say,
But
painted plumes in goodly order dight,
Like as the sun-burnt
Indians do array
Their
tawny bodies in their proudest plight:
As those same
plumes so seem’d he vain and light,
That
by his gait might easily appear;
For still he far’d
as dancing in delight,
And
in his hand a windy fan did bear
That in the idle air he mov’d
still here and there.
And him beside
march’d amorous Desire,
Who
seem’d of riper years than the other swain,
Yet was that other
swain this elder’s sire,
And
gave him being, common to them twain:
His garment was
disguised very vain,
And
his embroidered bonnet sat awry;
Twixt both his
hands few sparks he close did strain,
Which
still he blew, and kindled busily,
That soon they life conceiv’d
and forth in flames did fly.
Next after him
went Doubt, who was yclad
In
a discolour’d coat of strange disguise,
That at his back
a broad capuccio had,
And
sleeves dependant Albanese-wise;
He lookt askew
with his mistrustful eyes,
And
nicely trod, as thorns lay in his way,
Or that the floor
to shrink he did avise;
And
on a broken reed he still did stay
His feeble steps, which shrunk
when hard thereon he lay.
With him went
Daunger, cloth’d in ragged weed,
Made
of bear’s skin, that him more dreadful made;
Yet his own face
was dreadfull, ne did need
Strange
horror to deform his grisly shade;
A net in th’
one hand, and a rusty blade
In
th’ other was; this Mischiefe, that Mishap;
With th’
one his foes he threat’ned to invade,
With
th’ other he his friends meant to enwrap;
For whom he could not kill
he practiz’d to entrap.
Next him was Fear,
all arm’d from top to toe,
Yet
thought himselfe not safe enough thereby,
But fear’d
each shadow moving to and fro;
And
his own arms when glittering he did spy
Or clashing heard,
he fast away did fly,
As
ashes pale of hue, and winged-heel’d;
And evermore on
Daunger fixt his eye,
’Gainst
whom he always bent a brazen shield,
Which his right hand unarmed
fearfully did wield.
With him went
Hope in rank, a handsome maid,
Of
chearfull look and lovely to behold;
In silken samite
she was light array’d,
And
her fair locks were woven up in gold;
She always smil’d,
and in her hand did hold
An
holy-water sprinkle dipt in dew,
With which she
sprinkled favours manifold
On
whom she list, and did great liking shew,
Great liking unto many, but
true love to few.
Next after them,
the winged God himself
Came
riding on a lion ravenous,
Taught to obey
the menage of that elfe
That
man and beast with power imperious
Subdueth to his
kingdom tyrannous:
His
blindfold eyes he bade awhile unbind,
That his proud
spoil of that same dolorous
Fair
dame he might behold in perfect kind;
Which seen, he much rejoiced
in his cruel mind.
Of which full
proud, himself uprearing high,
He
looked round about with stern disdain,
And did survey
his goodly company:
And
marshalling the evil-ordered train,
With that the
darts which his right hand did strain,
Full
dreadfully he shook, that all did quake,
And clapt on high
his colour’d winges twain,
That
all his many it afraid did make:
Tho, blinding him again, his
way he forth did take.”
The description of Hope, in this series of historical portraits, is one of the most beautiful in Spenser: and the triumph of Cupid at the mischief he has made, is worthy of the malicious urchin deity. In reading these descriptions, one can hardly avoid being reminded of Rubens’s allegorical pictures; but the account of Satyrane taming the lion’s whelps and lugging the bear’s cubs along in his arms while yet an infant, whom his mother so naturally advises to “go seek some other play-fellows,” has even more of this high picturesque character. Nobody but Rubens could have painted the fancy of Spenser; and he could not have given the sentiment, the airy dream that hovers over it! With all this, Spenser neither makes us laugh nor weep. The only jest in his poem is an allegorical play upon words, where he describes Malbecco as escaping in the herd of goats, “by the help of his fayre hornes on hight.” But he has been unjustly charged with a want of passion and of strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the pathos of immediate action or suffering,
“That house’s
form within was rude and strong,
Like
an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift,
From whose rough
vault the ragged breaches hung,
Embossed
with massy gold of glorious gift,
And with rich
metal loaded every rift,
That
heavy ruin they did seem to threat:
And over them
Arachne high did lift
Her
cunning web, and spread her subtle net,
Enwrapped in foul smoke, and
clouds more black than jet.
Both roof and
floor, and walls were all of gold,
But
overgrown with dust and old decay, [4]
And hid in darkness
that none could behold
The
hue thereof: for view of cheerful day
Did never in that
house itself display,
But
a faint shadow of uncertain light;
Such as a lamp
whose life doth fade away;
Or
as the moon clothed with cloudy night
Does shew to him that walks
in fear and sad affright.
* * * * * * *
And over all sad
Horror with grim hue
Did
always soar, beating his iron wings;
And after him
owls and night-ravens flew,
The
hateful messengers of heavy things,
Of death and dolour
telling sad tidings;
Whiles
sad Celleno, sitting on a clift,
A song of bitter
bale and sorrow sings,
That
heart of flint asunder could have rift;
Which having ended, after
him she flieth swift.”
___ [4] “That all with one consent praise new-born gauds, Tho’ they are made and moulded of things past, And give to Dust, that is a little gilt, More laud than gold o’er-dusted.” Troilus and Cressida. ___
The Cave of Despair is described with equal gloominess and power of fancy; and the fine moral declamation of the owner of it, on the evils of life, almost makes one in love with death. In the story of Malbecco, who is haunted by jealousy, and in vain strives to run away from his own thoughts—
“High over hill and over dale he flies”—
the truth of human passion and the preternatural ending are equally striking.—It is not fair to compare Spenser with Shakspeare, in point of interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus; and the result would not be unfavourable to Spenser. There is only one work of the same allegorical kind, which has more interest than Spenser (with scarcely less imagination): and that is the Pilgrim’s Progress. The three first books of the Faery Queen are very superior to the three last. One would think that Pope, who used to ask if any one had ever read the Faery Queen through, had only dipped into these last. The only things in them equal to the former, are the account of Talus, the Iron Man, and the delightful episode of Pastorella.
The language of Spenser is full, and copious, to overflowing; it is less pure and idiomatic than Chaucer’s, and is enriched and adorned with phrases borrowed from the different languages of Europe, both ancient and modern. He was, probably, seduced into a certain license of expression by the difficulty of filling up the moulds of his complicated rhymed stanza from the limited resources of his native language. This stanza, with alternate and repeatedly recurring rhymes, is borrowed from the Italians. It was peculiarly fitted to their language, which abounds in similar vowel terminations, and is as little adapted to ours, from the stubborn, unaccommodating resistance which the consonant endings of the northern languages make to this sort of endless sing-song.—Not that I would, on that account, part with the stanza of Spenser. We are, perhaps, indebted to this very necessity of finding out new forms of expression, and to the occasional faults to which it led, for a poetical language rich and varied and magnificent beyond all former, and almost all later example. His versification is, at once, the most smooth and the most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinth of sweet sounds, “in many a winding bout of linked sweetness long drawn out”—that would cloy by their very sweetness, but that the ear is constantly relieved and enchanted by their continued variety of modulation— dwelling on the pauses of the action, or flowing on in a fuller tide of harmony with the movement of the sentiment. It has not the bold dramatic transitions of Shakspeare’s blank verse, nor the high-raised tone of Milton’s; but it is the perfection of melting harmony, dissolving the soul in pleasure, or holding it captive in the chains of suspense. Spenser was the poet of our waking dreams; and he has invented not only a language, but a music of his own for them. The undulations are infinite, like those of the waves of the sea: but the effect is still the same, lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noises of the world, from which we have no wish to be ever recalled.
LECTURE III. ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON.
In looking back to the great works of genius in former times, we are sometimes disposed to wonder at the little progress which has since been made in poetry, and in the arts of imitation in general. But this is perhaps a foolish wonder. Nothing can be more contrary to the fact, than the supposition that in what we understand by the fine arts, as painting, and poetry, relative perfection is only the result of repeated efforts in successive periods, and that what has been once well done, constantly leads to something better. What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical, or definite, but depends on feeling, taste, and genius, very soon becomes stationary, or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. The contrary opinion is a vulgar error, which has grown up, like many others, from transferring an analogy of one kind to something quite distinct, without taking into the account the difference in the nature of the things, or attending to the difference of the results. For most persons, finding what wonderful advances have been made in biblical criticism, in chemistry, in mechanics, in geometry, astronomy, &c. i.e. in things depending on mere inquiry and experiment, or on absolute demonstration, have been led hastily to conclude, that there was a general tendency in the efforts of the human intellect to improve by repetition, and, in all other arts and institutions, to grow perfect and mature by time. We look back upon the theological creed of our ancestors, and their discoveries in natural philosophy, with a smile of pity: science, and the arts connected with it, have all had their infancy, their youth, and manhood, and seem to contain in them no principle of limitation or decay: and, inquiring no farther about the matter, we infer, in the intoxication of our pride, and the height of our self-congratulation, that the same progress has been made, and will continue to be made, in all other things which are the work of man. The fact, however, stares us so plainly in the face, that one would think the smallest reflection must suggest the truth, and overturn our sanguine theories. The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the birth of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was, in other respects, comparatively barbarous. Those arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after. This is the peculiar distinction and privilege of each, of science and of art:—of the one, never to attain its utmost limit of perfection; and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Dante, and Ariosto, (Milton alone
The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought within us, and with the world of sense around us—with what we know, and see, and feel intimately. They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature. But the pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood three thousand, or three hundred years ago, as they are at present: the face of nature, and “the human face divine” shone as bright then as they have ever done. But it is their light, reflected by true genius on art, that marks out its path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses’ feet, like that which
“Circled
Una’s angel face,
And made a sunshine
in the shady place.”
The four greatest names in English poetry, are almost the four first we come to—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton. There are no others that can really be put in competition with these. The two last have had justice done them by the voice of common fame. Their names are blazoned in the very firmament of reputation; while the two first (though “the fault has been more in their stars than in themselves that they are underlings”) either never emerged far above the horizon, or were too soon involved in the obscurity of time. The three first of these are excluded from Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (Shakspeare indeed is so from the dramatic form of his compositions): and the fourth, Milton, is admitted with a reluctant and churlish welcome.
In comparing these four writers together, it might be said that Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life; Spenser, as the poet of romance; Shakspeare as the poet of nature (in the largest use of the term); and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as they are; Spenser, as we wish them to be; Shakspeare, as they would be; and Milton as they ought to be. As poets, and as great poets, imagination, that is, the power of feigning things according to nature, was common to them all: but the principle or moving power, to which this faculty was most subservient in Chaucer, was habit, or inveterate prejudice; in Spenser, novelty, and the love of the marvellous; in Shakspeare, it was the force of passion, combined with every variety of possible circumstances; and in Milton, only with the highest. The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakspeare, every thing.—It has been said by some critic, that Shakspeare was distinguished from the other dramatic writers of his day only by his wit; that they had all his other qualities but that; that one writer had as much sense, another as much fancy, another as much knowledge of character, another the same depth of passion, and another as great a power of language. This statement is not true; nor is the inference from it well-founded, even if it were. This person does not seem to have been aware that, upon his own shewing, the great distinction of Shakspeare’s genius was its virtually including the genius of all the great men of his age, and not his differing from them in one accidental particular. But to have done with such minute and literal trifling.
The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had “a mind reflecting ages past,” and present:—all the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: “All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,” are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for
“Ophelia.
My lord, as I was reading in my closet,
Prince Hamlet,
with his doublet all unbrac’d,
No hat upon his
head, his stockings loose,
Ungartred, and
down-gyved to his ancle,
Pale as his shirt,
his knees knocking each other,
And with a look
so piteous,
As if he had been
sent from hell
To speak of horrors,
thus he comes before me.
Polonius.
Mad for thy love!
Oph.
My lord, I do not know,
But truly I do
fear it.
Pol.
What said he?
Oph.
He took me by the wrist, and held me hard,
Then goes he to
the length of all his arm;
And with his other
hand thus o’er his brow,
He falls to such
perusal of my face,
As he would draw
it: long staid he so;
At last, a little
shaking of my arm,
And thrice his
head thus waving up and down,
He rais’d
a sigh so piteous and profound,
As it did seem
to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being.
That done, he lets me go,
And with his head
over his shoulder turn’d,
He seem’d
to find his way without his eyes;
For out of doors
he went without their help,
And to the last
bended their light on me.”
Act.
II. Scene 1.
How after this airy, fantastic idea of irregular grace and bewildered melancholy any one can play Hamlet, as we have seen it played, with strut, and stare, and antic right-angled sharp-pointed gestures, it is difficult to say, unless it be that Hamlet is not bound, by the prompter’s cue, to study the part of Ophelia. The account of Ophelia’s death begins thus:
“There is
a willow hanging o’er a brook,
That shows its
hoary leaves in the glassy stream.”—
Now this is an instance of the same unconscious power of mind which is as true to nature as itself. The leaves of the willow are, in fact, white underneath, and it is this part of them which would appear “hoary” in the reflection in the brook. The same sort of intuitive power, the same faculty of bringing every object in nature, whether present or absent, before the mind’s eye, is observable in the speech of Cleopatra, when conjecturing what were the employments of Antony in his absence:— “He’s speaking now, or murmuring, where’s my serpent of old Nile?” How fine to make Cleopatra have this consciousness of her own character, and to make her feel that it is this for which Antony is in love with her! She says, after the battle of Actium, when Antony has resolved to risk another fight, “It is my birth-day; I had thought to have held it poor: but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.” What other poet would have thought of such a casual resource of the imagination, or would have dared to avail himself of it? The thing happens in the play as it might have happened in fact.—That which, perhaps, more than any thing else distinguishes the dramatic productions of Shakspeare from all others, is this wonderful truth and individuality of conception. Each of his characters is as much itself, and as absolutely independent of the rest, as well as of the author, as if they were living persons, not fictions of the mind. The poet may be said, for the time, to identify himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given. His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh and blood; they speak like men, not like authors. One might suppose that he had stood by at the time, and overheard what passed. As in our dreams we hold conversations with ourselves, make remarks, or communicate intelligence, and have no idea of the answer which we shall receive, and which we ourselves make, till we hear it: so the dialogues in Shakspeare are carried on without any consciousness of what is to follow, without any appearance of preparation or premeditation. The gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. Nothing is made out by formal inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis: all comes, or seems to come, immediately from nature. Each object and circumstance exists in his mind, as it would have existed in reality: each several train of thought and feeling goes on of itself, without confusion or effort. In the world of his imagination, every thing has a life, a place, and being of its own!
Chaucer’s characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like identical propositions. They are consistent, but uniform; we get no new idea of them from first to last; they are not placed in different lights, nor are their subordinate traits brought out in new situations; they are like portraits or physiognomical studies, with the distinguishing features marked with inconceivable truth and precision, but that preserve the same unaltered air and attitude. Shakspeare’s are historical figures, equally true and correct, but put into action, where every nerve and muscle is displayed in the struggle with others, with all the effect of collision and contrast, with every variety of light and shade. Chaucer’s characters are narrative, Shakspeare’s dramatic, Milton’s epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shakspeare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakspeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances. Milton took only a few simple principles of character, and raised them to the utmost conceivable grandeur, and refined them from every base alloy. His imagination, “nigh sphered in Heaven,” claimed kindred only with what he saw from that height, and could raise to the same elevation with itself. He sat retired and kept his state alone, “playing with wisdom”; while Shakspeare mingled with the crowd, and played the host, “to make society the sweeter welcome.”
The passion in Shakspeare is of the same nature as his delineation of character. It is not some one habitual feeling or sentiment preying upon itself, growing out of itself, and moulding every thing to itself; it is passion modified by passion, by all the other feelings to which the individual is liable, and to which others are liable with him; subject to all the fluctuations of caprice and accident; calling into play all the resources of the understanding and all the energies of the will; irritated by obstacles or yielding to them; rising from small beginnings to its utmost height; now drunk with hope, now stung to madness, now sunk in despair, now blown to air with a breath, now raging like a torrent. The human soul is made the sport of fortune, the prey of adversity: it is stretched on the wheel of destiny, in restless ecstacy. The passions are in a state of projection. Years are melted down to moments, and every instant teems with fate. We know the results, we see the process. Thus after Iago has been boasting to himself of the effect of his poisonous suggestions on the mind of Othello, “which, with a little act upon the blood, will work like mines of sulphur,” he adds—
“Look where
he comes! not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy
syrups of the East,
Shall ever medicine
thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow’dst
yesterday.”—
And he enters at this moment, like the crested serpent, crowned with his wrongs and raging for revenge! The whole depends upon the turn of a thought. A word, a look, blows the spark of jealousy into a flame; and the explosion is immediate and terrible as a volcano. The dialogues in Lear, in Macbeth, that between Brutus and Cassius, and nearly all those in Shakspeare, where the interest is wrought up to its highest pitch, afford examples of this dramatic fluctuation of passion. The interest in Chaucer is quite different; it is like the course of a river, strong, and full, and increasing. In Shakspeare, on the contrary, it is like the sea, agitated this way and that, and loud-lashed by furious storms; while in the still pauses of the blast, we distinguish only the cries of despair, or the silence of death! Milton, on the other hand, takes the imaginative part of passion—that which remains after the event, which the mind reposes on when all is over, which looks upon circumstances from the remotest elevation of thought and fancy, and abstracts them from the world of action to that of contemplation. The objects of dramatic poetry affect us by sympathy, by their nearness to ourselves, as they take us by surprise, or force us upon action, “while rage with rage doth sympathise”; the objects of epic poetry affect us through the medium of the imagination, by magnitude and distance, by their permanence and universality. The one fill us with terror and pity, the other with admiration and delight. There are certain objects that strike the imagination, and inspire awe in the very idea of them, independently of any dramatic interest, that is, of any connection with the vicissitudes of human life. For instance, we cannot think of the pyramids of Egypt, of a Gothic ruin, or an old Roman encampment, without a certain emotion, a sense of power and sublimity coming over the mind. The heavenly bodies that hang over our heads wherever we go, and “in their untroubled element shall shine when we are laid in dust, and all our cares forgotten,” affect us in the same way. Thus Satan’s address to the Sun has an epic, not a dramatic interest; for though the second person in the dialogue makes no answer and feels no concern, yet the eye of that vast luminary is upon him, like the eye of heaven, and seems conscious of what he says, like an universal presence. Dramatic poetry and epic, in their perfection, indeed, approximate to and strengthen one another. Dramatic poetry borrows aid from the dignity of persons and things, as the heroic does from human passion, but in theory they are distinct.—When Richard II. calls for the looking-glass to contemplate his faded majesty in it, and bursts into that affecting exclamation: “Oh, that I were a mockery-king of snow, to melt away before the sun of Bolingbroke,” we have here the utmost force of human passion, combined with the ideas of regal splendour and fallen power. When Milton says of Satan:
“------His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appear’d Less than archangel ruin’d, and th’ excess Of glory obscur’d;”—
the mixture of beauty, of grandeur, and pathos, from the sense of irreparable loss, of never-ending, unavailing regret, is perfect.
The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility; or what is worse, to divest it both of imaginary splendour and human passion, to surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelings and devouring egotism of the writers’ own minds. Milton and Shakspeare did not so understand poetry. They gave a more liberal interpretation both to nature and art. They did not do all they could to get rid of the one and the other, to fill up the dreary void with the Moods of their own Minds. They owe their power over the human mind to their having had a deeper sense than others of what was grand in the objects of nature, or affecting in the events of human life. But to the men I speak of there is nothing interesting, nothing heroical, but themselves. To them the fall of gods or of great men is the same. They do not enter into the feeling. They cannot understand the terms. They are even debarred from the last poor, paltry consolation of an unmanly triumph over fallen greatness; for their minds reject, with a convulsive effort and intolerable loathing, the very idea that there ever was, or was thought to be, any thing superior to themselves. All that has ever excited the attention or admiration of the world, they look upon with the most perfect indifference; and they are surprised to find that the world repays their indifference with scorn. “With what measure they mete, it has been meted to them again.”—
Shakespeare’s imagination is of the same plastic kind as his conception of character or passion. “It glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.” Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the most opposite extremes; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, “puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.” He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it; but the stroke, like the lightning’s, is sure as it is sudden. He takes the widest possible range, but from that very range he has his choice of the greatest variety and aptitude of materials. He brings together images the most alike, but placed at the greatest distance from each other; that is, found in circumstances of the greatest dissimilitude. From the remoteness of his combinations, and the celerity with which they are effected, they coalesce the more indissolubly together. The more the thoughts are strangers to each other, and the longer they have been kept asunder, the more intimate does their union seem to become. Their felicity is equal to their force. Their likeness is made more dazzling by their novelty. They startle, and take the fancy prisoner in the same instant. I will mention one or two which are very striking, and not much known, out of Troilus and Cressida. AEneas says to Agamemnon,
“I ask that
I may waken reverence,
And on the cheek
be ready with a blush
Modest as morning,
when she coldly eyes
The youthful Phoebus.”
Ulysses urging Achilles to shew himself in the field, says—
“No man
is the lord of any thing,
Till he communicate
his parts to others:
Nor doth he of
himself know them for aught,
Till he behold
them formed in the applause,
Where they’re
extended! which like an arch reverberates
The voice again,
or like a gate of steel,
Fronting the sun,
receives and renders back
Its figure and
its heat.”
Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice.
“Rouse yourself;
and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your
neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop
from the lion’s mane
Be shook to air.”
Shakspeare’s language and versification are like the rest of him. He has a magic power over words: they come winged at his bidding; and seem to know their places. They are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the occasion, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an actual impression of the objects. His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion. His language is hieroglypnical. It translates thoughts into visible images. It abounds in sudden transitions and elliptical expressions. This is the source of his mixed metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of speech. These, however, give no pain from long custom. They have, in fact, become idioms in the language. They are the building, and not the scaffolding to thought. We take the meaning and effect of a well-known passage entire, and no more stop to scan and spell out the particular words and phrases, than the syllables of which they are composed. In trying to recollect any other author, one sometimes stumbles, in case of failure, on a word as good. In Shakspeare, any other word but the true one, is sure to be wrong. If any body, for instance, could not recollect the words of the following description,
“------Light thickens, And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,”
he would be greatly at a loss to substitute others for them equally expressive of the feeling. These remarks, however, are strictly applicable only to the impassioned parts of Shakspeare’s language, which flowed from the warmth and originality of his imagination, and were his own. The language used for prose conversation and ordinary business is sometimes technical, and involved in the affectation of the time. Compare, for example, Othello’s apology to the senate, relating “his whole course of love,” with some of the preceding parts relating to his appointment, and the official dispatches from Cyprus. In this respect, “the business of the state does him offence.”—His versification is no less powerful, sweet, and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of sullen intricacy, crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiest expansion—from the ease and familiarity of measured conversation to the lyrical sounds
“------Of ditties highly penned, Sung by a fair queen in a summer’s bower, With ravishing division to her lute.”
It is the only blank verse in the language, except Milton’s, that for itself is readable. It is not stately and uniformly swelling like his, but varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass over in its uncertain course,
“And so
by many winding nooks it strays,
With willing sport
to the wild ocean.”
It remains to speak of the faults of Shakspeare. They are not so many or so great as they have been represented; what there are, are chiefly owing to the following causes:—The universality of his genius was, perhaps, a disadvantage to his single works; the variety of his resources, sometimes diverting him from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and indifference of his temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than he might have been. He is relaxed and careless in critical places; he is in earnest throughout only in Timon, Macbeth, and Lear. Again, he had no models of acknowledged excellence constantly in view to stimulate his efforts, and by all that appears, no love of fame. He wrote for the “great vulgar and the small,” in his time, not for posterity. If Queen Elizabeth and the maids of honour laughed heartily at his worst jokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were silent at his best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next night well. He did not trouble himself about Voltaire’s criticisms. He was willing to take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things; and if his plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very facility of production would make him set less value on his own excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above half a dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography, not against poetry. As to the unities, he was right in setting them at defiance. He was fonder of puns than became so great a man. His barbarisms were those of his age. His genius was his own. He had no objection to float down with the stream of common taste and opinion: he rose above it by his own buoyancy, and an impulse which he could not keep under, in spite of himself or others, and “his delights did shew most dolphin-like.”
He had an equal genius for comedy and tragedy; and his tragedies are better than his comedies, because tragedy is better than comedy. His female characters, which have been found fault with as insipid, are the finest in the world. Lastly, Shakspeare was the least of a coxcomb of any one that ever lived, and much of a gentleman.
Shakspeare discovers in his writings little religious enthusiasm, and an indifference to personal reputation; he had none of the bigotry of his age, and his political prejudices were not very strong. In these respects, as well as in every other, he formed a direct contrast to Milton. Milton’s works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn to Fame. He had his thoughts constantly fixed on the contemplation of the Hebrew theocracy, and of a perfect commonwealth; and he seized the pen with a hand just warm from the touch of the ark of faith. His religious zeal infused its character into his imagination; so that he devotes himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation of his genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the good of his country. The spirit of the poet, the patriot, and the prophet, vied with each other in his breast. His mind appears to have held equal communion with the inspired writers, and with the bards and sages of ancient Greece and Rome;—
“Blind Thamyris,
and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias,
and Phineus, prophets old.”
He had a high standard, with which he was always comparing himself, nothing short of which could satisfy his jealous ambition. He thought of nobler forms and nobler things than those he found about him. He lived apart, in the solitude of his own thoughts, carefully excluding from his mind whatever might distract its purposes or alloy its purity, or damp its zeal. “With darkness and with dangers compassed round,” he had the mighty models of antiquity always present to his thoughts, and determined to raise a monument of equal height and glory, “piling up every stone of lustre from the brook,” for the delight and wonder of posterity. He had girded himself up, and as it were, sanctified his genius to this service from his youth. “For after,” he says, “I had from my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, been exercised to the tongues, and some sciences as my age could suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, it was found that whether aught was imposed upon me by them, or betaken to of my own choice, the style by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live; but much latelier, in the private academies of Italy, perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout, met with acceptance above what was looked for; I began thus far to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let it die. The accomplishment of these intentions, which have lived within me ever since I could conceive myself anything worth to my country, lies not but in a power above man’s to promise; but that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied
So that of Spenser:
“The noble
heart that harbours virtuous thought,
And
is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest
until it forth have brought
The
eternal brood of glory excellent.”
Milton, therefore, did not write from casual impulse, but after a severe examination of his own strength, and with a resolution to leave nothing undone which it was in his power to do. He always labours, and almost always succeeds. He strives hard to say the finest things in the world, and he does say them. He adorns and dignifies his subject to the utmost: he surrounds it with every possible association of beauty or grandeur, whether moral, intellectual, or physical. He refines on his descriptions of beauty; loading sweets on sweets, till the sense aches at them; and raises his images of terror to a gigantic elevation, that “makes Ossa like a wart.” In Milton, there is always an appearance of effort: in Shakespeare, scarcely any.
Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every source of imitation, sacred or profane; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer. He is a writer of centos, and yet in originality scarcely inferior to Homer. The power of his mind is stamped on every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. In reading his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them. The quantity of art in him shews the strength of his genius: the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. Milton’s learning has the effect of intuition. He describes objects, of which he could only have read in books, with the vividness of actual observation. His imagination has the force of nature. He makes words tell as pictures.
“Him followed
Rimmon, whose delightful seat
Was fair Damascus,
on the fertile banks
Of Abbana and
Pharphar, lucid streams.”
The word lucid here gives to the idea all the sparkling effect of the most perfect landscape.
And again:
“As when
a vulture on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridge
the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from
a region scarce of prey,
To gorge the flesh
of lambs and yeanling kids
On hills where
flocks are fed, flies towards the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes,
Indian streams;
But in his way
lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where
Chineses [sic] drive
With sails and
wind their cany waggons light.”
If Milton had taken a journey for the express purpose, he could not have described this scenery and mode of life better. Such passages are like demonstrations of natural history. Instances might be multiplied without end.
We might be tempted to suppose that the vividness with which he describes visible objects, was owing to their having acquired an unusual degree of strength in his mind, after the privation of his sight; but we find the same palpableness and truth in the descriptions which occur in his early poems. In Lycidas he speaks of “the great vision of the guarded mount,” with that preternatural weight of impression with which it would present itself suddenly to “the pilot of some small night-foundered skiff”: and the lines in the Penseroso, describing “the wandering moon,”
“Riding
near her highest noon,
Like one that
had been led astray
Through the heaven’s
wide pathless way,”
are as if he had gazed himself blind in looking at her. There is also the same depth of impression in his descriptions of the objects of all the different senses, whether colours, or sounds, or smells—the same absorption of his mind in whatever engaged his attention at the time. It has been indeed objected to Milton, by a common perversity of criticism, that his ideas were musical rather than picturesque, as if because they were in the highest degree musical, they must be (to keep the sage critical balance even, and to allow no one man to possess two qualities at the same time) proportionably deficient in other respects. But Milton’s poetry is not cast in any such narrow, common-place mould; it is not so barren of resources. His worship of the Muse was not so simple or confined. A sound arises “like a steam of rich distilled perfumes”; we hear the pealing organ, but the incense on the altars is also there, and the statues of the gods are ranged around! The ear indeed predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately affected, and because the language of music blends more immediately with, and forms a more natural accompaniment to, the variable and indefinite associations of ideas conveyed by words. But where the associations of the imagination are not the principal thing, the individual object is given by Milton with equal force and beauty. The strongest and best proof of this, as a characteristic power of his mind, is, that the persons of Adam and Eve, of Satan, &c. are always accompanied, in our imagination, with the grandeur of the naked figure; they convey to us the ideas of sculpture. As an instance, take the following:
“------He soon Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand, The same whom John saw also in the sun: His back was turned, but not his brightness hid; Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar Circled his head, nor less his locks behind Illustrious on his shoulders fledge with wings Lay waving round; on some great charge employ’d He seem’d, or fix’d in cogitation deep. Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hope To find who might direct his wand’ring flight To Paradise, the happy seat of man, His journey’s end, and our beginning woe. But first he casts to change his proper shape, Which else might work him danger or delay: And now a stripling cherub he appears, Not of the prime, yet such as in his face Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb Suitable grace diffus’d, so well he feign’d: Under a coronet his flowing hair In curls on either cheek play’d; wings he wore Of many a colour’d plume sprinkled with gold, His habit fit for speed succinct, and held Before his decent steps a silver wand.”
The figures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a Greek statue; glossy and impurpled, tinged with golden light, and musical as the strings of Memnon’s harp!
Again, nothing can be more magnificent than the portrait of Beelzebub:
“With Atlantean
shoulders fit to bear
The weight of
mightiest monarchies:”
Or the comparison of Satan, as he “lay floating many a rood,” to “that sea beast,”
“Leviathan,
which God of all his works
Created hugest
that swim the ocean-stream!”
What a force of imagination is there in this last expression! What an idea it conveys of the size of that hugest of created beings, as if it shrunk up the ocean to a stream, and took up the sea in its nostrils as a very little thing? Force of style is one of Milton’s greatest excellences. Hence, perhaps, he stimulates us more in the reading, and less afterwards. The way to defend Milton against all impugners, is to take down the book and read it.
Milton’s blank verse is the only blank verse in the language (except Shakspeare’s) that deserves the name of verse. Dr. Johnson, who had modelled his ideas of versification on the regular sing-song of Pope, condemns the Paradise Lost as harsh and unequal. I shall not pretend to say that this is not sometimes the case; for where a degree of excellence beyond the mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poet must sometimes fail. But I imagine that there are more perfect examples in Milton of musical expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage, than in all our other writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the exception already mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our stanza writers, as Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our rhymists. But in neither is there any thing like the same ear for music, the same power of approximating the varieties of poetical to those of musical rhythm, as there is in our great epic poet. The sound of his lines is moulded into the expression of the sentiment, almost of the very image. They rise or fall, pause or hurry rapidly on, with exquisite art, but without the least trick or affectation, as the occasion seems to require.
The following are some of the finest instances:
“------His hand was known In Heaven by many a tower’d structure high;— Nor was his name unheard or unador’d In ancient Greece: and in the Ausonian land Men called him Mulciber: and how he fell From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the chrystal battlements; from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith like a falling star On Lemnos, the AEgean isle: thus they relate, Erring.”—
“------But chief the spacious hall Thick swarm’d, both on the ground and in the air, Brush’d with the hiss of rustling wings. As bees In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides, Pour forth their populous youth about the hive In clusters; they among fresh dews and flow’rs Fly to and fro: or on the smoothed plank, The suburb of their straw-built citadel, New rubb’d with balm, expatiate and confer Their state affairs. So thick the airy crowd Swarm’d and were straiten’d; till the signal giv’n, Behold a wonder! They but now who seem’d In bigness to surpass earth’s giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves, Whose midnight revels by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course: they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear; At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”
I can only give another instance, though I have some difficulty in leaving off.
“Round he
surveys (and well might, where he stood
So high above
the circling canopy
Of night’s
extended shade) from th’ eastern point
Of Libra to the
fleecy star that bears
Andromeda far
off Atlantic seas
Beyond the horizon:
then from pole to pole
He views in breadth,
and without longer pause
Down right into
the world’s first region throws
His flight precipitant,
and winds with ease
Through the pure
marble air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable
stars that shone
Stars distant,
but nigh hand seem’d other worlds;
Or other worlds
they seem’d or happy isles,” &c.
The verse, in this exquisitely modulated passage, floats up and down as if it had itself wings. Milton has himself given us the theory of his versification—
“Such as
the meeting soul may pierce
In notes with
many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness
long drawn out.”
Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton’s,—Thomson’s, Young’s, Cowper’s, Wordsworth’s,—and it will be found, from the want of the same insight into “the hidden soul of harmony,” to be mere lumbering prose.
To proceed to a consideration of the merits of Paradise Lost, in the most essential point of view, I mean as to the poetry of character and passion. I shall say nothing of the fable, or of other technical objections or excellences; but I shall try to explain at once the foundation of the interest belonging to the poem. I am ready to give up the dialogues in Heaven, where, as Pope justly observes, “God the Father turns a school-divine”; nor do I consider the battle of the angels as the climax of sublimity, or the most successful effort of Milton’s pen. In a word, the interest of the poem arises from the daring ambition and fierce passions of Satan, and from the account of the paradisaical happiness, and the loss of it by our first parents. Three-fourths of the work are taken up with these characters, and nearly all that relates to them is unmixed sublimity and beauty. The two first books alone are like two massy pillars of solid gold.
Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem; and the execution is as perfect as the design is lofty. He was the first of created beings, who, for endeavouring to be equal with the highest, and to divide the empire of heaven with the Almighty, was hurled down to hell. His aim was no less than the throne of the universe; his means, myriads of angelic armies bright, the third part of the heavens, whom he lured after him with his countenance, and who durst defy the Omnipotent in arms. His ambition was the greatest, and his punishment was the greatest; but not so his despair, for his fortitude was as great as his sufferings. His strength of mind was matchless as his strength of body; the vastness of his designs did not surpass the firm, inflexible determination with which he submitted to his irreversible doom, and final loss of all good. His power of action and of suffering was equal. He was the greatest power that was ever overthrown, with the strongest will left to resist or to endure. He was baffled, not confounded. He stood like a tower; or
“------As when Heaven’s fire Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines.”
He was still surrounded with hosts of rebel angels, armed warriors, who own him as their sovereign leader, and with whose fate he sympathises as he views them round, far as the eye can reach; though he keeps aloof from them in his own mind, and holds supreme counsel only with his own breast. An outcast from Heaven, Hell trembles beneath his feet, Sin and Death are at his heels, and mankind are his easy prey.
“All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what else is not to be overcome,”
are still his. The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames is qualified and made innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil—but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. From this principle he never once flinches. His love of power and contempt for suffering are never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity. His thoughts burn like a hell within him; but the power of thought holds dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness of a determined purpose, of “that intellectual being, those thoughts that wander through eternity,” though accompanied with endless pain, he prefers to nonentity, to “being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb of uncreated night.” He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition in one line. “Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or suffering!” After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he does more than this—he founds a new empire in hell, and from it conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted flight, forcing his way through nether and surrounding fires. The poet has not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct; the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, “rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air,” it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic, irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed—but dazzling in its faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god. The deformity of Satan is only in the depravity of his will; he has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there, poor emblems of the unbending, unconquered spirit, of the writhing agonies within. Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot; to bring into the fair field of controversy the good old catholic prejudices of which Tasso and Dante have availed themselves, and which the mystic German critics would restore. He relied on the justice of his cause, and did not scruple to give the devil his due. Some persons may think that he has carried his liberality too far, and injured the cause he professed to espouse by making him the chief person in his poem. Considering the nature of his subject, he would be equally in danger of running into this fault, from his faith in religion, and his love of rebellion; and perhaps each of these motives had its full share in determining the choice of his subject.
Not only the figure of Satan, but his speeches in council, his soliloquies, his address to Eve, his share in the war in heaven, or in the fall of man, shew the same decided superiority of character. To give only one instance, almost the first speech he makes:
“Is this
the region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then the
lost archangel, this the seat
That we must change
for Heaven; this mournful gloom
For that celestial
light? Be it so, since he
Who now is sov’rain
can dispose and bid
What shall be
right: farthest from him is best,
Whom reason hath
equal’d, force hath made supreme
Above his equals.
Farewel happy fields,
Where joy for
ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world,
and thou profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new
possessor: one who brings
A mind not to
be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its
own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n
of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where,
if I be still the same,
And what I should
be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath
made greater? Here at least
We shall be free;
th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy,
will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign
secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth
ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign
in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
The whole of the speeches and debates in Pandemonium are well worthy of the place and the occasion—with Gods for speakers, and angels and archangels for hearers. There is a decided manly tone in the arguments and sentiments, an eloquent dogmatism, as if each person spoke from thorough conviction; an excellence which Milton probably borrowed from his spirit of partisanship, or else his spirit of partisanship from the natural firmness and vigour of his mind. In this respect Milton resembles Dante, (the only modern writer with whom he has any thing in common) and it is remarkable that Dante, as well as Milton, was a political partisan. That approximation to the severity of impassioned prose which has been made an objection to Milton’s poetry, and which is chiefly to be met with in these bitter invectives, is one of its great excellences. The author might here turn his philippics against Salmasius to good account. The rout in Heaven is like the fall of some mighty structure, nodding to its base, “with hideous ruin and combustion down.” But, perhaps, of all the passages in Paradise Lost, the description of the employments of the angels during the absence of Satan, some of whom “retreated in a silent valley, sing with notes angelical to many a harp their own heroic deeds and hapless fall by doom of battle,” is the most perfect example of mingled pathos and sublimity.—What proves the truth of this noble picture in every part, and that the frequent complaint of want of interest
Of Adam and Eve it has been said, that the ordinary reader can feel little interest in them, because they have none of the passions, pursuits, or even relations of human life, except that of man and wife, the least interesting of all others, if not to the parties concerned, at least to the by-standers. The preference has on this account been given to Homer, who, it is said, has left very vivid and infinitely diversified pictures of all the passions and affections, public and private, incident to human nature—the relations of son, of brother, parent, friend, citizen, and many others. Longinus preferred the Iliad to the Odyssey, on account of the greater number of battles it contains; but I can neither agree to his criticism, nor assent to the present objection. It is true, there is little action in this part of Milton’s poem; but there is much repose, and more enjoyment. There are none of the every-day occurrences, contentions, disputes, wars, fightings, feuds, jealousies, trades, professions, liveries, and common handicrafts of life; “no kind of traffic; letters are not known; no use of service, of riches, poverty, contract, succession, bourne, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none; no occupation, no treason, felony, sword, pike, knife, gun, nor need of any engine.” So much the better; thank Heaven, all these were yet to come. But still the die was cast, and in them our doom was sealed. In them
“The generations
were prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs,
were ready, the dread strife
Of poor humanity’s
afflicted will,
Struggling in
vain with ruthless destiny.”
In their first false step we trace all our future woe, with loss of Eden. But there was a short and precious interval between, like the first blush of morning before the day is overcast with tempest, the dawn of the world, the birth of nature from “the unapparent deep,” with its first dews and freshness on its cheek, breathing odours. Theirs was the first delicious taste of life, and on them depended all that was to come of it. In them hung trembling all our hopes and fears. They were as yet alone in the world, in the eye of nature, wondering at their new being, full of enjoyment and enraptured with one
“In either
hand the hast’ning angel caught
Our ling’ring
parents, and to th’ eastern gate
Led them direct,
and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected
plain; then disappear’d.
They looking back,
all th’ eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so
late their happy seat,
Wav’d over
by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful
faces throng’d, and fiery arms:
Some natural tears
they dropt, but wip’d them soon;
The world was
all before them, where to choose
Their place of
rest, and Providence their guide.”
LECTURE IV. ON DRYDEN AND POPE.
Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificial style of poetry in our language, as the poets of whom I have already treated, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, were of the natural; and though this artificial style is generally and very justly acknowledged to be inferior to the other, yet those who stand at the head of that class, ought, perhaps, to rank higher than those who occupy an inferior place in a superior class. They have a clear and independent claim upon our gratitude, as having produced a kind and degree of excellence which existed equally nowhere else. What has been done well by some later writers of the highest style of poetry, is included in, and obscured by a greater degree of power and genius in those before them: what has been done best by poets of an entirely distinct turn of mind, stands by itself, and tells for its whole amount. Young, for instance, Gray, or Akenside, only follow in the train of Milton and Shakspeare: Pope and Dryden walk by their side, though of an unequal stature, and are entitled to a first place in the lists of fame. This seems to be not only the reason of the thing, but the common sense of mankind, who, without any regular process of reflection, judge of the merit of a work, not more by its inherent and absolute worth, than by its originality and capacity of gratifying a different faculty of the mind, or a different class of readers; for it should be recollected, that there may be readers (as well as poets) not of the highest class, though very good sort of people, and not altogether to be despised.
The question, whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled, and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must have been a great prose-writer, that is, he was a great writer of some sort. He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a good one. If, indeed, by a great poet, we mean one who gives the utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the clean contrary way; namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his Critical Essays; or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point of view, as in his Satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity, as in his poems of Fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression, and all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his Epistles. He was not then distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm, of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a wit, and a critic, a man
Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of it. He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakspeare had an intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart of man in all possible circumstances: Pope had an exact knowledge of all that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his daring flight from heaven to earth, through Chaos and old Night. Pope’s Muse never wandered with safety, but from his library to his grotto, or from his grotto into his library back again. His mind dwelt with greater pleasure on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could describe the faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own person, better than the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the face of heaven—a piece of cut glass or a pair of paste buckles with more brilliance and effect, than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun. He would be more delighted with a patent lamp, than with “the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow,” that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre,
It cannot be denied, that his chief excellence lay more in diminishing, than in aggrandizing objects; in checking, not in encouraging our enthusiasm; in sneering at the extravagances of fancy or passion, instead of giving a loose to them; in describing a row of pins and needles, rather than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans; in penning a lampoon or a compliment, and in praising Martha Blount.
Shakspeare says,
“------In Fortune’s ray and brightness The herd hath more annoyance by the brize Than by the tyger: but when the splitting wind Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks, And flies fled under shade, why then The thing of courage, As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathise; And with an accent tuned in the self-same key, Replies to chiding Fortune.”
There is none of this rough work in Pope. His Muse was on a peace-establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered flatteries; its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for “the gnarled oak,” he gives us “the soft myrtle”: for rocks, and seas, and mountains, artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a china jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of the passions, we have
“Calm contemplation and poetic ease.”
Yet within this retired and narrow circle how much, and that how exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy, what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the magnifier is, to be sure, held to every thing, but still the exhibition is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or surprised. Such, at least, is the best account I am able to give of this extraordinary man, without doing injustice to him or others. It is time to refer to particular instances in his works.—The Rape of the Lock is the best or most ingenious of these. It is the most exquisite specimen of fillagree work ever invented. It is admirable in proportion as it is made of nothing.
“More subtle
web Arachne cannot spin,
Nor the fine nets,
which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew,
do not in th’ air more lightly flee.”
It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance is given to every thing, to paste, pomatum, billet-doux, and patches. Airs, languid airs, breathe around;—the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilette is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the Goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic! I will give only the two following passages in illustration of these remarks. Can any thing be more elegant and graceful than the description of Belinda, in the beginning of the second canto?
“Not
with more glories, in the ethereal plain,
The sun first
rises o’er the purpled main,
Than, issuing
forth, the rival of his beams
Launch’d
on the bosom of the silver Thames.
Fair nymphs, and
well-drest youths around her shone,
But ev’ry
eye was fix’d on her alone.
On her white breast
a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might
kiss, and infidels adore.
Her lively looks
a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes,
and as unfix’d as those:
Favours to none,
to all she smiles extends;
Oft she rejects,
but never once offends.
Bright as the
This
nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourish’d
two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls,
and well conspir’d to deck
With shining ringlets
the smooth iv’ry neck.”
The following is the introduction to the account of Belinda’s assault upon the baron bold, who had dissevered one of these locks “from her fair head for ever and for ever.”
“Now
meet thy fate, incens’d Belinda cry’d,
And drew a deadly
bodkin from her side.
(The same his
ancient personage to deck,
Her great, great
grandsire wore about his neck,
In three seal-rings;
which after, melted down,
Form’d a
vast buckle for his widow’s gown:
Her infant grandame’s
whistle next it grew,
The bells she
jingled, and the whistle blew;
Then in a bodkin
grac’d her mother’s hairs,
Which long she
wore, and now Belinda wears).”
I do not know how far Pope was indebted for the original idea, or the delightful execution of this poem, to the Lutrin of Boileau.
The Rape of the Lock is a double-refined essence of wit and fancy, as the Essay on Criticism is of wit and sense. The quantity of thought and observation in this work, for so young a man as Pope was when he wrote it, is wonderful: unless we adopt the supposition, that most men of genius spend the rest of their lives in teaching others what they themselves have learned under twenty. The conciseness and felicity of the expression are equally remarkable. Thus in reasoning on the variety of men’s opinion, he says—
" ’Tis with
our judgments, as our watches; none
Go just alike,
yet each believes his own.”
Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and illustrations in the Essay; the critical rules laid down are too much those of a school, and of a confined one. There is one passage in the Essay on Criticism in which the author speaks with that eloquent enthusiasm of the fame of ancient writers, which those will always feel who have themselves any hope or chance of immortality. I have quoted the passage elsewhere, but I will repeat it here.
“Still green
with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach
of sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames,
from envy’s fiercer rage,
Destructive war,
and all-involving age.
Hail, bards triumphant,
born in happier days,
Immortal heirs
of universal praise!
Whose honours
with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll
down, enlarging as they flow.”
These lines come with double force and beauty on the reader, as they were dictated by the writer’s despair of ever attaining that lasting glory which he celebrates with such disinterested enthusiasm in others, from the lateness of the age in which he lived, and from his writing in a tongue, not understood by other nations, and that grows obsolete and unintelligible to ourselves at the end of every second century. But he needed not have thus antedated his own poetical doom—the loss and entire oblivion of that which can never die. If he had known, he might have boasted that “his little bark” wafted down the stream of time,
“------With theirs should sail, Pursue the triumph and partake the gale”—
if those who know how to set a due value on the blessing, were not the last to decide confidently on their own pretensions to it.
There is a cant in the present day about genius, as every thing in poetry: there was a cant in the time of Pope about sense, as performing all sorts of wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the shibboleth of a critical party of the day. As a proof of the exclusive attention which it occupied in their minds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on Criticism (not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score successive couplets rhyming to the word sense. This appears almost incredible without giving the instances, and no less so when they are given.
“But of
the two, less dangerous is the offence,
To tire our patience
than mislead our sense.”—lines
3, 4.
“In search
of wit these lose their common sense,
And then turn
critics in their own defence.”—l.
28, 29.
“Pride,
where wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up all
the mighty void of sense.”—l.
209, 10.
“Some by
old words to fame have made pretence,
Ancients in phrase,
mere moderns in their sense.”—l.
324, 5.
" ’Tis not
enough no harshness gives offence;
The sound must
seem an echo to the sense.”—l.
364, 5.
“At every
trifle scorn to take offence;
That always shews
great pride, or little sense.”—l.
386, 7.
“Be silent
always, when you doubt your sense,
And speak, though
sure, with seeming diffidence.”—l.
366, 7.
“Be niggards
of advice on no pretence,
For the worst
avarice is that of sense.”—l.
578, 9.
“Strain
out the last dull dropping of their sense,
And rhyme with
all the rage of impotence.”—l.
608, 9.
“Horace
still charms with graceful negligence,
And without method
talks us into sense.”—l. 653,
4.
I have mentioned this the more for the sake of those critics who are bigotted idolisers of our author, chiefly on the score of his correctness. These persons seem to be of opinion that “there is but one perfect writer, even Pope.” This is, however, a mistake: his excellence is by no means faultlessness. If he had no great faults, he is full of little errors. His grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect. In the Abelard and Eloise, he says—
“There died the best of passions, Love and Fame.”
This is not a legitimate ellipsis. Fame is not a passion, though love is: but his ear was evidently confused by the meeting of the sounds “love and fame,” as if they of themselves immediately implied “love, and love of fame.” Pope’s rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to the eye instead of the ear; and this to a greater degree, not only than in later, but than in preceding writers. The praise of his versification must be confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony. In the translation of the Iliad, which has been considered as his masterpiece in style and execution, he continually changes the tenses in the same sentence for the purposes of the rhyme, which shews either a want of technical resources, or great inattention to punctilious exactness. But to have done with this.
The epistle of Eloise to Abelard is the only exception I can think of, to the general spirit of the foregoing remarks; and I should be disingenuous not to acknowledge that it is an exception. The foundation is in the letters themselves of Abelard and Eloise, which are quite as impressive, but still in a different way. It is fine as a poem: it is finer as a piece of high-wrought eloquence. No woman could be supposed to write a better love-letter in verse. Besides the richness of the historical materials, the high gusto of the original sentiments which Pope had to work upon, there were perhaps circumstances in his own situation which made him enter into the subject with even more than a poet’s feeling. The tears shed are drops gushing from the heart: the words are burning sighs breathed from the soul of love. Perhaps the poem to which it bears the greatest similarity in our language, is Dryden’s Tancred and Sigismunda, taken from Boccaccio. Pope’s Eloise will bear this comparison; and after such a test, with Boccaccio for the original author, and Dryden for the translator, it need shrink from no other. There is something exceedingly tender and beautiful in the sound of the concluding lines:
“If ever
chance two wandering lovers brings
To Paraclete’s
white walls and silver springs,” &c.
The Essay on Man is not Pope’s best work. It is a theory which Bolingbroke is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into verse. But “he spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.” All that he says, “the very words, and to the self-same tune,” would prove just as well that whatever is, is wrong, as that whatever is, is right. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but in general it is dull, heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already quoted on Settle, the Lord Mayor’s poet, (for at that time there was a city as well as a court poet)
“Now night
descending, the proud scene is o’er,
But lives in Settle’s
numbers one day more”—
is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant bards of antiquity!
The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope, is the prophetical conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires:
“Virtue
may chuse the high or low degree,
’Tis just
alike to virtue, and to me;
Dwell in a monk,
or light upon a king,
She’s still
the same belov’d, contented thing.
Vice is undone
if she forgets her birth,
And stoops from
angels to the dregs of earth.
But ’tis
the Fall degrades her to a whore:
Let Greatness
own her, and she’s mean no more.
Her birth, her
beauty, crowds and courts confess,
Chaste matrons
praise her, and grave bishops bless;
In golden chains
the willing world she draws,
And hers the gospel
is, and hers the laws;
Mounts the tribunal,
lifts her scarlet head,
And sees pale
Virtue carted in her stead.
Lo! at the wheels
of her triumphal car,
Old England’s
Genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragged in the
dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted
trains along the ground!
Our youth, all
livery’d o’er with foreign gold,
Before her dance;
behind her, crawl the old!
See thronging
millions to the Pagod run,
And offer country,
parent, wife, or son!
Hear her black
trumpet through the land proclaim,
That not to
be corrupted is the shame.
In soldier, churchman,
patriot, man in pow’r,
’Tis av’rice
all, ambition is no more!
See all our nobles
begging to be slaves!
See all our fools
aspiring to be knaves!
The wit of cheats,
the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand
envy and adore;
All, all look
up with reverential awe,
At crimes that
’scape or triumph o’er the law;
While truth, worth,
wisdom, daily they decry:
Nothing is sacred
now but villainy.
Yet may this verse
(if such a verse remain)
Show there was
one who held it in disdain.”
His Satires are not in general so good as his Epistles. His enmity is effeminate and petulant from a sense of weakness, as his friendship was tender from a sense of gratitude. I do not like, for instance, his character of Chartres, or his characters of women. His delicacy often borders upon sickliness; his fastidiousness makes others fastidious. But his compliments are divine; they are equal in value to a house or an estate. Take the following. In addressing Lord Mansfield, he speaks of the grave as a scene,
“Where Murray, long enough
his country’s pride,
Shall be no more than Tully, or than Hyde.”
To Bolingbroke he says—
“Why
rail they then if but one wreath of mine,
Oh all-accomplish’d
St. John, deck thy shrine?”
Again, he has bequeathed this praise to Lord Cornbury—
“Despise low thoughts,
low gains:
Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains;
Be virtuous and be happy for your pains.”
One would think (though there is no knowing) that a descendant of this nobleman, if there be such a person living, could hardly be guilty of a mean or paltry action.
The finest piece of personal satire in Pope (perhaps in the world) is his character of Addison; and this, it may be observed, is of a mixed kind, made up of his respect for the man, and a cutting sense of his failings. The other finest one is that of Buckingham, and the best part of that is the pleasurable.
“------Alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure and that soul of whim: Gallant and gay, in Cliveden’s proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love!”
Among his happiest and most inimitable effusions are the Epistles to Arbuthnot, and to Jervas the painter; amiable patterns of the delightful unconcerned life, blending ease with dignity, which poets and painters then led. Thus he says to Arbuthnot—
“Why
did I write? What sin to me unknown
Dipp’d me
in ink, my parents’ or my own?
As yet a child,
nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisped in numbers,
for the numbers came.
I left no calling
for this idle trade,
No duty broke,
no father disobey’d:
The muse but serv’d
to ease some friend, not wife;
To help me through
this long disease, my life?
To second, Arbuthnot!
thy art and care,
And teach the
being you preserv’d to bear.
But
why then publish? Granville the polite,
And knowing Walsh,
would tell me I could write;
Well-natur’d
Garth inflam’d with early praise,
And Congreve lov’d,
and Swift endur’d my lays;
The courtly Talbot,
Somers, Sheffield read;
E’en mitred
Rochester would nod the head;
And St. John’s
self (great Dryden’s friend before)
With open arms
receiv’d one poet more.
Happy my studies,
when by these approv’d!
Happier their
author, when by these belov’d!
From these the
world will judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets,
Oldmixons, and Cooks.”
I cannot help giving also the conclusion of the Epistle to Jervas.
“Oh,
lasting as those colours may they shine,
Free as thy stroke,
yet faultless as thy line;
New graces yearly
like thy works display,
Soft without weakness,
without glaring gay;
Led by some rule,
that guides, but not constrains;
And finish’d
more through happiness than pains.
The kindred arts
shall in their praise conspire,
One dip the pencil,
and one string the lyre.
Yet should the
Graces all thy figures place,
And breathe an
air divine on ev’ry face;
Yet should the
Muses bid my numbers roll
Strong as their
charms, and gentle as their soul;
With Zeuxis’
Helen thy Bridgewater vie,
And these be sung
till Granville’s Myra die:
Alas! how little
from the grave we claim!
Thou but preserv’st
a face, and I a name.”
And shall we cut ourselves off from beauties like these with a theory? Shall we shut up our books, and seal up our senses, to please the dull spite and inordinate vanity of those “who have eyes, but they see not—ears, but they hear not—and understandings, but they understand not,”—and go about asking our blind guides, whether Pope was a poet or not? It will never do. Such persons, when you point out to them a fine passage in Pope, turn it off to something of the same sort in some other writer. Thus they say that the line, “I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came,” is pretty, but taken from that of Ovid—Et quum conabar scribere, versus erat. They are safe in this mode of criticism: there is no danger of any one’s tracing their writings to the classics.
Pope’s letters and prose writings neither take away from, nor add to his poetical reputation. There is, occasionally, a littleness of manner, and an unnecessary degree of caution. He appears anxious to say a good thing in every word, as well as every sentence. They, however, give a very favourable idea of his moral character in all respects; and his letters to Atterbury, in his disgrace and exile, do equal honour to both. If I had to choose, there are one or two persons, and but one or two, that I should like to have been better than Pope!
Dryden was a better prose-writer, and a bolder and more varied versifier than Pope. He was a more vigorous thinker, a more correct and logical declaimer, and had more of what may be called strength of mind than Pope; but he had not the same refinement and delicacy of feeling. Dryden’s eloquence and spirit were possessed in a higher degree by others, and in nearly the same degree by Pope himself; but that by which Pope was distinguished, was an essence which he alone possessed, and of incomparable value on that sole account. Dryden’s Epistles are excellent, but inferior to Pope’s, though they appear (particularly the admirable one to Congreve) to have been the model on which the latter formed his. His Satires are better than Pope’s. His Absalom and Achitophel is superior, both in force of invective and discrimination of character, to any thing of Pope’s in the same way. The character of Achitophel is very fine; and breathes, if not a sincere love for virtue, a strong spirit of indignation against vice.
Mac Flecknoe is the origin of the idea of the Dunciad; but it is less elaborately constructed, less feeble, and less heavy. The difference between Pope’s satirical portraits and Dryden’s, appears to be this in a good measure, that Dryden seems to grapple with his antagonists, and to describe real persons; Pope seems to refine upon them in his own mind, and to make them out just what he pleases, till they are not real characters, but the mere driveling effusions of his spleen and malice. Pope describes the thing, and then goes on describing his own description till he loses himself in verbal repetitions.
“Besides
these jolly birds, whose corpse impure
Repaid their commons
with their salt manure,
Another farm he
had behind his house,
Not overstocked,
but barely for his use;
Wherein his poor
domestic poultry fed,
And from his pious
hand “received their bread.”
Our pampered pigeons,
with malignant eyes,
Beheld these inmates,
and their nurseries;
Though hard their
fare, at evening, and at morn,
(A cruise of water,
and an ear of corn,)
Yet still they
grudged that modicum, and thought
A sheaf in every
single grain was brought.
Fain would they
filch that little food away,
While unrestrained
those happy gluttons prey;
And much they
grieved to see so nigh their hall,
The bird that
warned St. Peter of his fall;
That he should
raise his mitred crest on high,
And clap his wings,
and call his family
To sacred rites;
and vex the ethereal powers
With midnight
mattins at uncivil hours;
Nay more, his
quiet neighbours should molest,
Just in the sweetness
of their morning rest.
Beast of a bird!
supinely when he might
Lie snug and sleep,
to rise before the light!
What if his dull
forefathers us’d that cry,
Could he not let
a bad example die?
The world was
fallen into an easier way:
This age knew
better than to fast and pray.
Good sense in
sacred worship would appear,
So to begin as
they might end the year.
Such feats in
former times had wrought the falls
Of crowing chanticleers
in cloister’d walls.
Expell’d
for this, and for their lands they fled;
And sister Partlet
with her hooded head
Was hooted hence,
because she would not pray a-bed.”
There is a magnanimity of abuse in some of these epithets, a fearless choice of topics of invective, which may be considered as the heroical in satire.
The Annus Mirabilis is a tedious performance; it is a tissue of far-fetched, heavy, lumbering conceits, and in the worst style of what has been denominated metaphysical poetry. His Odes in general are of the same stamp; they are the hard-strained offspring of a meagre, meretricious fancy. The famous Ode on St. Cecilia deserves its reputation; for, as piece of poetical mechanism to be set to music, or recited in alternate strophe and antistrophe, with classical allusions, and flowing verse, nothing can be better. It is equally fit to be said or sung; it is not equally good to read. It is lyrical, without being epic or dramatic. For instance, the description of Bacchus,
“The jolly
god in triumph comes,
Sound the trumpets,
beat the drums;
Flush’d
with a purple grace,
He shews his honest
face”—
does not answer, as it ought, to our idea of the God, returning from the conquest of India, with satyrs and wild beasts, that he had tamed, following in his train; crowned with vine leaves, and riding in a chariot drawn by leopards—such as we have seen him painted by Titian or Rubens! Lyrical poetry, of all others, bears the nearest resemblance to painting: it deals in hieroglyphics and passing figures, which depend for effect, not on the working out, but on the selection. It is the dance and pantomime of poetry. In variety and rapidity of movement, the Alexander’s Feast has all that can be required in this respect; it only wants loftiness and truth of character.
Dryden’s plays are better than Pope could have written; for though he does not go out of himself by the force of imagination, he goes out of himself by the force of common-places and rhetorical dialogue. On the other hand, they are not so good as Shakspeare’s; but he has left the best character of Shakspeare that has ever been written. [5]
His alterations from Chaucer and Boccaccio shew a greater knowledge of the taste of his readers and power of pleasing them, than acquaintance with the genius of his authors. He ekes out the lameness of the verse in the former, and breaks the force of the passion in both. The Tancred and Sigismunda is the only general exception, in which, I think, he has fully retained, if not improved upon, the impassioned declamation of the original. The Honoria has none of the bewildered, dreary, preternatural effect of Boccaccio’s story. Nor has the Flower and the Leaf any thing of the enchanting simplicity and concentrated feeling of Chaucer’s romantic fiction. Dryden, however, sometimes seemed to indulge himself as well as his readers, as in keeping entire that noble line in Palamon’s address to Venus:
“Thou gladder of the mount of Cithaeron!”
His Tales have been, upon the whole, the most popular of his works; and I should think that a translation of some of the other serious tales in Boccaccio and Chaucer, as that of Isabella, the Falcon, of Constance, the Prioress’s Tale, and others, if executed with taste and spirit, could not fail to succeed in the present day.
___ [5] “To begin then with Shakspeare: he was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say, he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, and insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets, Quantum lenta solent inter Viburna Cupressi.” ___
It should appear, in tracing the history of our literature, that poetry had, at the period of which we are speaking, in general declined, by successive gradations, from the poetry of imagination, in the time of Elizabeth, to the poetry of fancy (to adopt a modern distinction) in the time of Charles I.; and again from the poetry of fancy to that of wit, as in the reign of Charles II. and Queen Anne. It degenerated into the poetry of mere common places, both in style and thought, in the succeeding reigns: as in the latter part of the last century, it was transformed, by means of the French Revolution, into the poetry of paradox.
Of Donne I know nothing but some beautiful verses to his wife, dissuading her from accompanying him on his travels abroad, and some quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could not unravel.
Waller still lives in the name of Sacharissa; and his lines on the death of Oliver Cromwell shew that he was a man not without genius and strength of thought.
Marvel is a writer of nearly the same period, and worthy of a better age. Some of his verses are harsh, as the words of Mercury; others musical, as is Apollo’s lute. Of the latter kind are his boat-song, his description of a fawn, and his lines to Lady Vere. His lines prefixed to Paradise Lost are by no means the most favourable specimen of his powers.
Butler’s Hudibras is a poem of more wit than any other in the language. The rhymes have as much genius in them as the thoughts; but there is no story in it, and but little humour. Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously: wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature. The fault of Butler’s poem is not that it has too much wit, but that it has not an equal quantity of other things. One would suppose that the starched manners and sanctified grimace of the times in which he lived, would of themselves have been sufficiently rich in ludicrous incidents and characters; but they seem rather to have irritated his spleen, than to have drawn forth his powers of picturesque imitation. Certainly if we compare Hudibras with Don Quixote in this respect, it seems rather a meagre and unsatisfactory performance.
Rochester’s poetry is the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure, of thought with licentiousness. His extravagant heedless levity has a sort of passionate enthusiasm in it; his contempt for every thing that others respect, almost amounts to sublimity. His poem upon Nothing is itself no trifling work. His epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written.
Sir John Suckling was of the same mercurial stamp, but with a greater fund of animal spirits; as witty, but less malicious. His Ballad on a Wedding is perfect in its kind, and has a spirit of high enjoyment in it, of sportive fancy, a liveliness of description, and a truth of nature, that never were surpassed. It is superior to either Gay or Prior; for with all their naivete and terseness, it has a Shakspearian grace and luxuriance about it, which they could not have reached.
Denham and Cowley belong to the same period, but were quite distinct from each other: the one was grave and prosing, the other melancholy and fantastical. There are a number of good lines and good thoughts in the Cooper’s Hill. And in Cowley there is an inexhaustible fund of sense and ingenuity, buried in inextricable conceits, and entangled in the cobwebs of the schools. He was a great man, not a great poet. But I shall say no more on this subject. I never wish to meddle with names that are sacred, unless when they stand in the way of things that are more sacred.
Withers is a name now almost forgotten, and his works seldom read; but his poetry is not unfrequently distinguished by a tender and pastoral turn of thought; and there is one passage of exquisite feeling, describing the consolations of poetry in the following terms:
“She
doth tell me where to borrow
Comfort in the
midst of sorrow;
Makes the desolatest
place [6]
To her presence
be a grace;
And the blackest
discontents
Be her fairest
ornaments.
In my former days
of bliss
Her divine skill
taught me this,
That from every
thing I saw,
I could some invention
draw;
And raise pleasure
to her height,
Through the meanest
object’s sight,
By the murmur
of a spring,
Or the least bough’s
rusteling,
By a daisy whose
leaves spread
Shut when Titan
goes to bed;
Or a shady bush
or tree,
She could more
infuse in me,
Than all Nature’s
beauties can,
In some other
wiser man.
By her help I
also now
Make this churlish
place allow
Some things that
may sweeten gladness
In the very gall
of sadness.
The dull loneness,
the black shade,
That these hanging
vaults have made,
The strange music
of the waves,
Beating on these
hollow caves,
This black den
which rocks emboss,
Overgrown with
___ [6] Written in the Fleet Prison. ___
LECTURE V. ON THOMSON AND COWPER.
Thomson, the kind-hearted Thomson, was the most indolent of mortals and of poets. But he was also one of the best both of mortals and of poets. Dr. Johnson makes it his praise that he wrote “no line which dying he would wish to blot.” Perhaps a better proof of his honest simplicity, and inoffensive goodness of disposition, would be that he wrote no line which any other person living would wish that he should blot. Indeed, he himself wished, on his death-bed, formally to expunge his dedication of one of the Seasons to that finished courtier, and candid biographer of his own life, Bub Doddington. As critics, however, not as moralists, we might say on the other hand—“Would he had blotted a thousand!”—The same suavity of temper and sanguine warmth of feeling which threw such a natural grace and genial spirit of enthusiasm over his poetry, was also the cause of its inherent vices and defects. He is affected through carelessness: pompous from unsuspecting simplicity of character. He is frequently pedantic and ostentatious in his style, because he had no consciousness of these vices in himself. He mounts upon stilts, not out of vanity, but indolence. He seldom writes a good line, but he makes up for it by a bad one. He takes advantage of all the most trite and mechanical common-places of imagery and diction as a kindly relief to his Muse, and as if he thought them quite as good, and likely to be quite as acceptable to the reader, as his own poetry. He did not think the difference worth putting himself to the trouble of accomplishing. He had too little art to conceal his art: or did not even seem to know that there was any occasion for it. His art is as naked and undisguised as his nature; the one is as pure and genuine as the
“Come, gentle
Spring! ethereal Mildness! come,
And from the bosom
of yon dropping cloud,
While music wakes
around, veil’d in a shower
Of shadowing roses,
on our plains descend.”
Who, from such a flimsy, round-about, unmeaning commencement as this, would expect the delightful, unexaggerated, home-felt descriptions of natural scenery, which are scattered in such unconscious profusion through this and the following cantos? For instance, the very next passage is crowded with a set of striking images.
“And see
where surly Winter passes off
Far to the north,
and calls his ruffian blasts:
His blasts obey,
and quit the howling hill,
The shatter’d
forest, and the ravag’d vale;
While softer gales
succeed, at whose kind touch
Dissolving snows
in livid torrents lost,
The mountains
lift their green heads to the sky.
As yet the trembling
year is unconfirmed,
And Winter oft
at eve resumes the breeze,
Chills the pale
morn, and bids his driving sleets
Deform the day
delightless; so that scarce
The bittern knows
his time with bill ingulpht
To shake the sounding
marsh, or from the shore
The plovers when
to scatter o’er the heath,
And sing their
wild notes to the list’ning waste.”
Thomson is the best of our descriptive poets: for he gives most of the poetry of natural description. Others have been quite equal to him, or have surpassed him, as Cowper for instance, in the picturesque part of his art, in marking the peculiar features and curious details of objects;—no one has yet come up to him in giving the sum total of their effects, their varying influences on the mind. He does not go into the minutiae of a landscape, but describes the vivid impression which the whole makes
It has been supposed by some, that the Castle of Indolence is Thomson’s best poem; but that is not the case. He has in it, indeed, poured out the whole soul of indolence, diffuse, relaxed, supine, dissolved into a voluptuous dream; and surrounded himself with a set of objects and companions, in entire unison with the listlessness of his own temper. Nothing can well go beyond the descriptions of these inmates of the place, and their luxurious pampered way of life—of him who came among them like “a burnished fly in month of June,” but soon left them on his heedless way; and him,
“For whom
the merry bells had rung, I ween,
If in this nook
of quiet, bells had ever been.”
The in-door quiet and cushioned ease, where “all was one full-swelling bed”; the out-of-door stillness, broken only by “the stock-dove’s plaint amid the forest deep,”
“That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale”—
are in the most perfect and delightful keeping. But still there are no passages in this exquisite little production of sportive ease and fancy, equal to the best of those in the Seasons. Warton, in his Essay on Pope, was the first to point out and do justice to some of these; for instance, to the description of the effects of the contagion among our ships at Carthagena—“of the frequent corse heard nightly plunged amid the sullen waves,” and to the description of the pilgrims lost in the deserts of Arabia. This last passage, profound and striking as it is, is not free from those faults of style which I have already noticed.
“------Breath’d hot From all the boundless furnace of the sky, And the wide-glitt’ring waste of burning sand, A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil, Son of the desert, ev’n the camel feels Shot through his wither’d heart the fiery blast. Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad, Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands, Commov’d around, in gath’ring eddies play; Nearer and nearer still they dark’ning come, Till with the gen’ral all-involving storm Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise, And by their noon-day fount dejected thrown, Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep, Beneath descending hills the caravan Is buried deep. In Cairo’s crowded streets, Th’ impatient merchant, wond’ring, waits in vain; And Mecca saddens at the long delay.”
There are other passages of equal beauty with these; such as that of the hunted stag, followed by “the inhuman rout,”
“------That from the shady depth Expel him, circling through his ev’ry shift. He sweeps the forest oft, and sobbing sees The glades mild op’ning to the golden day, Where in kind contest with his butting friends He wont to struggle, or his loves enjoy.”
The whole of the description of the frozen zone, in the Winter, is perhaps even finer and more thoroughly felt, as being done from early associations, than that of the torrid zone in his Summer. Any thing more beautiful than the following account of the Siberian exiles is, I think, hardly to be found in the whole range of poetry.
“There through
the prison of unbounded wilds,
Barr’d by
the hand of nature from escape,
Wide roams the
Russian exile. Nought around
Strikes his sad
eye but deserts lost in snow,
And heavy-loaded
groves, and solid floods,
That stretch athwart
the solitary vast
Their icy horrors
to the frozen main;
And cheerless
towns far distant, never bless’d,
Save when its
annual course the caravan
Bends to the golden
coast of rich Cathay,
With news of human
kind.”
The feeling of loneliness, of distance, of lingering, slow-revolving years of pining expectation, of desolation within and without the heart, was never more finely expressed than it is here.
The account which follows of the employments of the Polar night—of the journeys of the natives by moonlight, drawn by rein-deer, and of the return of spring in Lapland—
“Where pure
Niemi’s fairy mountains rise,
And fring’d
with roses Tenglio rolls his stream,”
is equally picturesque and striking in a different way. The traveller lost in the snow, is a well-known and admirable dramatic episode. I prefer, however, giving one example of our author’s skill in painting common domestic scenery, as it will bear a more immediate comparison with the style of some later writers on such subjects. It is of little consequence what passage we take. The following description of the first setting in of winter is, perhaps, as pleasing as any.
“Through
the hush’d air the whitening shower descends,
At first thin
wav’ring, till at last the flakes
Fall broad and
wide, and fast, dimming the day
With a continual
flow. The cherish’d fields
Put on their winter-robe
of purest white:
’Tis brightness
all, save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy
current. Low the woods
Bow their hoar
head; and ere the languid Sun,
Faint, from the
West emits his ev’ning ray,
Earth’s
universal face, deep hid, and chill,
Is one wide dazzling
waste, that buries wide
The works of man.
Drooping, the lab’rer-ox
Stands cover’d
o’er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all
his toil. The fowls of heav’n,
Tam’d by
the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing
store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence
assigns them. One alone,
The red-breast,
sacred to the household Gods,
Wisely regardful
of the embroiling sky,
In joyless fields
and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering
mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit.
Half-afraid, he first
Against the window
beats; then, brisk, alights
On the warm hearth;
then hopping o’er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling
family askance,
And pecks, and
starts, and wonders where he is:
Till more familiar
grown, the table-crumbs
Attract his slender
feet. The foodless wilds
Pour forth their
brown inhabitants. The hare,
Though timorous
of heart, and hard beset
By death in various
forms, dark snares and dogs,
And more unpitying
men, the garden seeks,
Urg’d on
by fearless want. The bleating kind [sic]
Eye the bleak
heav’n, and next, the glist’ning earth,
With looks of
dumb despair; then, sad dispers’d,
Dig for the wither’d
herb through heaps of snow.”
It is thus that Thomson always gives a moral sense to nature.
Thomson’s blank verse is not harsh, or utterly untuneable; but it is heavy and monotonous; it seems always labouring up-hill. The selections which have been made from his works in Enfield’s Speaker, and other books of extracts, do not convey the most favourable idea of his genius or taste; such as Palemon and Lavinia, Damon and Musidora, Celadon and Amelia. Those parts of any author which are most liable to be stitched in worsted, and framed and glazed, are not by any means always the best. The moral descriptions and reflections in the Seasons are in an admirable spirit, and written with great force and fervour.
His poem on Liberty is not equally good: his Muse was too easy and good-natured for the subject, which required as much indignation against unjust and arbitrary power, as complacency in the constitutional monarchy, under which, just after the expulsion of the Stuarts and the establishment of the House of Hanover, in contempt of the claims of hereditary pretenders to the throne, Thomson lived. Thomson was but an indifferent hater; and the most indispensable part of the love of liberty has unfortunately hitherto been the hatred of tyranny. Spleen is the soul of patriotism, and of public good: but you would not expect a man who has been seen eating peaches off a tree with both hands in his waistcoat pockets, to be “overrun with the spleen,” or to heat himself needlessly about an abstract proposition.
His plays are liable to the same objection. They are never acted, and seldom read. The author could not, or would not, put himself out of his way, to enter into the situations and passions of others, particularly of a tragic kind. The subject of Tancred and Sigismunda, which is taken from a serious episode in Gil Blas, is an admirable one, but poorly handled: the ground may be considered as still unoccupied.
Cowper, whom I shall speak of in this connection, lived at a considerable distance of time after Thomson; and had some advantages over him, particularly in simplicity of style, in a certain precision and minuteness of graphical description, and in a more careful and leisurely choice of such topics only as his genius and peculiar habits of mind prompted him to treat of. The Task has fewer blemishes than the Seasons; but it has not the same capital excellence, the “unbought grace” of poetry, the power of moving and infusing the warmth of the author’s mind into that of the reader. If Cowper had a more polished taste, Thomson had, beyond comparison, a more fertile genius, more impulsive force, a more entire forgetfulness of himself in his subject. If in Thomson you are sometimes offended with the slovenliness of the author by profession, determined to get through his task at all events; in Cowper you are no less dissatisfied with the finicalness of the private gentleman, who does not care whether he completes his work or not; and in whatever he does, is evidently more solicitous to please himself than the public. There is an effeminacy about him, which shrinks from and repels common and hearty sympathy. With all his boasted simplicity and love of the country, he seldom launches out into general descriptions of nature: he looks at her over his clipped hedges, and from his well-swept garden-walks; or if he makes a bolder experiment now and then, it is with an air of precaution, as if he were afraid of being caught in a shower of rain, or of not being able, in case of any untoward accident, to make good his retreat home. He shakes hands with nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on, and leads “his Vashti” forth to public
“The night
was winter in his roughest mood;
The morning sharp
and clear. But now at noon
Upon the southern
side of the slant hills,
And where the
woods fence off the northern blast,
The season smiles,
resigning all its rage,
And has the warmth
of May. The vault is blue,
Without a cloud,
and white without a speck
The dazzling splendour
of the scene below.
Again the harmony
comes o’er the vale;
And through the
trees I view th’ embattled tow’r,
Whence all the
music. I again perceive
The soothing influence
of the wafted strains,
And settle in
soft musings as I tread
The walk, still
verdant, under oaks and elms,
Whose outspread
branches overarch the glade.
The roof, though
moveable through all its length,
His satire is also excellent. It is pointed and forcible, with the polished manners of the gentleman, and the honest indignation of the virtuous man. His religious poetry, except where it takes a tincture of controversial heat, wants elevation and fire. His Muse had not a seraph’s wing. I might refer, in illustration of this opinion, to the laboured anticipation of the Millennium at the end of the sixth book. He could describe a piece of shell-work as well as any modern poet: but he could not describe the New Jerusalem so well as John Bunyan;—nor are his verses on Alexander Selkirk so good as Robinson Crusoe. The one is not so much like a vision, nor is the other so much like the reality.
The first volume of Cowper’s poems has, however, been less read than it deserved. The comparison in these poems of the proud and humble believer to the peacock and the pheasant, and the parallel between Voltaire and the poor cottager, are exquisite pieces of eloquence and poetry, particularly the last.
“Yon
cottager, who weaves at her own door,
Pillow and bobbins
all her little store;
Content though
mean, and cheerful if not gay,
Shuffling her
threads about the live-long day,
Just earns a scanty
pittance, and at night,
Lies down secure,
her heart and pocket light;
She, for her humble
sphere by nature fit,
Has little understanding,
and no wit,
Receives no praise;
but, though her lot be such,
(Toilsome and
indigent) she renders much;
Just knows, and
knows no more, her Bible true—
A truth the brilliant
Frenchman never knew;
And in that charter
reads with sparkling eyes
Her title to a
treasure in the skies.
O
happy peasant! Oh unhappy bard!
His the mere tinsel,
hers the rich reward;
He prais’d,
perhaps, for ages yet to come,
She never heard
of half a mile from home:
He lost in errors
his vain heart prefers,
She safe in the
simplicity of hers.”
His character of Whitfield, in the poem on Hope, is one of his most spirited and striking things. It is written con amore.
“But
if, unblameable in word and thought,
A man arise, a
man whom God has taught,
With all Elijah’s
dignity of tone,
And all the love
of the beloved John,
To storm the citadels
they build in air,
To smite the untemper’d
wall (’tis death to spare,)
To sweep away
all refuges of lies,
And place, instead
of quirks, themselves devise,
Lama Sabachthani
before their eyes;
To show that without
Christ all gain is loss,
All hope despair
that stands not on his cross;
Except a few his
God may have impressed,
A tenfold phrensy
seizes all the rest.”
These lines were quoted, soon after their appearance, by the Monthly Reviewers, to shew that Cowper was no poet, though they afterwards took credit to themselves for having been the first to introduce his verses to the notice of the public. It is not a little remarkable that these same critics regularly damned, at its first coming out, every work which has since acquired a standard reputation with the public.—Cowper’s verses on his mother’s picture, and his lines to Mary, are some of the most pathetic that ever were written. His stanzas on the loss of the Royal George have a masculine strength and feeling beyond what was usual with him. The story of John Gilpin has perhaps given as much pleasure to as many people as any thing of the same length that ever was written.
His life was an unhappy one. It was embittered by a morbid affection, and by his religious sentiments. Nor are we to wonder at this, or bring it as a charge against religion; for it is the nature of the poetical temperament to carry every thing to excess, whether it be love, religion, pleasure, or pain, as we may see in the case of Cowper and of Burns, and to find torment or rapture in that in which others merely find a resource from ennui, or a relaxation from common occupation.
There are two poets still living who belong to the same class of excellence, and of whom I shall here say a few words; I mean Crabbe, and Robert Bloomfield, the author of the Farmer’s Boy. As a painter of simple natural scenery, and of the still life of the country, few writers have more undeniable and unassuming pretensions than the ingenious and self-taught poet, last-mentioned. Among the sketches of this sort I would mention, as equally distinguished for delicacy, faithfulness, and naivete, his description of lambs racing, of the pigs going out an acorning, of the boy sent to feed his sheep before the break of day in winter; and I might add the innocently told story of the poor bird-boy, who in vain through the live-long day expects his promised companions at his hut, to share his feast of roasted sloes with him, as an example of that humble pathos, in which this author excels. The fault indeed of his genius is that it is too humble: his Muse has something not only rustic, but menial in her aspect. He seems afraid of elevating nature, lest she should be ashamed of him. Bloomfield very beautifully describes the lambs in springtime as racing round the hillocks of green turf: Thomson, in describing the same image, makes the mound of earth the remains of an old Roman encampment. Bloomfield never gets beyond his own experience; and that is somewhat confined. He gives the simple appearance of nature, but he gives it naked, shivering, and unclothed with the drapery of a moral imagination. His poetry has much the effect of the first approach of spring, “while yet the year is unconfirmed,” where a few tender buds venture forth here and there, but are chilled by the early frosts and nipping breath of poverty.—It should seem from this and other instances that have occurred within the last century, that we cannot expect from original genius alone, without education, in modern and more artificial periods, the same bold and independent results as in former periods. And one reason appears to be, that though such persons, from whom we might at first expect a restoration of the good old times of poetry, are not encumbered and enfeebled by the trammels of custom, and the dull weight of other men’s ideas; yet they are oppressed by the consciousness of a want of the common advantages which others have; are looking at the tinsel finery of the age, while they neglect the rich unexplored mine in their own breasts; and instead of setting an example for the world to follow, spend their lives in aping, or in the despair of aping, the hackneyed accomplishments of their inferiors. Another cause may be, that original genius alone is not sufficient to produce the highest excellence, without a corresponding state of manners, passions, and religious belief: that no single mind can move in direct opposition to the vast machine of the world around it; that the poet can do no more than stamp the mind of his age upon his works; and that all that the ambition of the highest
Crabbe is, if not the most natural, the most literal of our descriptive poets. He exhibits the smallest circumstances of the smallest things. He gives the very costume of meanness; the nonessentials of every trifling incident. He is his own landscape-painter, and engraver too. His pastoral scenes seem pricked on paper in little dotted lines. He describes the interior of a cottage like a person sent there to distrain for rent. He has an eye to the number of arms in an old worm-eaten chair, and takes care to inform himself and the reader whether a joint-stool stands upon three legs or upon four. If a settle by the fire-side stands awry, it gives him as much disturbance as a tottering world; and he records the rent in a ragged counterpane as an event in history. He is equally curious in his back-grounds and in his figures. You know the Christian and surnames of every one of his heroes,—the dates of their achievements, whether on a Sunday or a Monday,—their place of birth and burial, the colour of their clothes, and of their hair, and whether they squinted or not. He takes an inventory of the human heart exactly in the same manner as of the furniture of a sick room: his sentiments have very much the air of fixtures; he gives you the petrifaction of a sigh, and carves a tear, to the life, in stone. Almost all his characters are tired of their lives, and you heartily wish them dead. They remind one of anatomical preservations; or may be said to bear the same relation to actual life that a stuffed cat in a glass-case does to the real one purring on the hearth: the skin is the same, but the life and the sense of heat is gone. Crabbe’s poetry is like a museum, or curiosity-shop: every thing has the same posthumous appearance, the same inanimateness and identity of character. If Bloomfield is too much of the Farmer’s Boy, Crabbe is too much of the parish beadle, an overseer of the country poor. He has no delight beyond the walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal would convert the world into a vast infirmary. He is a kind of Ordinary, not of Newgate, but of nature.
The best descriptive poetry is not, after all, to be found in our descriptive poets. There are set descriptions of the flowers, for instance, in Thomson, Cowper, and others; but none equal to those in Milton’s Lycidas, and in the Winter’s Tale.
We have few good pastorals in the language. Our manners are not Arcadian; our climate is not an eternal spring; our age is not the age of gold. We have no pastoral-writers equal to Theocritus, nor any landscapes like those of Claude Lorraine. The best parts of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar are two fables, Mother Hubberd’s Tale, and the Oak and the Briar; which last is as splendid a piece of oratory as any to be found in the records of the eloquence of the British senate! Browne, who came after Spenser, and Withers, have left some pleasing allegorical poems of this kind. Pope’s are as full of senseless finery and trite affectation, as if a peer of the realm were to sit for his picture with a crook and cocked hat on, smiling with an insipid air of no-meaning, between nature and fashion. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia is a lasting monument of perverted power; where an image of extreme beauty, as that of “the shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old,” peeps out once in a hundred folio pages, amidst heaps of intricate sophistry and scholastic quaintness. It is not at all like Nicholas Poussin’s picture, in which he represents some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription—“I also was an Arcadian!” Perhaps the best pastoral
“A fair and happy milk-maid is a country wench that is so far from making herself beautiful by art, that one look of her’s is able to put all face-physic out of countenance. She knows a fair look is but a dumb orator to commend virtue, therefore minds it not. All her excellences stand in her so silently, as if they had stolen upon her without her knowledge. The lining of her apparel (which is herself) is far better than outsides of tissue; for though she be not arrayed in the spoil of the silkworm, she is decked in innocency, a far better wearing. She doth not, with lying long in bed, spoil both her complexion and conditions. Nature hath taught her, too immoderate sleep is rust to the soul: she rises therefore with chanticleer, her dame’s cock, and at night makes the lamb her curfew. Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made haycock. She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early (sitting at her merry wheel) she sings a defiance to the giddy wheel of Fortune. She doth all things with so sweet a grace, it seems ignorance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well. She bestows her year’s wages at next fair; and in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and chirurgery, and she lives the longer for’t. She dares go alone, and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none: yet, to say the truth, she is
The love of the country has been sung by poets, and echoed by philosophers; but the first have not attempted, and the last have been greatly puzzled to account for it. I do not know that any one has ever explained, satisfactorily, the true source of this feeling, or of that soothing emotion which the sight of the country, or a lively description of rural objects hardly ever fails to infuse into the mind. Some have ascribed this feeling to the natural beauty of the objects themselves; others to the freedom from care, the silence and tranquillity which scenes of retirement afford; others to the healthy and innocent employments of a country life; others to the simplicity of country manners, and others to a variety of different causes; but none to the right one. All these, indeed, have their effect; but there is another principal one which has not been touched upon, or only slightly glanced at. I will not, however, imitate Mr. Horne Tooke, who after enumerating seventeen different definitions of the verb, and laughing at them all as deficient and nugatory, at the end of two quarto volumes does not tell us what the verb really is, and has left posterity to pluck out “the heart of his mystery.” I will say at once what it is that distinguishes this interest from others, and that is its abstractedness. The interest we feel in human nature is exclusive, and confined to the individual; the interest we feel in external nature is common, and transferable from one object to all others of the same class. Thus.
Rousseau in his Confessions relates, that when he took possession of his room at Annecy, he found that he could see “a little spot of green” from his window, which endeared his situation the more to him, because, he says, it was the first time he had had this object constantly before him since he left Boissy, the place where he was at school when a child. [7] Some such feeling as that here described will be found lurking at the bottom of all our attachments of this sort. Were it not for the recollections habitually associated with them, natural objects could not interest the mind in the manner they do. No doubt, the sky is beautiful, the clouds sail majestically along its bosom; the sun is cheering; there is something exquisitely graceful in the manner in which a plant or tree puts forth its branches; the motion with which they bend and tremble in the evening breeze is soft and lovely; there is music in the babbling of a brook; the view from the top of a mountain is full of grandeur; nor can we behold the ocean with indifference. Or, as the Minstrel sweetly sings,
“Oh, how
canst thou renounce the boundless store
Of
charms which Nature to her votary yields!
The warbling woodland,
the resounding shore,
The
pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
All that the genial
ray of morning gilds,
And
all that echoes to the song of even,
All that the mountain’s
sheltering bosom shields,
And
all the dread magnificence of heaven,
Oh, how canst
thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven!”
___ [7] Pope also declares that he had a particular regard for an old post which stood in the court-yard before the house where he was brought up. ___
It is not, however, the beautiful and magnificent alone that we admire in Nature; the most insignificant and rudest objects are often found connected with the strongest emotions; we become attached to the most common and familiar images, as to the face of a friend whom we have long known, and from whom we have received many benefits. It is because natural objects have been associated with the sports of our childhood, with air and exercise, with our feelings in solitude, when the mind takes the strongest hold of things, and clings with the fondest interest to whatever strikes its attention; with change of place, the pursuit of new scenes, and thoughts of distant friends; it is because they have surrounded us in almost all situations, in joy and in sorrow, in pleasure and in pain; because they have been one chief source and nourishment of our feelings, and a part of our being, that we love them as we do ourselves.
There is, generally speaking, the same foundation for our love of Nature as for all our habitual attachments, namely, association of ideas. But this is not all. That which distinguishes this attachment from others is the transferable nature of our feelings with respect to physical objects; the associations connected with any one object extending to the whole class. Our having been attached to any particular person does not make us feel the same attachment to the next person we may chance to meet; but, if we have once associated strong feelings of delight with the objects of natural scenery, the tie becomes indissoluble, and we shall ever after feel the same attachment to other objects of the same sort. I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head was the same sun which I saw in England; the faces only were foreign to me. Whence comes this difference? It arises from our always imperceptibly connecting the idea of the individual with man, and only the idea of the class with natural objects. In the one case, the external appearance or physical structure is the least thing to be attended to; in the other, it is every thing. The springs that move the human form, and make it
It is the same setting sun that we see and remember year after year, through summer and winter, seed-time and harvest. The moon that shines above our heads, or plays through the checquered shade, is the same moon that we used to read of in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances. We see no difference in the trees first covered with leaves in the spring. The dry reeds rustling on the side of a stream—the woods swept by the loud blast—the dark massy foliage of autumn—the grey trunks and naked branches of the trees in winter—the sequestered copse, and wide-extended heath—the glittering sunny showers, and December snows —are still the same, or accompanied with the same thoughts and feelings: there is no object, however trifling or rude, that does not in some mood or other find its way into the heart, as a link in the chain of our living being; and this it is that makes good that saying of the poet—
“To me the
meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that
do often lie too deep for tears.”
Thus nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks; for there is that consent and mutual harmony among all her works, one undivided spirit pervading them throughout, that to him who has well acquainted himself with them, they speak always the same well-known language, striking on the heart, amidst unquiet thoughts and the tumult of the world, like the music of one’s native tongue heard in some far-off country.
“My heart
leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the
sky:
So was it when
my life began,
So is it now I
am a man,
So shall it be
when I grow old and die.
The child’s
the father of the man,
And I would have
my years to be
Linked each to
each by natural piety.”
The daisy that first strikes the child’s eye in trying to leap over his own shadow, is the same flower that with timid upward glance implores the grown man not to tread upon it. Rousseau, in one of his botanical excursions, meeting with the periwinkle, fell upon his knees, crying out—Ah! voila de la pervenche! It was because he had thirty years before brought home the same flower with him in one of his rambles with Madame de Warens, near Chambery. It struck him as the same identical little blue flower that he remembered so well; and thirty years of sorrow and bitter regret were effaced from his memory. That, or a thousand other flowers of the same name, were the same to him, to the heart, and to the eye; but there was but one Madame Warens in the world, whose image was never absent from his thoughts; with whom flowers and verdure sprung up beneath his feet, and without whom all was cold and barren in nature and in his own breast. The cuckoo, “that wandering voice,” that comes and goes with the spring, mocks our ears with one note from youth to age; and the lapwing, screaming round the traveller’s path, repeats for ever the same sad story of Tereus and Philomel!
LECTURE VI.
ON SWIFT, YOUNG, GRAY, COLLINS, &c.
I shall in the present Lecture go back to the age of Queen Anne, and endeavour to give a cursory account of the most eminent of our poets, of whom I have not already spoken, from that period to the present.
The three principal poets among the wits of Queen Anne’s reign, next to Pope, were Prior, Swift, and Gay. Parnell, though a good-natured, easy man, and a friend to poets and the Muses, was himself little more than an occasional versifier; and Arbuthnot, who had as much wit as the best of them, chose to shew it in prose, and not in verse. He had a very notable share in the immortal History of John Bull, and the inimitable and praiseworthy Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. There has been a great deal said and written about the plagiarisms of Sterne; but the only real plagiarism he has been guilty of (if such theft were a crime), is in taking Tristram Shandy’s father from Martin’s, the elder Scriblerus. The original idea of the character, that is, of the opinionated, captious old gentleman, who is pedantic, not from profession, but choice, belongs to Arbuthnot.—Arbuthnot’s style is distinguished from that of his contemporaries, even by a greater degree of terseness and conciseness. He leaves out every superfluous word; is sparing of connecting particles, and introductory phrases; uses always the simplest forms of construction; and is more a master of the idiomatic peculiarities and internal resources of the language than almost any other writer. There is a research in the choice of a plain, as well as of an ornamented or learned style; and, in fact, a great deal more. Among common English words, there may be ten expressing the same thing with different degrees of force and propriety, and only one of them the very word we want, because it is the only one that answers exactly with the idea we have in our minds. Each word in familiar use has a different set of associations and shades of meaning attached to it, and distinguished from each other by inveterate custom; and it is in having the whole of these at our command, and in knowing which to choose, as they are called for by the occasion, that the perfection of a pure conversational prose-style consists. But in writing a florid and artificial style, neither the same range of invention, nor the same quick sense of propriety—nothing but learning is required. If you know the words, and their general meaning, it is sufficient: it is impossible you should know the nicer inflections of signification, depending on an endless variety of application, in expressions borrowed from a foreign or dead language. They all impose upon the ear alike, because they are not familiar to it; the only distinction left is between the pompous and the plain; the sesquipedalia verba have this advantage, that they are all of one length; and any words are equally fit for a learned style, so that we have never heard them before. Themistocles thought that the same sounding epithets could not suit all subjects, as the same dress does not fit all persons. The style of our modern prose writers is very fine in itself; but it wants variety of inflection and adaptation; it hinders us from seeing the differences of the things it undertakes to describe.
What I have here insisted on will be found to be the leading distinction between the style of Swift, Arbuthnot, Steele, and the other writers of the age of Queen Anne, and the style of Dr. Johnson, which succeeded to it. The one is English, and the other is not. The writers first mentioned, in order to express their thoughts, looked about them for the properest word to convey any idea, that the language which they spoke, and which their countrymen understood, afforded: Dr. Johnson takes the first English word that offers, and by translating it at a venture into the first Greek or Latin word he can think of, only retaining the English termination, produces an extraordinary effect upon the reader, by much the same sort of mechanical process that Trim converted the old jack-boots into a pair of new mortars.
Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man, who liked to think and talk, better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote. His long compound Latin phrases required less thought, and took up more room than others. What shews the facilities afforded by this style of imposing generalization, is, that it was instantly adopted with success by all those who were writers by profession, or who were not; and that at present, we cannot see a lottery puff or a quack advertisement pasted against a wall, that is not perfectly Johnsonian in style. Formerly, the learned had the privilege of translating their notions into Latin; and a great privilege it was, as it confined the reputation and emoluments of learning to themselves. Dr. Johnson may be said to have naturalised this privilege, by inventing a sort of jargon translated half-way out of one language into the other, which raised the Doctor’s reputation, and confounded all ranks in literature.
In the short period above alluded to, authors professed to write as other men spoke; every body now affects to speak as authors write; and any one who retains the use of his mother tongue, either in writing or conversation, is looked upon as a very illiterate character.
Prior and Gay belong, in the characteristic excellences of their style, to the same class of writers with Suckling, Rochester, and Sedley: the former imbibed most of the licentious levity of the age of Charles II. and carried it on beyond the Revolution under King William. Prior has left no single work equal to Gay’s Fables, or the Beggar’s Opera. But in his lyrical and fugitive pieces he has shown even more genius, more playfulness, more mischievous gaiety. No one has exceeded him in the laughing grace with which he glances at a subject that will not bear examining, with which he gently hints at what cannot be directly insisted on, with which he half conceals, and half draws aside the veil from some of the Muses’ nicest mysteries. His Muse is, in fact, a giddy wanton flirt, who spends her time in playing at snap-dragon and blind-man’s buff, who tells what she should not, and knows more
“Little
Will, the scourge of France,
No Godhead, but
the first of men,”
are excellent, and shew the same talent for double-entendre and the same gallantry of spirit, whether in the softer lyric, or the more lively heroic. Some of Prior’s bon mots are the best that are recorded.—His serious poetry, as his Solomon, is as heavy as his familiar style was light and agreeable. His moral Muse is a Magdalen, and should not have obtruded herself on public view. Henry and Emma is a paraphrase of the old ballad of the Nut-brown Maid, and not so good as the original. In short, as we often see in other cases, where men thwart their own genius, Prior’s sentimental and romantic productions are mere affectation, the result not of powerful impulse or real feeling, but of a consciousness of his deficiencies, and a wish to supply their place by labour and art.
Gay was sometimes grosser than Prior, not systematically, but inadvertently—from not being so well aware of what he was about; nor was there the same necessity for caution, for his grossness is by no means so seductive or inviting.
Gay’s Fables are certainly a work of great merit, both as to the quantity of invention implied, and as to the elegance and facility of the execution. They are, however, spun out too long; the descriptions and narrative are too diffuse and desultory; and the moral is sometimes without point. They are more like Tales than Fables. The best are, perhaps, the Hare with Many Friends, the Monkeys, and the Fox at the Point of Death. His Pastorals are pleasing and poetical. But his capital work is his Beggar’s Opera. It is indeed a masterpiece of wit and genius, not to say of morality. In composing it, he chose a very unpromising ground to work upon, and he has prided himself in adorning it with all the graces, the precision, and brilliancy of style. It is a vulgar error to call this a vulgar play. So far from it, that I do not scruple to say that it appears to me one of the most refined productions
I shall conclude this account of Gay with his verses on Sir Richard Blackmore, which may serve at once as a specimen of his own manner, and as a character of a voluminous contemporary poet, who was admired by Mr. Locke, and knighted by King William III.
“See
who ne’er was nor will be half-read,
Who first sung
Arthur, then sung Alfred;
Praised great
Eliza in God’s anger,
Till all true
Englishmen cried, ’Hang her!’—
Maul’d human
wit in one thick satire;
Next in three
books spoil’d human nature:
Undid Creation
at a jerk,
And of Redemption
made damn’d work.
Then took his
Muse at once, and dipt her
Full in the middle
of the Scripture.
What wonders there
the man, grown old, did?
Sternhold himself
he out Sternholded.
Made David seem
so mad and freakish,
All thought him
just what thought King Achish.
No mortal read
his Solomon
But judg’d
Re’boam his own son.
Moses he serv’d
as Moses Pharaoh,
And Deborah as
she Siserah,
Made Jeremy full
sore to cry,
And Job himself
curse God and die.
What punishment
all this must follow?
Shall Arthur use
him like King Tollo?
Shall David as
Uriah slay him?
Or dextrous Deborah
Siserah him?
No!—none
of these! Heaven spare his life!
But send him,
honest Job, thy wife!”
Gay’s Trivia, or Art of Walking the Streets, is as pleasant as walking the streets must have been at the time when it was written. His ballad of Black Eyed Susan is one of the most delightful that can be imagined; nor do I see that it is a bit the worse for Mr. Jekyll’s parody on it.
Swift’s reputation as a poet has been in a manner obscured by the greater splendour, by the natural force and inventive genius of his prose writings; but if he had never written either the Tale of a Tub or Gulliver’s Travels, his name merely as a poet would have come down to us, and have gone down to posterity with well earned honours. His Imitations of Horace, and still more his Verses on his own Death, place him in the first rank of agreeable moralists in verse. There is not only a dry humour, an exquisite tone of irony, in these productions of his pen; but there is a touching, unpretending pathos, mixed up with the most whimsical and eccentric strokes of pleasantry and satire. His Description of the Morning in London, and of a City Shower, which were first published in the Tatler, are among the most delightful of the contents of that very delightful work. Swift shone as one of the most sensible of the poets; he is also distinguished as one of the most nonsensical of them. No man has written so many lack-a-daisical, slip-shod, tedious, trifling, foolish, fantastical verses as he, which are so little an imputation on the wisdom of the writer; and which, in fact, only shew his readiness to oblige others, and to forget himself. He has gone so far as to invent a new stanza of fourteen and sixteen syllable lines for Mary the cookmaid to vent her budget of nothings, and for Mrs. Harris to gossip with the deaf old housekeeper. Oh, when shall we have such another Rector of Laracor!—The Tale of a Tub is one of the most masterly compositions in the language, whether for thought, wit, or style. It is so capital and undeniable a proof of the author’s talents, that Dr. Johnson, who did not like Swift, would not allow that he wrote it. It is hard that the same performance should stand in the way of a man’s promotion to a bishopric, as wanting gravity, and at the same time be denied to be his, as having too much wit. It is a pity the Doctor did not find out some graver author, for whom he felt a critical kindness, on whom to father this splendid but unacknowledged production. Dr. Johnson could not deny that Gulliver’s Travels were his; he therefore disputed their merits, and said that after the first idea of them was conceived, they were easy to execute; all the rest followed mechanically. I do not know how that may be; but the mechanism employed is something very different from any that the author of Rasselas was in the habit of bringing to bear on such occasions. There is nothing more futile, as well as invidious, than this mode of criticising a work of original genius. Its greatest merit is supposed to be in the invention; and you say, very wisely, that it is not in the execution. You might as well take away the merit of the invention of the telescope, by saying that, after its uses were explained and understood, any ordinary eyesight could look through it. Whether the excellence of Gulliver’s Travels is in the conception or the execution, is of
I do not, therefore, agree with the estimate of Swift’s moral or intellectual character, given by an eminent critic, who does not seem to have forgotten the party politics of Swift. I do not carry my political resentments so far back: I can at this time of day forgive Swift for having been a Tory. I feel little disturbance (whatever I might think of them) at his political sentiments, which died with him, considering how much else he has left behind him of a more solid and imperishable nature! If he had, indeed, (like some others) merely left behind him the lasting infamy of a destroyer of his country, or the shining example of an apostate from liberty, I might have thought the case altered.
The determination with which Swift persisted in a preconcerted theory, savoured of the morbid affection of which he died. There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable. Swift was not a Frenchman. In this respect he differed from Rabelais and Voltaire. They have been accounted the three greatest wits in modern times; but their wit was of a peculiar kind in each. They are little beholden to each other; there is some resemblance between Lord Peter in the Tale of a Tub, and Rabelais’ Friar John; but in general they are all three authors of a substantive character in themselves. Swift’s wit (particularly in his chief prose works) was serious, saturnine, and practical; Rabelais’ was fantastical and joyous; Voltaire’s was light, sportive, and verbal. Swift’s wit was the wit of sense; Rabelais’, the wit of nonsense; Voltaire’s, of indifference to both. The ludicrous in Swift arises out of his keen sense of impropriety, his soreness and impatience of the least absurdity. He separates, with a severe and caustic air, truth from falsehood, folly from wisdom, “shews vice her own image, scorn her own feature”; and it is the force, the precision, and the honest abruptness with which the separation is made, that excites our surprise, our admiration, and laughter. He sets a mark of reprobation on that which offends good sense and good manners, which cannot be mistaken, and which holds it up to our ridicule and contempt ever after. His occasional disposition to trifling (already noticed) was a relaxation from the excessive earnestness of his mind. Indignatio facit versus. His better genius was his spleen. It was the biting acrimony of his temper that sharpened his other faculties. The truth of his perceptions produced the pointed coruscations of his wit; his playful irony was the result of inward bitterness of thought; his imagination was the product of the literal, dry, incorrigible tenaciousness of his understanding. He endeavoured to escape from the persecution of realities into the regions of fancy, and invented his Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, Yahoos, and Houynhyms,
Rabelais was a Frenchman of the old school—Voltaire of the new. The wit of the one arose from an exuberance of enjoyment—of the other, from an excess of indifference, real or assumed. Voltaire had no enthusiasm for one thing or another: he made light of every thing. In his hands all things turn to chaff and dross, as the pieces of silver money in the Arabian Nights were changed by the hands
Young is a gloomy epigrammatist. He has abused great powers both of thought and language. His moral reflections are sometimes excellent; but he spoils their beauty by overloading them with a religious horror, and at the same time giving them all the smart turns and quaint expression of an enigma or repartee in verse. The well-known lines on Procrastination are in his best manner:
“Be
wise to-day; ’tis madness to defer;
Next day the fatal
precedent will plead;
Thus on, till
wisdom is push’d out of life.
Procrastination
is the thief of time;
Year after year
it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies
of a moment leaves
The vast concerns
of an eternal scene.
Of
man’s miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm, “That
all men are about to live,”
For ever on the
brink of being born.
All pay themselves
the compliment to think
They, one day,
shall not drivel; and their pride
On this reversion
takes up ready praise;
At least, their
own; their future selves applauds;
How excellent
that life they ne’er will lead!
Time lodg’d
in their own hands is Folly’s vails:
That lodg’d
in Fate’s, to Wisdom they consign;
The thing they
can’t but purpose, they postpone.
’Tis not
in Folly, not to scorn a fool;
And scarce in
human Wisdom to do more.
All Promise is
poor dilatory man,
And that through
every stage. When young, indeed,
In full content
we, sometimes, nobly rest,
Un-anxious for
ourselves; and only wish,
As duteous sons,
our fathers were more wise.
At thirty man
suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty,
and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides
his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent
purpose to Resolve;
In all the magnanimity
of thought
Resolves, and
re-resolves; then dies the same.
And
why? Because he thinks himself immortal.
All men think
all men mortal, but themselves;
Themselves, when
some alarming shock of fate
Strikes through
their wounded hearts the sudden dread;
But their hearts
wounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; where
past the shaft, no trace is found.
As from the wing
no scar the sky retains;
The parted wave
no furrow from the keel;
So dies in human
hearts the thought of death.
Ev’n with
the tender tear which nature sheds
O’er those
we love, we drop it in their grave.”
His Universal Passion is a keen and powerful satire; but the effort takes from the effect, and oppresses attention by perpetual and violent demands upon it. His tragedy of the Revenge is monkish and scholastic. Zanga is a vulgar caricature of Iago. The finest lines in it are the burst of triumph at the end, when his revenge is completed:
“Let Europe
and her pallid sons go weep,
Let Afric on her
hundred thrones rejoice,” &c.
Collins is a writer of a very different stamp, who had perhaps less general power of mind than Young; but he had that true vivida vis, that genuine inspiration, which alone can give birth to the highest efforts of poetry. He leaves stings in the minds of his readers, certain traces of thought and feelings which never wear out, because nature had left them in his own mind. He is the only one of the minor poets of whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have done the greatest things. The germ is there. He is sometimes affected, unmeaning, and obscure; but he also catches rich glimpses of the bowers of Paradise, and has lofty aspirations after the highest seats of the Muses. With a great deal of tinsel and splendid patch-work, he has not been able to hide the solid sterling ore of genius. In his best works there is an attic simplicity, a pathos, and fervour of imagination, which make us the more lament that the efforts of his mind were at first depressed by neglect and pecuniary embarrassment, and at length buried in the gloom of an unconquerable and fatal malady. How many poets have gone through all the horrors of poverty and contempt, and ended their days in moping melancholy or moody madness!
“We poets
in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes
in the end despondency and madness.”
Is this the fault of themselves, of nature in tempering them of too fine a clay, or of the world, that spurner of living, and patron of dead merit? Read the account of Collins—with hopes frustrated, with faculties blighted, at last, when it was too late for himself or others, receiving the deceitful favours of relenting Fortune, which served only to throw their sunshine on his decay, and to light him to an early grave. He was found sitting with every spark of imagination extinguished, and with only the faint traces of memory and reason left —with only one book in his room, the Bible; “but that,” he said, “was the best.” A melancholy damp hung like an unwholesome mildew upon his faculties—a canker had consumed the flower of his life. He produced works of genius, and the public regarded them with scorn: he aimed at excellence that should be his own, and his friends treated his efforts as the wanderings of fatuity. The proofs of his capacity are, his Ode on Evening, his Ode on the Passions (particularly the fine personification of Hope), his Ode to Fear, the Dirge in Cymbeline, the Lines on Thomson’s Grave, and his Eclogues, parts of which are admirable. But perhaps his Ode on the Poetical Character is the best of all. A rich distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden cloud envelopes it; a honeyed paste of poetic diction encrusts it, like the candied coat of the auricula. His Ode to Evening shews equal genius in the images and versification. The sounds steal slowly over the ear, like the gradual coming on of evening itself:
“If aught
of oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chaste
Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like
thy own solemn springs,
Thy
springs and dying gales,
O nymph reserv’d,
while now the bright-haired sun
Sits on yon western
tent, whose cloudy skirts
With
brede ethereal wove,
O’erhang
his wavy bed:
Now air is hush’d,
save where the weak-ey’d bat,
With short shrill
shriek flits by on leathern wing,
Or
where the beetle winds
His
small but sullen horn,
As oft he rises
midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim
borne in heedless hum.
Now
teach me, maid compos’d,
To
breathe some soften’d strain,
Whose numbers
stealing through thy darkling vale
May not unseemly
with its stillness suit,
As
musing slow, I hail
Thy
genial, lov’d return!
For when thy folding
star arising shews
His paly circlet,
at his warning lamp
The
fragrant Hours and Elves
Who
slept in flow’rs the day,
And many a nymph
who wreathes her brows with sedge,
And sheds the
fresh’ning dew, and lovelier still,
The
pensive Pleasures sweet
Prepare
thy shadowy car;
Then lead, calm
Votress, where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone
heath, or some time-hallow’d pile,
Or
upland fallows grey
Reflect
its last cool gleam.
But when chill
blust’ring winds, or driving rain,
Forbid my willing
feet, be mine the hut,
That
from the mountain’s side
Views
wilds and swelling floods,
And hamlets brown,
and dim discover’d spires,
And hears their
simple bell, and marks o’er all
Thy
dewy fingers draw
The
gradual dusky veil.
While Spring shall
pour his show’rs, as oft he wont,
And bathe thy
breathing tresses, meekest Eve!
While
Summer loves to sport
Beneath
thy lingering light;
While sallow Autumn
fills thy lap with leaves;
Or Winter yelling
through the troublous air,
Affrights
thy shrinking train,
And
rudely rends thy robes;
So long, sure-found
beneath the sylvan shed,
Shall Fancy, Friendship,
Science, rose-lipp’d Health,
Thy
gentlest influence own,
And
hymn thy favourite name.”
Hammond, whose poems are bound up with Collins’s, in Bell’s pocket edition, was a young gentleman, who appears to have fallen in love about the year 1740, and who translated Tibullus into English verse, to let his mistress and the public know of it.
I should conceive that Collins had a much greater poetical genius than Gray: he had more of that fine madness which is inseparable from it, of its turbid effervescence, of all that pushes it to the verge of agony or rapture. Gray’s Pindaric Odes are, I believe, generally given up at present: they are stately and pedantic, a kind of methodical borrowed phrenzy. But I cannot so easily give up, nor will the world be in any haste to part with his Elegy in a Country Church-yard: it is one of the most classical productions that ever was penned by a refined and thoughtful mind, moralising on human life. Mr. Coleridge (in his Literary Life) says, that his friend Mr. Wordsworth had undertaken to shew that the language of the Elegy is unintelligible: it has, however, been understood! The Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College is more mechanical and common-place; but it touches on certain strings about the heart, that vibrate in unison with it to our latest breath. No one ever passes by Windsor’s “stately heights,” or sees the distant spires of Eton College below, without thinking of Gray. He deserves that we should think of him; for he thought of others, and turned a trembling, ever-watchful ear to “the still sad music of humanity.”—His Letters are inimitably fine. If his poems are sometimes finical and pedantic, his prose is quite free from affectation. He pours his thoughts out upon paper as they arise in his mind; and they arise in his mind without pretence, or constraint, from the pure impulse of learned leisure and contemplative indolence. He is not here on stilts or in buckram; but smiles in his easy chair, as he moralises through the loopholes of retreat, on the bustle and raree-show of the world, or on “those reverend bedlams, colleges and schools!” He had nothing to do but to read and to think, and to tell his friends what he read and thought. His life was a luxurious, thoughtful dream. “Be mine,” he says in one of his Letters, “to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.” And in another, to shew his contempt for action and the turmoils of ambition, he says to someone, “Don’t you remember Lords ------ and ------, who are now great statesmen, little dirty boys playing at cricket? For my part, I do not feel a bit wiser, or bigger, or older than I did then.” What an equivalent for not being wise or great, to be always young! What a happiness never to lose or gain any thing in the game of human life, by being never any thing more than a looker-on!
How different from Shenstone, who only wanted to be looked at: who withdrew from the world to be followed by the crowd, and courted popularity by affecting privacy! His Letters shew him to have lived in a continual fever of petty vanity, and to have been a finished literary coquet. He seems always to say, “You will find nothing in the world so amiable as Nature and me: come, and admire us.” His poems are indifferent and tasteless, except his Pastoral Ballad, his Lines on Jemmy Dawson, and his School-mistress, which last is a perfect piece of writing.
Akenside had in him the materials of poetry, but he was hardly a great poet. He improved his Pleasures of the Imagination in the subsequent editions, by pruning away a great many redundances of style and ornament. Armstrong is better, though he has not chosen a very exhilarating subject—The Art of Preserving Health. Churchill’s Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good as the subjects deserved—they are strong, coarse, and full of an air of hardened assurance. I ought not to pass over without mention Green’s Poem on the Spleen, or Dyer’s Grongar Hill.
The principal name of the period we are now come to is that of Goldsmith, than which few names stand higher or fairer in the annals of modern literature. One should have his own pen to describe him as he ought to be described—amiable, various, and bland, with careless inimitable grace touching on every kind of excellence—with manners unstudied, but a gentle heart—performing miracles of skill from pure happiness of nature, and whose greatest fault was ignorance of his own worth. As a poet, he is the most flowing and elegant of our versifiers since Pope, with traits of artless nature which Pope had not, and with a peculiar felicity in his turns upon words, which he constantly repeated with delightful effect: such as—
“------His lot, though small, He sees that little lot, the lot of all.”
* * * * *
“And turn’d and look’d, and turn’d to look again.”
As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmed all Europe. What reader is there in the civilised world, who is not the better for the story of the washes which the worthy Dr. Primrose demolished so deliberately with the poker—for the knowledge of the guinea which the Miss Primroses kept unchanged in their pockets—the adventure of the picture of the Vicar’s family, which could not be got into the house— and that of the Flamborough family, all painted with oranges in their hands—or for the story of the case of shagreen spectacles and the cosmogony?
As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth new powers from Mr. Liston’s face. That alone is praise enough for it. Poor Goldsmith! how happy he has made others! how unhappy he was in himself! He never had the pleasure of reading his own works! He had only the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and the consolation of being harassed to death with his own! He is the most amusing and interesting person, in one of the most amusing and interesting books in the world, Boswell’s Life of Johnson. His peach-coloured coat shall always bloom in Boswell’s writings, and his fame survive in his own!— His genius was a mixture of originality and imitation: he could do nothing without some model before him, and he could copy nothing that he did not adorn with the graces of his own mind. Almost all the latter part of the Vicar of Wakefield, and a great deal of the former, is taken from Joseph Andrews; but the circumstances I have mentioned above are not.
The finest things he has left behind him in verse are his character of a country school-master, and that prophetic description of Burke in the Retaliation. His moral Essays in the Citizen of the World, are as agreeable chit-chat as can be conveyed in the form of didactic discourses.
Warton was a poet and a scholar, studious with ease, learned without affectation. He had a happiness which some have been prouder of than he, who deserved it less—he was poet-laureat.
“And that
green wreath which decks the bard when dead,
That laurel garland
crown’d his living head.”
But he bore his honours meekly, and performed his half-yearly task regularly. I should not have mentioned him for this distinction alone (the highest which a poet can receive from the state), but for another circumstance; I mean his being the author of some of the finest sonnets in the language—at least so they appear to me; and as this species of composition has the necessary advantage of being short (though it is also sometimes both “tedious and brief"), I will here repeat two or three of them, as treating pleasing subjects in a pleasing and philosophical way.
Written in a blank leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon
“Deem not,
devoid of elegance, the sage,
By Fancy’s
genuine feelings unbeguil’d,
Of painful pedantry
the poring child;
Who turns of these
proud domes the historic page,
Now sunk by Time,
and Henry’s fiercer rage.
Think’st
thou the warbling Muses never smil’d
On his lone hours?
Ingenuous views engage
His thoughts,
on themes unclassic falsely styl’d,
Intent.
While cloister’d piety displays
Her mouldering
roll, the piercing eye explores
New manners, and
the pomp of elder days,
Whence culls the
pensive bard his pictur’d stores.
Not rough nor
barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity,
but strewn with flowers.”
Sonnet. Written at Stonehenge.
“Thou noblest
monument of Albion’s isle,
Whether, by Merlin’s
aid, from Scythia’s shore
To Amber’s
fatal plain Pendragon bore,
Huge frame of
giant hands, the mighty pile,
T’entomb
his Britons slain by Hengist’s guile:
Or Druid priests,
sprinkled with human gore,
Taught mid thy
massy maze their mystic lore:
Or Danish chiefs,
enrich’d with savage spoil,
To victory’s
idol vast, an unhewn shrine,
Rear’d the
rude heap, or in thy hallow’d ground
Repose the kings
of Brutus’ genuine line;
Or here those
kings in solemn state were crown’d;
Studious to trace
thy wondrous origin,
We muse on many
an ancient tale renown’d.”
Nothing can be more admirable than the learning here displayed, or the inference from it, that it is of no use but as it leads to interesting thought and reflection.
That written after seeing Wilton House is in the same style, but I prefer concluding with that to the river Lodon, which has a personal as well as poetical interest about it.
“Ah! what
a weary race my feet have run,
Since first I
trod thy banks with alders crown’d,
And thought my
way was all through fairy ground,
Beneath the azure
sky and golden sun:
When first my
Muse to lisp her notes begun!
While pensive
memory traces back the round
Which fills the
varied interval between;
Much pleasure,
more of sorrow, marks the scene.—
Sweet native stream!
those skies and suns so pure
No more return,
to cheer my evening road!
Yet still one
joy remains, that not obscure
Nor useless, all
my vacant days have flow’d
From youth’s
gay dawn to manhood’s prime mature,
Nor with the Muse’s
laurel unbestow’d.”
I have thus gone through all the names of this period I could think of, but I find that there are others still waiting behind that I had never thought of. Here is a list of some of them—Pattison, Tickell, Hill, Somerville, Browne, Pitt, Wilkie, Dodsley, Shaw, Smart, Langhorne, Bruce, Greame, Glover, Lovibond, Penrose, Mickle, Jago, Scott, Whitehead, Jenyns, Logan, Cotton, Cunningham, and Blacklock.—I think it will be best to let them pass and say nothing about them. It will be hard to persuade so many respectable persons that they are dull writers, and if we give them any praise, they will send others.
But here comes one whose claims cannot be so easily set aside: they have been sanctioned by learning, hailed by genius, and hallowed by misfortune—I mean Chatterton. Yet I must say what I think of him, and that is not what is generally thought. I pass over the disputes between the learned antiquaries, Dr. Mills, Herbert Croft, and Dr. Knox, whether he was to be placed after Shakspeare and Dryden, or to come after Shakspeare alone. A living poet has borne a better testimony to him—
“I thought of Chatterton,
the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;
And him [8] who walked in glory and in joy
Beside his plough along the mountain side.”
I am loth to put asunder whom so great an authority has joined together; but I cannot find in Chatterton’s works any thing so extraordinary as the age at which they were written. They have a facility, vigour, and knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would not have been so in a man of twenty. He did not shew extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would have written better, had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would have lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves; for their mind to them also “a kingdom is.” With an unaccountable power coming over him at an unusual age, and with the youthful confidence it inspired, he performed wonders, and was willing to set a seal on his reputation by a tragic catastrophe. He had done his best; and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into AEtna, to ensure immortality. The brazen slippers alone remain!—
___ [8] Burns.—These lines are taken from the introduction to Mr. Wordsworth’s poem of the LEECH-GATHERER. ___
LECTURE VII. ON BURNS, AND THE OLD ENGLISH BALLADS.
I am sorry that what I said in the conclusion of the last Lecture respecting Chatterton, should have given dissatisfaction to some persons, with whom I would willingly agree on all such matters. What I meant was less to call in question Chatterton’s genius, than to object to the common mode of estimating its magnitude by its prematureness. The lists of fame are not filled with the dates of births or deaths; and the side-mark of the age at which they were done, wears out in works destined for immortality. Had Chatterton really done more, we should have thought less of him, for our attention would then have been fixed on the excellence of the works themselves, instead of the singularity of the circumstances in which they were produced. But because he attained to the full powers of manhood at an early age, I do not see that he would have attained to more than those powers, had he lived to be a man. He was a prodigy, because in him the ordinary march of nature was violently precipitated; and it is therefore inferred, that he would have continued to hold on his course, “unslacked of motion.” On the contrary, who knows but he might have lived to be poet-laureat? It is much better to let him remain as he was. Of his actual productions, any one may think as highly as he pleases; I would only guard against adding to the account of his quantum meruit, those possible productions by which the learned rhapsodists of his time raised his gigantic pretensions to an equality with those of Homer and Shakspeare. It is amusing to read some of these exaggerated descriptions, each rising above the other in extravagance. In Anderson’s Life, we find that Mr. Warton speaks of him “as a prodigy of genius,” as “a singular instance of prematurity of abilities”: that may be true enough, and Warton was at any rate a competent judge; but Mr. Malone “believes him to have been the greatest genius that England has produced since the days of Shakspeare.” Dr. Gregory says, “he must rank, as a universal genius, above Dryden, and perhaps only second to Shakspeare.” Mr. Herbert Croft is still more unqualified in his praises; he asserts, that “no such being, at any period of life, has ever been known, or possibly ever will be known.” He runs a parallel between Chatterton and Milton; and asserts, that “an army of Macedonian and Swedish mad butchers fly before him,” meaning, I suppose, that Alexander the Great and Charles the Twelfth were nothing to him; “nor,” he adds, “does my memory supply me with any human being, who at such an age, with such advantages, has produced such compositions. Under the heathen mythology, superstition and admiration would have explained all, by bringing Apollo on earth; nor would the God ever have descended with more credit
Now this is so far from the mark, that the whole controversy might have been settled by any one but the learned antiquaries themselves, who had the smallest share of their learning, from this single circumstance, that the poems read as smooth as any modern poems, if you read them as modern compositions; and that you cannot read them, or make verse of them at all, if you pronounce or accent the words as they were spoken at the time when the poems were pretended to have been written. The whole secret of the imposture, which nothing but a deal of learned dust, raised by collecting and removing a great deal of learned rubbish, could have prevented our laborious critics from seeing through, lies on the face of it (to say nothing of the burlesque air which is scarcely disguised throughout) in the repetition of a few obsolete words, and in the mis-spelling of common ones.
“No sooner,” proceeds the Doctor, “do I turn to the poems, than the labour of the antiquaries appears only waste of time; and I am involuntarily forced to join in placing that laurel, which he seems so well to have deserved, on the brow of Chatterton. The poems bear so many marks of superior genius, that they have deservedly excited the general attention of polite scholars, and are considered as the most remarkable productions in modern poetry. We have many instances of poetical eminence at an early age; but neither Cowley, Milton, nor Pope, ever produced any thing while they were boys, which can justly be compared to the poems of Chatterton. The learned antiquaries do not indeed dispute their excellence. They extol it in the highest terms of applause. They raise their favourite Rowley to a rivalry with Homer: but they make the very merits of the works an argument against their real author. Is it possible, say they, that a boy should produce compositions so beautiful and masterly? That a common boy should produce them is not possible,” rejoins the Doctor; “but that they should be produced by a boy of an extraordinary genius, such as was that of Homer or Shakspeare, though a prodigy, is such a one as by no means exceeds the bounds of rational credibility.”
Now it does not appear that Shakspeare or Homer were such early prodigies; so that by this reasoning he must take precedence of them too, as well as of Milton, Cowley, and Pope. The reverend and classical writer then breaks out into the following melancholy raptures:—
“Unfortunate
boy! short and evil were thy days, but thy fame shall
be immortal. Hadst thou been known to the munificent
patrons of genius . . .
“Unfortunate
boy! poorly wast thou accommodated during thy short
sojourning here among us;—rudely wast thou
treated—sorely did thy feelings suffer
from the scorn of the unworthy; and there are at last
those who wish to rob thee of thy only meed, thy posthumous
glory. Severe too are the censures of thy morals.
In the gloomy moments of despondency, I fear thou
hast uttered impious and blasphemous thoughts.
But let thy more rigid censors reflect, that thou wast
literally and strictly but a boy. Let many of
thy bitterest enemies reflect what were their own
religious principles, and whether they had any at the
age of fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Surely
it is a severe and an unjust surmise that thou wouldst
probably have ended thy life as a victim to the laws,
if thou hadst not ended it as thou didst.”
Enough, enough, of the learned antiquaries, and of the classical and benevolent testimony of Dr. Knox. Chatterton was, indeed, badly enough off; but he was at least saved from the pain and shame of reading this woful lamentation over fallen genius, which circulates splendidly bound in the fourteenth edition, while he is a prey to worms. As to those who are really capable of admiring Chatterton’s genius, or of feeling an interest in his fate, I would only say, that I never heard any one speak of any one of his works as if it were an old well-known favourite, and had become a faith and a religion in his mind. It is his name, his youth, and what he might have lived to have done, that excite our wonder and admiration. He has the same sort of posthumous fame that an actor of the last age has—an abstracted reputation which is independent of any thing we know of his works. The admirers of Collins never think of him without recalling to their minds his Ode on Evening, or on the Poetical Character. Gray’s Elegy, and his poetical popularity, are identified together, and inseparable even in imagination. It is the same with respect to Burns: when you speak of him as a poet, you mean his works, his Tam o’Shanter, or his Cotter’s Saturday Night. But the enthusiasts for Chatterton, if you ask for the proofs of his extraordinary genius, are obliged to turn to the volume, and perhaps find there what they seek; but it is not in their minds; and it is of that I spoke. The Minstrel’s song in AElla is I think the best.
“O! synge
untoe my roundelaie,
O! droppe the
brynie teare wythe mee,
Daunce ne moe
atte hallie daie,
Lycke a rennynge
ryver bee.
Mie
love ys dedde,
Gonne
to hys deathe-bedde,
Al
under the wyllowe-tree.
Black hys cryne
as the wyntere nyght,
Whyte hys rode
as the sommer snowe,
Rodde hys face
as the mornynge lyghte,
Cale he lyes ynne
the grave belowe.
Mie
love ys dedde,
Gonne
to hys deathe-bedde,
Al
under the wyllowe-tree.
Swote hys tongue
as the throstles note,
Quycke ynne daunce
as thought cann bee,
Defte his taboure,
codgelle stote,
O! hee lys bie
the wyllowe-tree.
Mie
love ys dedde,
Gonne
to hys deathe-bedde,
Al
under the wyllowe-tree.
Harke! the ravenne
flappes hys wynge,
In the briered
dell belowe;
Harke! the dethe-owle
loude dothe synge,
To the nygthe-mares
as theie goe.
Mie
love ys dedde,
Gone
to hys deathe-bedde,
Al
under the wyllowe-tree.
See! the whyte
moone sheenes onne hie;
Whyterre ys mie
true loves shroude;
Whyterre yanne
the mornynge skie,
Whyterre yanne
the evenynge cloude.
Mie
love ys dedde,
Gonne
to hys deathe-bedde,
Al
under the wyllowe-tree.
Heere, upon mie
true loves grave,
Schalle the baren
fleurs be layde,
Ne one hallie
seyncte to save
Al the celness
of a mayde.
Mie
love ys dedde,
Gonne
to his deathe-bedde,
Al
under the wyllowe-tree.
Wythe mie hondes
I’ll dent the brieres
Rounde hys hallie
corse to gre,
Ouphante fairies,
lyghte your fyres,
Heere mie boddie
stille schalle bee.
Mie
love ys dedde,
Gonne
to hys deathe-bedde,
Al
under the wyllowe-tree.
Comme, wythe acorne-coppe
and thorne,
Drayne my hartys
blodde awaie;
Lyfe and all yttes
goode I scorne,
Daunce bie nete,
or feaste by daie.
Mie
love ys dedde,
Gonne
to hys deathe-bedde,
Al
under the wyllowe-tree.
Water wytches,
crownede whthe reytes,
Bere mee to yer
leathalle tyde.
I die; I comme;
mie true love waytes.
Thos the damselle
spake, and dyed.”
To proceed to the more immediate subject of the present Lecture, the character and writings of Burns.—Shakspeare says of some one, that “he was like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring.” Burns, the poet, was not such a man. He had a strong mind, and a strong body, the fellow to it. He had a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom— you can almost hear it throb. Some one said, that if you had shaken hands with him, his hand would have burnt yours. The Gods, indeed, “made him poetical”; but nature had a hand in him first. His heart was in the right place. He did not “create a soul under the ribs of death,” by tinkling siren
It has been usual to attack Burns’s moral character, and the moral tendency of his writings at the same time; and Mr. Wordsworth, in a letter to Mr. Gray, Master of the High School at Edinburgh, in attempting to defend, has only laid him open to a more serious and unheard-of responsibility. Mr. Gray might very well have sent him back, in return for his epistle, the answer of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost:—“Via goodman Dull, thou hast spoken no word all this while.” The author of this performance, which is as weak in effect as it is pompous in pretension, shews a great dislike of Robespierre, Buonaparte, and of Mr. Jeffrey, whom he, by some unaccountable fatality, classes together as the three most formidable enemies of the human race that have appeared in his (Mr. Wordsworth’s) remembrance; but he betrays very little liking to Burns. He is, indeed, anxious to get him out of the unhallowed clutches of the Edinburgh Reviewers (as a mere matter of poetical privilege), only to bring him before a graver and higher tribunal, which is his own; and after repeating and insinuating ponderous
“The landlady
and Tam grew gracious,
Wi’ favours
secret, sweet, and precious";—
or,
“Care, mad
to see a man so happy,
E’en drown’d
himself among the nappy";—
and fairly confessed that he could not have written such lines from a want of proper habits and previous sympathy; and that till some great puritanical genius should arise to do these things equally well without any knowledge of them, the world might forgive Burns the injuries he had done his health and fortune in his poetical apprenticeship to experience, for the pleasure he had afforded them. Instead of this, Mr. Wordsworth hints, that with different personal habits and greater strength of mind, Burns would have written differently, and almost as well as he does. He might have taken that line of Gay’s,
“The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets,”—
and applied it in all its force and pathos to the poetical character. He might have argued that poets are men of genius, and that a man of genius is not a machine; that they live in a state of intellectual intoxication, and that it is too much to expect them to be distinguished by peculiar sang froid, circumspection, and sobriety. Poets are by nature men of stronger imagination and keener sensibilities than others; and it is a contradiction to suppose them at the same time governed only by the cool, dry, calculating dictates of reason and foresight. Mr. Wordsworth might have ascertained the boundaries that part the provinces of reason and imagination:—that it is the business of the understanding to exhibit things in their relative proportions and ultimate consequences—of the imagination to insist on their immediate impressions, and to indulge their
Again, our philosophical letter-writer might have enlarged on the temptations to which Burns was exposed from his struggles with fortune and the uncertainty of his fate. He might have shewn how a poet, not born to wealth or title, was kept in a constant state of feverish anxiety with respect to his fame and the means of a precarious livelihood: that “from being chilled with poverty, steeped in contempt, he had passed into the sunshine of fortune, and was lifted to the very pinnacle of public favour”; yet even there could not count on the continuance of success, but was, “like the giddy sailor on the mast, ready with every blast to topple down into the fatal bowels of the deep!” He might have traced his habit of ale-house tippling to the last long precious draught of his favourite usquebaugh, which he took in the prospect of bidding farewel for ever to his native land; and his conjugal infidelities to his first disappointment in love, which would not have happened to him, if he had been born to a small estate in land, or bred up behind a counter!
Lastly, Mr. Wordsworth might have shewn the incompatibility between the Muses and the Excise, which never agreed well together, or met in one seat, till they were unaccountably reconciled on Rydal Mount. He must know (no man better) the distraction created by the opposite calls of business and of fancy, the torment of extents, the plague of receipts laid in order or mislaid, the disagreeableness of exacting penalties or paying the forfeiture; and how all this (together with the broaching of casks and the splashing of beer-barrels) must have preyed upon a mind like Burns, with more than his natural sensibility and none of his acquired firmness.
Mr. Coleridge, alluding to this circumstance of the promotion of the Scottish Bard to be “a gauger of ale-firkins,” in a poetical epistle to his friend Charles Lamb, calls upon him in a burst of heartfelt indignation, to gather a wreath of henbane, nettles, and nightshade,
“------To twine The illustrious brow of Scotch nobility.”
If, indeed, Mr. Lamb had undertaken to write a letter in defence of Burns, how different would it have been from this of Mr. Wordsworth’s! How much better than I can even imagine it to have been done!
It is hardly reasonable to look for a hearty or genuine defence of Burns from the pen of Mr. Wordsworth; for there is no common link of sympathy between them. Nothing can be more different or hostile than the spirit of their poetry. Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry is the poetry of mere sentiment and pensive contemplation: Burns’s is a very highly sublimated essence of animal existence. With Burns, “self-love and social are the same”—
“And we’ll
tak a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang
syne.”
Mr. Wordsworth is “himself alone,” a recluse philosopher, or a reluctant spectator of the scenes of many-coloured life; moralising on them, not describing, not entering into them. Robert Burns has exerted all the vigour of his mind, all the happiness of his nature, in exalting the pleasures of wine, of love, and good fellowship: but in Mr. Wordsworth there is a total disunion and divorce of the faculties of the mind from those of the body; the banns are forbid, or a separation is austerely pronounced from bed and board—a mensa et thoro. From the Lyrical Ballads, it does not appear that men eat or drink, marry or are given in marriage. If we lived by every sentiment that proceeded out of mouths, and not by bread or wine, or if the species were continued like trees (to borrow an expression from the great Sir Thomas Brown), Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry would be just as good as ever. It is not so with Burns: he is “famous for the keeping of it up,” and in his verse is ever fresh and gay. For this, it seems, he has fallen under the displeasure of the Edinburgh Reviewers, and the still more formidable patronage of Mr. Wordsworth’s pen.
“This, this was the unkindest cut of all.”
I was going to give some extracts out of this composition in support of what I have said, but I find them too tedious. Indeed (if I may be allowed to speak my whole mind, under correction) Mr. Wordsworth could not be in any way expected to tolerate or give a favourable interpretation to Burns’s constitutional foibles—even his best virtues are not good enough for him. He is repelled and driven back into himself, not less by the worth than by the faults of others. His taste is as exclusive and repugnant as his genius. It is because so few things give him pleasure, that he gives pleasure to so few people. It is not every one who can perceive the sublimity of a daisy, or the pathos to be extracted from a withered thorn!
To proceed from Burns’s patrons to his poetry, than which no two things can be more different. His “Twa Dogs” is a very spirited piece of description, both as it respects the animal and human creation, and conveys a very vivid idea of the manners both of high and low life. The burlesque panegyric of the first dog,
“His locked,
lettered, braw brass collar
Shew’d him
the gentleman and scholar”—
reminds one of Launce’s account of his dog Crabbe, where he is said, as an instance of his being in the way of promotion, “to have got among three or four gentleman-like dogs under the Duke’s table.” The “Halloween” is the most striking and picturesque description of local customs and scenery. The Brigs of Ayr, the Address to a Haggis, Scotch Drink, and innumerable others are, however, full of the same kind of characteristic and comic painting. But his master-piece in this way is his Tam o’Shanter. I shall give the beginning of it, but I am afraid I shall hardly know when to leave off.
“When
chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neebors,
neebors meet,
As market-days
are wearing late,
And folk begin
to tak the gate;
While we sit bousing
at the nappy,
And getting fou
and unco happy,
We think na on
the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters,
slaps, and stiles,
That lie between
us and our hame,
Whare sits our
sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her
brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath
to keep it warm.
This
truth fand honest Tam o’Shanter,
As he frae Ayr
ae night did canter;
(Auld Ayr, wham
ne’er a town surpasses,
For honest men
and bonny lasses.)
O
Tam! hadst thou but been sae wise,
As ta’en
thy ain wife Kate’s advice!
She tauld thee
weel thou was a skellum,
A blethering,
blustering, drunken blellum;
That frae November
till October
Ae market-day
thou was na sober;
That ilka melder,
wi’ the miller,
Thou sat as lang
as thou had siller;
That ev’ry
naig was ca’d a shoe on,
The smith and
thee gat roaring fou on;
That at the Lord’s
house, ev’n on Sunday,
Thou drank wi’
Kirton Jean till Monday—
She prophesy’d,
that late or soon,
Thou wad be found
deep drown’d in Doon;
Or catch’t
wi’ warlocks in the mirk,
By Alloway’s
auld haunted kirk.
Ah,
gentle dames! it gars me greet,
To think how mony
counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen’d,
sage advices,
The husband frae
the wife despises!
But
to our tale: Ae market night,
Tam had got planted
unco right
Fast by an ingle,
bleezing finely,
Wi’ reaming
swats, that drank divinely;
And at his elbow,
Souter Johnny,
His ancient, trusty,
drouthy crony;
Tam lo’ed
him like a vera brither;
They had been
fou for weeks thegither.
The night drave
on wi’ sangs an clatter,
And aye the ale
was growing better:
The landlady and
Tam grew gracious
Wi’ favours
secret, sweet, and precious:
The Souter tauld
his queerest stories;
The landlord’s
laugh was ready chorus:
The storm without
might rair and rustle,
Tam did na mind
the storm a whistle.
Care,
mad to see a man sae happy,
E’en drown’d
himsel amang the nappy;
As bees flee hame
wi’ lades o’ treasure,
The minutes wing’d
their way wi’ pleasure:
Kings may be blest,
but Tam was glorious,
O’er a’
the ills of life victorious!
But
pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the
flow’r—its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow,
falls in the river,
A moment white—then
melts for ever;
Or like the Borealis
race,
That flit ere
you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s
lovely form,
Evanishing amid
the storm.—
Nae man can tether
time or tide,
The hour approaches,
Tam maun ride;
That hour o’
night’s black arch the key-stane,
That dreary hour
he mounts his beast in,
And sic a night
he taks the road in,
As ne’er
poor sinner was abroad in.
The
wind blew as ’twad blawn its last;
The rattling showers
rose on the blast,
The speedy gleams
the darkness swallow’d,
Loud, deep, and
lang, the thunder bellow’d:
That night a child
might understand,
The Deil had business
on his hand.
Weel
mounted on his grey mare, Meg,
A better never
lifted leg,
Tam skelpit on
thro’ dub and mire,
Despising wind,
and rain, and fire;
Whiles haulding
fast his gude blue bonnet;
Whiles crooning
o’er some auld Scots sonnet;
Whiles glowring
round wi’ prudent cares,
Lest bogles catch
him unawares;
Kirk-Alloway was
drawing nigh,
Whare ghaists
and houlets nightly cry.—
By
this time Tam was cross the ford,
Whare in the snaw,
the chapman smoor’d;
And past the birks
and meikle stane,
Whare drunken
Charlie brak’s neck-bane;
And thro’
the whins, and by the cairn,
Where hunters
fand the murder’d bairn;
And near the thorn,
aboon the well,
Whare Mungo’s
mither hang’d hersel.—
Before him Doon
pours all his floods;
The doubling storm
roars thro’ the woods;
The lightnings
flash from pole to pole;
Near and more
near the thunders roll:
Whan, glimmering
thro’ the groaning trees,
Kirk-Alloway seem’d
in a bleeze;
Thro’ ilka
bore the beams were glancing;
And loud resounded
mirth and dancing.
Inspiring
bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou
canst make us scorn!
Wi’ Tippenny,
we fear nae evil,
Wi’ Usqueba,
we’ll face the devil!
The swats sae
ream’d in Tammie’s noddle,
Fair play, he
car’d na de’ils a boddle.
But Maggie stood
right sair astonish’d,
Till by the heel
and hand admonish’d,
She ventur’d
forward on the light,
And, vow!
Tam saw an unco sight!
As
Tammie glowr’d amaz’d, and curious,
The mirth and
fun grew fast and furious:
The Piper loud
and louder blew;
The dancers quick
and quicker flew;
They reel’d,
they set, they cross’d, they cleekit,
Till ilka Carlin
swat and reekit,
And coost her
duddies to the wark,
And linket at
it in her sark!
Now
Tam, O Tam! had they been queans
A’ plump
and strapping in their teens;
Their sarks, instead
o’ creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white
seventeen hundred linen!
Thir breeks o’
mine, my only pair,
That ance were
plush, o’ guid blue hair,
I wad hae gi’en
them aff my hurdies,
For ae blink o’
the bonnie burdies!
But
wither’d beldams, auld and droll,
Rigwoodie hags
wad spean a foal,
Louping and flinging
on a crummock,
I wonder did na
turn thy stomach.
But
Tam ken’d what was what fu’ brawly,
There was ae winsome
wench and waly,
That night enlisted
in the core,
(Lang after ken’d
on Carrick shore;
For mony a beast
to dead she shot,
And perish’d
mony a bonnie boat,
And shook baith
meikle corn and bear,
And kept the country-side
in fear—)
Her cutty sark
o’ Paisley harn,
That while a lassie
she had worn,
In longitude tho’
sorely scanty,
It was her best,
and she was vaunty.—
Ah! little ken’d
thy reverend grannie,
That sark she
coft for her wee Nannie,
Wi’ twa
pund Scots (’twas a’ her riches),
Wad ever grac’d
a dance of witches!
But
here my Muse her wing maun cour;
Sic flights are
far beyond her power:
To sing how Nannie
lap and flang,
(A souple jade
she was, and strang)
And how Tam stood
like ane bewitch’d,
And thought his
very een enrich’d;
Ev’n Satan
glowr’d and fidg’d fu’ fain,
And hotch’t,
and blew wi’ might and main;
Till first ae
caper, syne anither,
Tam tint his reason
a’ thegither,
And roars out,
“Weel done, Cutty Sark!”
And in an instant
all was dark;
And scarcely had
he Maggie rallied,
When out the hellish
legion sallied.
As
bees biz out wi’ angry fyke
When plundering
herds assail their byke;
As open pussie’s
mortal foes,
When, pop! she
starts before their nose;
As eager rins
the market-crowd,
When “Catch
the thief!” resounds aloud;
So Maggie rins—the
witches follow,
Wi’ mony
an eldritch skreech and hollow,
Ah,
Tam! ah, Tam! thou ‘ll get thy fairin’!
In hell they’ll
roast thee like a herrin’!
In vain thy Kate
awaits thy comin’!
Kate soon will
be a waefu’ woman!
Now, do thy speedy
utmost, Meg,
And win the key-stane
o’ the brig;
There, at them
thou thy tail may toss,
A running stream
they dare na cross;
But ere the key-stane
she could make,
The fient a tail
she had to shake!
For Nannie, far
before the rest,
Hard upon noble
Maggie prest,
And flew at Tam
wi’ furious ettle;
But little wist
she Maggie’s mettle—
Ae spring brought
off her master hale,
But left behind,
her ain grey tail:
The Carlin claught
her by the rump,
And left poor
Maggie scarce a stump.
Now,
wha this tale o’ truth shall read,
Ilk man and mother’s
son tak heed:
Whane’er
to drink you are inclin’d,
Or Cutty Sarks
rin in your mind,
Think, ye may
buy the joys owre dear;
Remember Tam o’
Shanter’s mare.”
Burns has given the extremes of licentious eccentricity and convivial enjoyment, in the story of this scape-grace, and of patriarchal simplicity and gravity in describing the old national character of the Scottish peasantry. The Cotter’s Saturday Night is a noble and pathetic picture of human manners, mingled with a fine religious awe. It comes over the mind like a slow and solemn strain of music. The soul of the poet aspires from this scene of low-thoughted care, and reposes, in trembling hope, on “the bosom of its Father and its God.” Hardly any thing can be more touching than the following stanzas, for instance, whether as they describe human interests, or breathe a lofty devotional spirit.
“The toil-worn
Cotter frae his labour goes,
This
night his weekly moil is at an end,
Collects his spades,
his mattocks, and his hoes,
Hoping
the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o’er
the moor, his course does hameward bend.
At length his
lonely cot appears in view,
Beneath
the shelter of an aged tree;
Th’ expectant
wee-things, toddlin, stacher through
To
meet their dad, wi’ flichterin noise and glee.
His wee-bit ingle,
blinkin bonilie,
His
clean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie’s smile,
The lisping infant,
prattling on his knee,
Does
a’ his weary carking cares beguile,
And makes him
quite forget his labour and his toil.
Belyve, the elder
bairns come drapping in,
At
service out, amang the farmers roun’,
Some ca’
the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin
A
cannie errand to a neebor town;
Their eldest hope,
their Jenny, woman-grown,
In
youthfu’ bloom, love sparkling in her e’e,
Comes hame, perhaps,
to shew a braw new gown,
Or
deposit her sair-won penny-fee,
To help her parents
dear, if they in hardship be.
Wi’ joy
unfeign’d, brothers and sisters meet,
An’
each for other’s welfare kindly spiers;
The social hours,
swift-winged, unnotic’d fleet;
Each
tells the uncos that he sees or hears:
The parents, partial,
eye their hopeful years;
Anticipation
forward points the view;
The mither, wi’
her needle an’ her shears,
Gars
auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new;
The father mixes
a’ wi’ admonition due.
* * * * * * *
But, hark! a rap
comes gently to the door;
Jenny,
wha kens the meaning o’ the same,
Tells how a neebor
lad cam o’er the moor,
To
do some errands, and convoy her hame.
The wily mother
sees the conscious flame
Sparkle
in Jenny’s e’e, and flush her cheek;
With heart-struck,
anxious care, inquires his name,
While
Jenny hafflins is afraid to speak;
Weel pleas’d
the mother hears it’s nae wild, worthless rake.
Wi’ kindly
welcome, Jenny brings him ben;
A
strappan youth; he taks the mother’s eye;
Blithe Jenny sees
the visit’s no ill ta’en;
The
father craks of horses, pleughs, and kye.
The youngster’s
artless heart o’erflows wi’ joy,
But
blate an’ laithfu’, scarce can weel behave;
The mother, wi’
a woman’s wiles, can spy
What
makes the youth sae bashfu’ an’ sae grave;
Weel-pleas’d
to think her bairn’s respected like the lave.
But now the supper
crowns their simple board,
The
halesome parritch, chief o’ Scotia’s food:
The soupe their
only hawkie does afford,
That
’yont the hallan snugly chows her cood:
The dame brings
forth, in complimental mood,
To
grace the lad, her weel-hain’d kebbuck, fell,
An’ aft
he’s prest, an’ aft he ca’s it guid;
The
frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell,
How ‘twas
a towmond auld, sin’ lint was i’ the bell.
The cheerfu’
supper done, wi’ serious face,
They,
round the ingle, form a circle wide;
The sire turns
o’er, with patriarchal grace,
The
big ha’-Bible, ance his father’s pride:
His bonnet rev’rently
is laid aside,
His
lyart haffets wearing thin an’ bare;
Those strains
that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He
wales a portion wi’ judicious care;
And “Let
us worship God!” he says, with solemn air.
They chant their
artless notes in simple guise;
They
tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim:
Perhaps Dundee’s
wild-warbling measures rise,
Or
plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name;
Or noble Elgin
beets the heav’n-ward flame,
The
sweetest far of Scotia’s holy lays:
Compar’d
with these, Italian trills are tame;
The
tickled ears no heart-felt raptures raise;
Nae unison hae
they with our Creator’s praise.”—
Burns’s poetical epistles to his friends are admirable, whether for the touches of satire, the painting of character, or the sincerity of friendship they display. Those to Captain Grose, and to Davie, a brother poet, are among the best:—they are “the true pathos and sublime of human life.” His prose-letters are sometimes tinctured with affectation. They seem written by a man who has been admired for his wit, and is expected on all occasions to shine. Those in which he expresses his ideas of natural beauty in reference to Alison’s Essay on Taste, and advocates the keeping up the remembrances of old customs and seasons, are the most powerfully written. His English serious odes and moral stanzas are, in general, failures, such as The Lament, Man was made to Mourn, &c. nor do I much admire his “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled.” In this strain of didactic or sentimental moralising, the lines to Glencairn are the most happy, and impressive. His imitations of the old humorous ballad style of Ferguson’s songs are no whit inferior to the admirable originals, such as “John Anderson, my Joe,” and many more. But of all his productions, the pathetic and serious love-songs which he has left behind him, in the manner of the old ballads, are perhaps those which take the deepest and most lasting hold of the mind. Such are the lines to Mary Morison, and those entitled Jessy.
“Here’s
a health to ane I lo’e dear—
Here’s a
health to ane I lo’e dear—
Thou art sweet
as the smile when fond lovers meet,
And
soft as their parting tear—Jessy!
Altho’ thou
maun never be mine,
Altho’
even hope is denied;
’Tis sweeter
for thee despairing,
Than
aught in the world beside—Jessy!”
The conclusion of the other is as follows.
“Yestreen,
when to the trembling string
The
dance gaed through the lighted ha’,
To thee my fancy
took its wing,
I
sat, but neither heard nor saw.
Tho’ this
was fair, and that was bra’,
And
yon the toast of a’ the town,
I sighed and said
among them a’,
Ye
are na’ Mary Morison.”
That beginning, “Oh gin my love were a bonny red rose,” is a piece of rich and fantastic description. One would think that nothing could surpass these in beauty of expression, and in true pathos: and nothing does or can, but some of the old Scotch ballads themselves. There is in them a still more original cast of thought, a more romantic imagery— the thistle’s glittering down, the gilliflower on the old garden-wall, the horseman’s silver bells, the hawk on its perch—a closer intimacy with nature, a firmer reliance on it, as the only stock of wealth which the mind has to resort to, a more infantine simplicity of manners, a greater strength of affection, hopes longer cherished and longer deferred, sighs that the heart dare hardly heave, and “thoughts that often lie too deep for tears.” We seem to feel that those who wrote and sung them (the early minstrels) lived in the open air, wandering on from place to place with restless feet and thoughts, and lending an ever-open ear to the fearful accidents of war or love, floating on the breath of old tradition or common fame, and moving the strings of their harp with sounds that sank into a nation’s heart. How fine an illustration of this is that passage in Don Quixote, where the knight and Sancho, going in search of Dulcinea, inquire their way of the countryman, who was driving his mules to plough before break of day, “singing the ancient ballad of Roncesvalles.” Sir Thomas Overbury describes his country girl as still accompanied with fragments of old songs. One of the best and most striking descriptions of the effects of this mixture of national poetry and music is to be found in one of the letters of Archbishop Herring, giving an account of a confirmation-tour in the mountains of Wales.
“That pleasure over, our work became very arduous, for we were to mount a rock, and in many places of the road, over natural stairs of stone. I submitted to this, which they told me was but a taste of the country, and to prepare me for worse things to come. However, worse things did not come that morning, for we dined soon after out of our own wallets; and though our inn stood in a place of the most frightful solitude, and the best formed for the habitation of monks (who once possessed it) in the world, yet we made a cheerful meal. The novelty of the thing gave me spirits, and the air gave me appetite much keener than the knife I ate with. We had our music too; for there came in a harper, who soon drew about us a group of figures that Hogarth would have given any price for. The harper was in his true place and attitude; a man and woman stood
I could wish that Mr. Wilkie had been recommended to take this group as the subject of his admirable pencil; he has painted a picture of Bathsheba, instead.
In speaking of the old Scotch ballads, I need do no more than mention the name of Auld Robin Gray. The effect of reading this old ballad is as if all our hopes and fears hung upon the last fibre of the heart, and we felt that giving way. What silence, what loneliness, what leisure for grief and despair!
“My father
pressed me sair,
Though
my mother did na’ speak;
But she looked
in my face
Till
my heart was like to break.”
The irksomeness of the situations, the sense of painful dependence, is excessive; and yet the sentiment of deep-rooted, patient affection triumphs over all, and is the only impression that remains. Lady Ann Bothwell’s Lament is not, I think, quite equal to the lines beginning—
“O waly,
waly, up the bank,
And
waly, waly, down the brae,
And waly, waly,
yon burn side,
Where
I and my love wont to gae.
I leant my back
unto an aik,
I
thought it was a trusty tree;
But first it bow’d,
and syne it brak,
Sae
my true-love’s forsaken me.
O waly, waly,
love is bonny,
A
little time while it is new;
But when its auld,
it waxeth cauld,
And
fades awa’ like the morning dew.
When cockle-shells
turn siller bells,
And
muscles grow on every tree,
Whan frost and
snaw sall warm us aw,
Then
sall my love prove true to me.
Now Arthur seat
sall be my bed,
The
sheets sall ne’er be fyld by me:
Saint Anton’s
well sall be my drink,
Since
my true-love’s forsaken me.
Martinmas wind,
when wilt thou blaw,
And
shake the green leaves aff the tree?
O gentle death,
whan wilt thou cum,
And
tak’ a life that wearies me!
’Tis not
the frost that freezes sae,
Nor
blawing snaw’s inclemencie,
’Tis not
sic cauld, that makes me cry,
But
my love’s heart grown cauld to me.
Whan we came in
by Glasgow town,
We
were a comely sight to see,
My love was clad
in black velvet,
And
I myself in cramasie.
But had I wist
before I kist,
That
love had been sae hard to win;
I’d lockt
my heart in case of gowd,
And
pinn’d it with a siller pin.
And oh! if my
poor babe were born,
And
set upon the nurse’s knee,
And I mysel in
the cold grave!
Since
my true-love ’s forsaken me.”
The finest modern imitation of this style is the Braes of Yarrow; and perhaps the finest subject for a story of the same kind in any modern book, is that told in Turner’s History of England, of a Mahometan woman, who having fallen in love with an English merchant, the father of Thomas a Becket, followed him all the way to England, knowing only the word London, and the name of her lover, Gilbert.
But to have done with this, which is rather too serious a subject.— The old English ballads are of a gayer and more lively turn. They are adventurous and romantic; but they relate chiefly to good living and good fellowship, to drinking and hunting scenes. Robin Hood is the chief of these, and he still, in imagination, haunts Sherwood Forest. The archers green glimmer under the waving branches; the print on the grass remains where they have just finished their noon-tide meal under the green-wood tree; and the echo of their bugle-horn and twanging bows resounds through the tangled mazes of the forest, as the tall slim deer glances startled by.
“The trees
in Sherwood Forest are old and good;
The
grass beneath them now is dimly green:
Are
they deserted all? Is no young mien,
With loose-slung
bugle, met within the wood?
No arrow found—foil’d
of its antler’d food—
Struck
in the oak’s rude side?—Is there nought
seen
To
mark the revelries which there have been,
In the sweet days
of merry Robin Hood?
Go there with
summer, and with evening—go
In
the soft shadows, like some wand’ring man—
And
thou shalt far amid the forest know
The archer-men
in green, with belt and bow,
Feasting
on pheasant, river-fowl, and swan,
With
Robin at their head, and Marian.” [9]
___ [9] Sonnet on Sherwood Forest, by J.H. Reynolds, Esq. ___
LECTURE VIII. ON THE LIVING POETS.
“No more
of talk where God or Angel guest
With man, as with
his friend, familiar us’d
To sit indulgent.”------
Genius is the heir of fame; but the hard condition on which the bright reversion must be earned is the loss of life. Fame is the recompense not of the living, but of the dead. The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men. Fame itself is immortal, but it is not begot till the breath of genius is extinguished. For fame is not popularity, the shout of the multitude, the
Those minds, then, which are the most entitled to expect it, can best put up with the postponement of their claims to lasting fame. They can afford to wait. They are not afraid that truth and nature will ever wear out; will lose their gloss with novelty, or their effect with fashion. If their works have the seeds of immortality in them, they will live; if they have not, they care little about them as theirs. They do not complain of the start which others have got of them in the race of everlasting renown, or of the impossibility of attaining the honours which time alone can give, during the term of their natural lives. They know that no applause, however loud and violent, can anticipate or over-rule the judgment of posterity; that the opinion of no one individual, nor of any one generation, can have the weight, the authority (to say nothing of the force of sympathy and prejudice), which must belong to that of successive generations. The brightest living reputation cannot be equally imposing to the imagination, with that which is covered and rendered venerable with the hoar of innumerable ages. No modern production can have the same atmosphere of sentiment around it, as the remains of classical antiquity. But then our moderns may console themselves with the reflection, that they will be old in their turn, and will either be remembered with still increasing honours, or quite forgotten!
I would speak of the living poets as I have spoken of the dead (for I think highly of many of them); but I cannot speak of them with the same reverence, because I do not feel it; with the same confidence, because I cannot have the same authority to sanction my opinion. I cannot be absolutely certain that any body, twenty years hence, will think any thing about any of them; but we may be pretty sure that Milton and Shakspeare will be remembered twenty years hence. We are, therefore, not without excuse if we husband our enthusiasm a little, and do not prematurely lay out our whole stock in untried ventures, and what may turn out to be false bottoms. I have myself out-lived one generation of favourite poets, the Darwins, the Hayleys, the Sewards. Who reads them now?—If, however, I have not the verdict of posterity to bear me out in bestowing the most unqualified praises on their immediate successors, it is also to be remembered, that neither does it warrant me in condemning them. Indeed, it was not my wish to go into this ungrateful part of the subject; but something of the sort is expected
I am a great admirer of the female writers of the present day; they appear to me like so many modern Muses. I could be in love with Mrs. Inchbald, romantic with Mrs. Radcliffe, and sarcastic with Madame D’Arblay: but they are novel-writers, and, like Audrey, may “thank the Gods for not having made them poetical.” Did any one here ever read Mrs. Leicester’s School? If they have not, I wish they would; there will be just time before the next three volumes of the Tales of My Landlord come out. That is not a school of affectation, but of humanity. No one can think too highly of the work, or highly enough of the author.
The first poetess I can recollect is Mrs. Barbauld, with whose works I became acquainted before those of any other author, male or female, when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her story-books for children. I became acquainted with her poetical works long after in Enfield’s Speaker; and remember being much divided in my opinion at that time, between her Ode to Spring and Collins’s Ode to Evening.
Mrs. Hannah More is another celebrated modern poetess, and I believe still living. She has written a great deal which I have never read.
Miss Baillie must make up this trio of female poets. Her tragedies and comedies, one of each to illustrate each of the passions, separately from the rest, are heresies in the dramatic art. She is a Unitarian in poetry. With her the passions are, like the French republic, one and indivisible: they are not so in nature, or in Shakspeare. Mr. Southey has, I believe, somewhere expressed an opinion, that the Basil of Miss Baillie is superior to Romeo and Juliet. I shall not stay to contradict him. On the other hand, I prefer her De Montfort, which was condemned on the stage, to some later tragedies, which have been more fortunate—to the Remorse, Bertram, and lastly, Fazio. There is in the chief character of that play a nerve, a continued unity of interest, a setness of purpose and precision of outline which John Kemble alone was capable of giving; and there is all the grace which women have in writing. In saying that De Montfort was a character which just suited Mr. Kemble, I mean to pay a compliment to both. He was not “a man of no mark or likelihood”: and what he could be supposed to do particularly well, must have a meaning in it. As to the other tragedies just mentioned, there is no reason why any common actor should not “make mouths in them at the invisible event,”—one as well as another. Having thus expressed my sense of the merits of this authoress, I must add, that her comedy of the Election, performed last summer at the Lyceum with indifferent success, appears to me the perfection of baby-house theatricals. Every thing in it has such a do-me-good air, is so insipid and amiable. Virtue seems such a pretty playing at make-believe, and vice is such a naughty word. It is a theory of some French author, that little girls ought not to be suffered to have dolls to play with, to call them pretty dears, to admire their black eyes and cherry cheeks, to lament and bewail over them if they fall down and hurt their faces, to praise them when they are good, and scold them when they are naughty. It is a school of affectation: Miss Baillie has profited of it. She treats her grown men and women as little girls treat their dolls—makes moral puppets of them, pulls the wires, and they talk virtue and act vice, according to their cue and the title prefixed to each comedy or tragedy, not from any real passions of their own, or love either of virtue or vice.
The transition from these to Mr. Rogers’s Pleasures of Memory, is not far: he is a very lady-like poet. He is an elegant, but feeble writer. He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering cover of fine words; is full of enigmas with no meaning to them; is studiously inverted, and scrupulously far-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly because no particle, line, or syllable of them reads like prose. He differs from Milton in this respect, who is accused of having inserted a number of prosaic lines in Paradise Lost. This kind of poetry, which is a more minute and inoffensive species of the Della Cruscan, is like the game of asking what one’s thoughts are like. It is a tortuous, tottering, wriggling, fidgetty translation of every thing from the vulgar tongue, into all the tantalizing, teasing, tripping, lisping mimminee-pimminee of the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction. You have nothing like truth of nature or simplicity of expression. The fastidious and languid reader is never shocked by meeting, from the rarest chance in the world, with a single homely phrase or intelligible idea. You cannot see the thought for the ambiguity of the language, the figure for the finery, the picture for the varnish. The whole is refined, and frittered away into an appearance of the most evanescent brilliancy and tremulous imbecility.—There is no other fault to be found with the Pleasures of Memory, than a want of taste and genius. The sentiments are amiable, and the notes at the end highly interesting, particularly the one relating to the Countess Pillar (as it is called) between Appleby and Penrith, erected (as the inscription tells the thoughtful traveller) by Anne Countess of Pembroke, in the year 1648, in memory of her last parting with her good and pious mother in the same place in the year 1616—
“To shew
that power of love, how great
Beyond all human
estimate.”
This story is also told in the poem, but with so many artful innuendos and tinsel words, that it is hardly intelligible; and still less does it reach the heart.
Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope is of the same school, in which a painful attention is paid to the expression in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry. How much the sense and keeping in the ideas are sacrificed to a jingle of words and epigrammatic turn of expression, may be seen in such lines as the following:—one of the characters, an old invalid, wishes to end his days under
“Some hamlet
shade, to yield his sickly form
Health in the
breeze, and shelter in the storm.”
Now the antithesis here totally fails: for it is the breeze, and not the tree, or as it is quaintly expressed, hamlet shade, that affords health, though it is the tree that affords shelter in or from the storm. Instances of the same sort of curiosa infelicitas are not rare in this author. His verses on the Battle of Hohenlinden have considerable spirit and animation. His Gertrude of Wyoming is his principal performance. It is a kind of historical paraphrase of Mr. Wordsworth’s poem of Ruth. It shews little power, or power enervated by extreme fastidiousness. It is
“------Of outward show Elaborate; of inward less exact.”
There are painters who trust more to the setting of their pictures than to the truth of the likeness. Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on superfine wove paper, to have a disproportionate eye to points and commas, and dread of errors of the press. He is so afraid of doing wrong, of making the smallest mistake, that he does little or nothing. Lest he should wander irretrievably from the right path, he stands still. He writes according to established etiquette. He offers the Muses no violence. If he lights upon a good thought, he immediately drops it for fear of spoiling a good thing. When he launches a sentiment that you think will float him triumphantly for once to the bottom of the stanza, he stops short at the end of the first or second line, and stands shivering on the brink of beauty, afraid to trust himself to the fathomless abyss. Tutus nimium, timidusque procellarum. His very circumspection betrays him. The poet, as well as the woman, that deliberates, is undone. He is much like a man whose heart fails him just as he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks his neck by flinging himself out of it when it is too late. Mr. Campbell too often maims and mangles his ideas before they are full formed, to fit them to the Procustes’ bed of criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in the birth, lest they should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh Review. He plays the hypercritic on himself, and starves his genius to death from a needless apprehension of a plethora. No writer who thinks habitually of the critics, either to tremble at their censures or set them at defiance, can write well. It is the business of reviewers to watch poets, not of poets to watch reviewers.—There is one admirable simile in this poem, of the European child brought by the sooty Indian in his hand, “like morning brought by night.” The love-scenes in Gertrude of Wyoming breathe a balmy voluptuousness of sentiment; but they are generally broken off in the middle; they are like the scent of a bank of violets, faint and rich, which the gale suddenly conveys in a different direction. Mr. Campbell is careful of his own reputation, and economical of the pleasures of his readers. He treats them as the fox in the fable treated his guest the stork; or, to use his own expression, his fine things are
“Like angels’ visits, few, and far between.” [10]
There is another fault in this poem, which is the mechanical structure of the fable. The most striking events occur in the shape of antitheses. The story is cut into the form of a parallelogram. There is the same systematic alternation of good and evil, of violence and repose, that there is of light and shade in a picture. The Indian, who is the chief agent in the interest of the poem, vanishes and returns after long intervals, like the periodical
___ [10] There is the same idea in Blair’s Grave.
“------Its visits, Like those of angels, short, and far between.”
Mr. Campbell in altering the expression has spoiled it. “Few,” and “far between,” are the same thing. ___
Tom Moore is a poet of a quite different stamp. He is as heedless, gay, and prodigal of his poetical wealth, as the other is careful, reserved, and parsimonious. The genius of both is national. Mr. Moore’s Muse is another Ariel, as light, as tricksy, as indefatigable, and as humane a spirit. His fancy is for ever on the wing, flutters in the gale, glitters in the sun. Every thing lives, moves, and sparkles in his poetry, while over all love waves his purple light. His thoughts are as restless, as many, and as bright as the insects that people the sun’s beam. “So work the honey-bees,” extracting liquid sweets from opening buds; so the butterfly expands its wings to the idle air; so the thistle’s silver down is wafted over summer seas. An airy voyager on life’s stream, his mind inhales the fragrance of a thousand shores, and drinks of endless pleasures under halcyon skies. Wherever his footsteps tend over the enamelled ground of fairy fiction—
“Around
him the bees in play flutter and cluster,
And gaudy butterflies
frolic around.”
The fault of Mr. Moore is an exuberance of involuntary power. His facility of production lessens the effect of, and hangs as a dead weight upon, what he produces. His levity at last oppresses. The infinite delight he takes in such an infinite number of things, creates indifference in minds less susceptible of pleasure than his own. He exhausts attention by being inexhaustible. His variety cloys; his rapidity dazzles and distracts the sight. The graceful ease with which he lends himself to every subject, the genial spirit with which he indulges in every sentiment, prevents him from giving their full force to the masses of things, from connecting them into a whole. He wants intensity, strength,
Mr. Moore ought not to have written Lalla Rookh, even for three thousand guineas. His fame is worth more than that. He should have minded the advice of Fadladeen. It is not, however, a failure, so much as an evasion and a consequent disappointment of public expectation. He should have left it to others to break conventions with nations, and faith with the world. He should, at any rate, have kept his with the public. Lalla Rookh is not what people wanted to see whether Mr. Moore could do; namely, whether he could write a long epic poem. It is four short tales. The interest, however, is often high-wrought and tragic, but the execution still turns to the effeminate and voluptuous side. Fortitude of mind is the first requisite of a tragic or epic writer. Happiness of nature and felicity of genius are the pre-eminent characteristics of the bard of Erin. If he is not perfectly contented with what he is, all the world beside is. He had no temptation to risk any thing in adding to the love and admiration of his age, and more than one country.
“Therefore
to be possessed with double pomp,
To guard a title
that was rich before,
To gild refined
gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume
on the violet,
To smooth the
ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow,
or with taper light
To seek the beauteous
eye of heav’n to garnish,
Is wasteful and
ridiculous excess.”
The same might be said of Mr. Moore’s seeking to bind an epic crown, or the shadow of one, round his other laurels.
If Mr. Moore has not suffered enough personally, Lord Byron (judging from the tone of his writings) might be thought to have suffered too much to be a truly great poet. If Mr. Moore lays himself too open to all the various impulses of things, the outward shews of earth and sky, to every breath that blows, to every stray sentiment that crosses his fancy; Lord Byron shuts himself up too much in the impenetrable gloom of his own thoughts, and buries the natural light of things in “nook monastic.” The Giaour, the Corsair, Childe Harold, are all the same person, and they are apparently all himself. The everlasting repetition of one subject, the same dark ground of fiction, with the darker colours of the poet’s mind spread over it, the unceasing accumulation of horrors on horror’s head, steels the mind against the sense of pain, as inevitably as the unwearied Siren sounds and luxurious monotony of Mr. Moore’s poetry make it inaccessible to pleasure. Lord Byron’s poetry is as morbid as Mr. Moore’s is careless and dissipated. He has more depth of passion, more force and impetuosity, but the passion is always of the same unaccountable character, at once violent and sullen, fierce and gloomy. It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying upon itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things. There is nothing less poetical than this sort of unaccommodating selfishness. There is nothing more repulsive than this sort of ideal absorption of all the interests of others, of the good and ills of life, in the ruling passion and moody abstraction of a single mind, as if it would make itself the centre of the universe, and there was nothing worth cherishing but its intellectual diseases. It is like a cancer, eating into the heart of poetry. But still there is power; and power rivets attention and forces admiration. “He hath a demon:” and that is the next thing to being full of the God. His brow collects the scattered gloom: his eye flashes livid fire that withers and consumes. But still we watch the progress of the scathing bolt with interest, and mark the ruin it leaves behind with awe. Within the contracted range of his imagination, he has great unity and truth of keeping. He chooses elements and agents congenial to his mind, the dark and glittering ocean, the frail bark hurrying before the storm, pirates and men that “house on the wild sea with wild usages.” He gives the tumultuous eagerness of action, and the fixed despair of thought. In vigour of style and force of conception, he in one sense surpasses every writer of the present day. His indignant apothegms are like oracles of misanthropy. He who wishes for “a curse to kill with,” may find it in Lord Byron’s writings. Yet he has beauty lurking underneath his strength, tenderness sometimes joined with the phrenzy of despair. A flash of golden light sometimes follows from a stroke of his pencil, like a falling meteor. The flowers that adorn his poetry bloom over charnel-houses and the grave!
There is one subject on which Lord Byron is fond of writing, on which I wish he would not write—Buonaparte. Not that I quarrel with his writing for him, or against him, but with his writing both for him and against him. What right has he to do this? Buonaparte’s character, be it what else it may, does not change every hour according to his Lordship’s varying humour. He is not a pipe for Fortune’s finger, or for his Lordship’s Muse, to play what stop she pleases on. Why should Lord Byron now laud him to the skies in the hour of his success, and then peevishly wreak his disappointment on the God of his idolatry? The man he writes of does not rise or fall with circumstances: but “looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Besides, he is a subject for history, and not for poetry.
“Great princes’
favourites their fair leaves spread,
But
as the marigold at the sun’s eye,
And in themselves
their pride lies buried;
For
at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior,
famoused for fight,
After
a thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the book
of honour razed quite,
And
all the rest forgot for which he toil’d.”
If Lord Byron will write any thing more on this hazardous theme, let him take these lines of Shakspeare for his guide, and finish them in the spirit of the original—they will then be worthy of the subject.
Walter Scott is the most popular of all the poets of the present day, and deservedly so. He describes that which is most easily and generally understood with more vivacity and effect than any body else. He has no excellences, either of a lofty or recondite kind, which lie beyond the reach of the most ordinary capacity to find out; but he has all the good qualities which all the world agree to understand. His style is clear, flowing, and transparent: his sentiments, of which his style is an easy and natural medium, are common to him with his readers. He has none of Mr. Wordsworth’s idiosyncracy. He differs from his readers only in a greater range of knowledge and facility of expression. His poetry belongs to the class of improvisatori poetry. It has neither depth, height, nor breadth in it; neither uncommon strength, nor uncommon refinement of thought, sentiment, or language. It has no originality. But if this author has no research, no moving power in his own breast, he relies with the greater safety and success on the force of his subject. He selects a story such as is sure to please, full of incidents, characters, peculiar manners, costume, and scenery; and he tells it in a way that can offend no one. He never wearies or disappoints you. He is communicative and garrulous; but he is not his own hero. He never obtrudes himself on your notice to prevent your seeing the subject. What passes in the poem, passes much as it would have done in reality. The author has little or
Mr. Wordsworth is the most original poet now living. He is the reverse of Walter Scott in his defects and excellences. He has nearly all that the other wants, and wants all that the other possesses. His poetry is not external, but internal; it does not depend upon tradition, or story, or old song; he furnishes it from his own mind, and is his own subject. He is the poet of mere sentiment. Of many of the Lyrical Ballads, it is not possible to speak in terms of too high praise, such as Hart-leap Well, the Banks of the Wye, Poor Susan, parts of the Leech-gatherer, the lines to a Cuckoo, to a Daisy, the Complaint, several of the Sonnets, and a hundred others of inconceivable beauty, of perfect originality and pathos. They open a finer and deeper vein of thought and feeling than any poet in modern times has done, or attempted. He has produced a deeper impression, and on a smaller circle, than any other of his contemporaries. His powers have been mistaken by the age, nor does he exactly understand them himself. He cannot form a whole. He has not the constructive faculty. He can give only the fine tones of thought, drawn from his mind by accident or nature, like the sounds drawn from the AEolian harp by the wandering gale.—He is totally deficient in all the machinery of poetry. His Excursion, taken as a whole, notwithstanding the noble materials thrown away in it, is a proof of this. The line labours, the sentiment moves slow, but the poem stands stock-still. The reader makes no way from the first line to the last. It is more than any thing in the world like Robinson Crusoe’s boat, which would have been an excellent good boat, and would have carried him to the other side of the globe, but that he could not get it out of the sand where it stuck fast. I did what little I could to help to launch it at the time, but it would not do. I am not, however, one of those who laugh at the attempts or failures of men of genius. It is not my way to cry “Long life to the conqueror.” Success and desert are not with me synonymous terms; and the less Mr. Wordsworth’s general merits have been understood, the more necessary is it to insist upon them. This is not the place to repeat what I have already said on the subject. The reader may turn to it in the Round Table. I do not think, however, there is any thing in the larger poem equal to many of the detached pieces in the Lyrical Ballads. As Mr. Wordsworth’s poems have been little known to the public, or chiefly through garbled extracts from them, I will here give an entire poem (one that has always been a favourite with me), that the reader may know what it is that the admirers of this author find to be delighted with in his poetry. Those who do not feel the beauty and the force of it, may save themselves the trouble of inquiring farther.
HART-LEAP WELL.
The knight had
ridden down from Wensley moor
With
the slow motion of a summer’s cloud;
He turned aside
towards a vassal’s door,
And,
“Bring another horse!” he cried aloud.
“Another
horse!”—That shout the vassal heard,
And
saddled his best steed, a comely gray;
Sir Walter mounted
him; he was the third
Which
he had mounted on that glorious day.
Joy sparkled in
the prancing courser’s eyes:
The
horse and horseman are a happy pair;
But, though Sir
Walter like a falcon flies,
There
is a doleful silence in the air.
A rout this morning
left Sir Walter’s hall,
That
as they galloped made the echoes roar;
But horse and
man are vanished, one and all;
Such
race, I think, was never seen before.
Sir Walter, restless
as a veering wind,
Calls
to the few tired dogs that yet remain:
Brach, Swift,
and Music, noblest of their kind,
Follow,
and up the weary mountain strain.
The knight hallooed,
he chid and cheered them on
With
suppliant gestures and upbraidings stern;
But breath and
eye-sight fail; and, one by one,
The
dogs are stretched among the mountain fern.
Where is the throng,
the tumult of the race?
The
bugles that so joyfully were blown?
—This
chase it looks not like an earthly chase;
Sir
Walter and the hart are left alone.
The poor hart
toils along the mountain side;
I
will not stop to tell how far he fled,
Nor will I mention
by what death he died;
But
now the knight beholds him lying dead.
Dismounting then,
he leaned against a thorn;
He
had no follower, dog, nor man, nor boy:
He neither smacked
his whip, nor blew his horn,
But
gazed upon the spoil with silent joy.
Close to the thorn
on which Sir Walter leaned,
Stood
his dumb partner in this glorious act;
Weak as a lamb
the hour that it is yeaned;
And
foaming like a mountain cataract.
Upon his side
the hart was lying stretched:
His
nose half-touched a spring beneath a hill,
And with the last
deep groan his breath had fetched
The
waters of the spring were trembling still.
And now, too happy
for repose or rest,
(Was
never man in such a joyful case!)
Sir Walter walked
all round, north, south, and west,
And
gazed, and gazed upon that darling place.
And climbing up
the hill—(it was at least
Nine
roods of sheer ascent) Sir Walter found,
Three several
hoof-marks which the hunted beast
Had
left imprinted on the verdant ground.
Sir Walter wiped
his face and cried, “Till now
Such
sight was never seen by living eyes:
Three leaps have
borne him from this lofty brow,
Down
to the very fountain where he lies.
I’ll build
a pleasure-house upon this spot,
And
a small arbour, made for rural joy;
’Twill be
the traveller’s shed, the pilgrim’s cot,
A
place of love for damsels that are coy.
A cunning artist
will I have to frame
A
bason for that fountain in the dell;
And they, who
do make mention of the same
From
this day forth, shall call it HART-LEAP WELL.
And, gallant brute!
to make thy praises known,
Another
monument shall here be raised;
Three several
pillars, each a rough-hewn stone,
And
planted where thy hoofs the turf have grazed.
And, in the summer-time
when days are long,
I
will come hither with my paramour;
And with the dancers,
and the minstrel’s song,
We
will make merry in that pleasant bower.
Till the foundations
of the mountains fail,
My
mansion with its arbour shall endure;—
The joy of them
who till the fields of Swale,
And
them who dwell among the woods of Ure!”
Then home he went,
and left the hart, stone-dead,
With
breathless nostrils stretched above the spring.
—Soon
did the knight perform what he had said,
And
far and wide the fame thereof did ring.
Ere thrice the
moon into her port had steered,
A
cup of stone received the living well;
Three pillars
of rude stone Sir Walter reared,
And
built a house of pleasure in the dell.
And near the fountain,
flowers of stature tall
With
trailing plants and trees were intertwined,—
Which soon composed
a little sylvan hall,
A
leafy shelter from the sun and wind.
And thither, when
the summer-days were long,
Sir
Walter journeyed with his paramour;
And with the dancers
and the minstrel’s song
Made
merriment within that pleasant bower.
The knight, Sir
Walter, died in course of time,
And
his bones lie in his paternal vale.—
But there is matter
for a second rhyme,
And
I to this would add another tale.”
“The moving
accident is not my trade:
To
freeze the blood I have no ready arts:
’Tis my
delight, alone in summer shade,
To
pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.
As I from Hawes
to Richmond did repair,
It
chanced that I saw standing in a dell
Three aspens at
three corners of a square,
And
one, not four yards distant, near a well.
What this imported
I could ill divine:
And,
pulling now the rein my horse to stop,
I saw three pillars
standing in a line,
The
last stone pillar on a dark hill-top.
The trees were
gray, with neither arms nor head;
Half-wasted
the square mound of tawny green;
So that you just
might say, as then I said,
“Here
in old time the hand of man hath been.”
I looked upon
the hill both far and near,
More
doleful place did never eye survey;
It seemed as if
the spring-time came not here,
And
Nature here were willing to decay.
I stood in various
thoughts and fancies lost,
When
one, who was in shepherd’s garb attired,
Came up the hollow:—Him
did I accost,
And
what this place might be I then inquired.
The shepherd stopped,
and that same story told
Which
in my former rhyme I have rehearsed.
“A jolly
place,” said he, “in times of old!
But
something ails it now; the spot is curst.
You see these
lifeless stumps of aspen wood—
Some
say that they are beeches, others elms—
These were the
bower; and here a mansion stood,
The
finest palace of a hundred realms!
The arbour does
its own condition tell;
You
see the stones, the fountain, and the stream;
But as to the
great lodge! you might as well
Hunt
half a day for a forgotten dream.
There’s
neither dog nor heifer, horse nor sheep,
Will
wet his lips within that cup of stone;
And oftentimes,
when all are fast asleep,
This
water doth send forth a dolorous groan.
Some say that
here a murder has been done,
And
blood cries out for blood: but, for my part,
I’ve guessed,
when I’ve been sitting in the sun,
That
it was all for that unhappy hart.
What thoughts
must through the creature’s brain have passed!
Even
from the top-most stone, upon the steep,
Are but three
bounds—and look, Sir, at this last—
—O
Master! it has been a cruel leap.
For thirteen hours
he ran a desperate race;
And
in my simple mind we cannot tell
What cause the
hart might have to love this place,
And
come and make his death-bed near the well.
Here on the grass
perhaps asleep he sank,
Lulled
by this fountain in the summer-tide;
This water was
perhaps the first he drank
When
he had wandered from his mother’s side.
In April here
beneath the scented thorn
He
heard the birds their morning carols sing;
And he, perhaps,
for aught we know, was born
Not
half a furlong from that self-same spring.
But now here’s
neither grass nor pleasant shade;
The
sun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be,
as I have often said,
Till
trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.”
“Gray-headed
Shepherd, thou hast spoken well;
Small
difference lies between thy creed and mine:
This beast not
unobserved by Nature fell;
His
death was mourned by sympathy divine.
The Being, that
is in the clouds and air,
That
is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep,
and reverential care
For
the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
The pleasure-house
is dust:—behind, before,
This
is no common waste, no common gloom;
But Nature, in
due course of time, once more
Shall
here put on her beauty and her bloom.
She leaves these
objects to a slow decay,
That
what we are, and have been, may be known;
But at the coming
of the milder day,
These
monuments shall all be overgrown.
One lesson, Shepherd,
let us two divide,
Taught
both by what she shews, and what conceals,
Never to blend
our pleasure or our pride
With
sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”
Mr. Wordsworth is at the head of that which has been denominated the Lake school of poetry; a school which, with all my respect for it, I do not think sacred from criticism or exempt from faults, of some of which faults I shall speak with becoming frankness; for I do not see that the liberty of the press ought to be shackled, or freedom of speech curtailed, to screen either its revolutionary or renegado extravagances. This school of poetry had its origin in the French revolution, or rather in those sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution; and which sentiments and opinions were indirectly imported into this country in translations from the German about that period. Our poetical literature had, towards the close of the last century, degenerated into the most trite, insipid, and mechanical of all things, in the hands of the followers of Pope and the old French school of poetry. It wanted something to stir it up, and it found that some thing in the principles and events of the French revolution. From the impulse it thus received, it rose at once from the most servile imitation and tamest common-place, to the utmost pitch of singularity and paradox. The change in the belles-lettres was as complete, and to many persons as startling, as the change in politics, with which it went hand in hand. There was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that was established was to be tolerated. All the common-place figures of poetry, tropes, allegories, personifications, with the whole heathen mythology, were instantly discarded; a classical allusion was considered as a piece of antiquated foppery; capital letters were no more allowed in print, than letters-patent of nobility were permitted in real life; kings and queens were dethroned from their rank and station in legitimate tragedy or epic poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere; rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular metre was abolished along with regular government.
“When Adam
delved, and Eve span,
Where was then
the gentleman?”
(—or the poet laureat either, we may ask?)—In Mr. Coleridge’s Ode to an Ass’s Foal, in his Lines to Sarah, his Religious Musings; and in his and Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, passim.
Of Mr. Southey’s larger epics, I have but a faint recollection at this distance of time, but all that I remember of them is mechanical and extravagant, heavy and superficial. His affected, disjointed style is well imitated in the Rejected Addresses. The difference between him and Sir Richard Blackmore seems to be, that the one is heavy and the other light, the one solemn and the other pragmatical, the one phlegmatic and the other flippant; and that there is no Gay in the present time to give a Catalogue Raisonne of the performances of the living undertaker of epics. Kehama is a loose sprawling figure, such as we see cut out of wood or paper, and pulled or jerked with wire or thread, to make sudden and surprising motions, without meaning, grace, or nature in them. By far the best of his works are some of his shorter personal compositions, in which there is an ironical mixture of the quaint and serious, such as his lines on a picture of Gaspar Poussin, the fine tale of Gualberto, his Description of a Pig, and the Holly-tree, which is an affecting, beautiful, and modest retrospect on his own character. May the aspiration with which it concludes be fulfilled! [11]—But the little he has done of true and sterling excellence, is overloaded by the quantity of indifferent matter which he turns out every year, “prosing or versing,” with equally mechanical and irresistible facility. His Essays, or political and moral disquisitions, are not so full of original matter as Montaigne’s. They are second or third rate compositions in that class.
___ [11] “O reader! hast thou ever stood to see The Holly Tree? The eye that contemplates it well perceives Its glossy leaves, Ordered by an intelligence so wise As might confound the Atheist’s sophistries.
Below, a circling fence, its
leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;
But as they grow where nothing is to fear,
Smooth and unarm’d the pointless leaves
appear.
I love to view these things with
curious eyes,
And moralize;
And in the wisdom of the Holly Tree
Can emblems see
Wherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme,
Such as may profit in the after time.
So, though abroad perchance I
might appear
Harsh and austere,
To those who on my leisure would intrude
Reserved and rude,
Gentle at home amid my friends I’d be,
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.
And should my youth, as youth
is apt I know,
Some harshness show,
All vain asperities I day by day
Would wear away,
Till the smooth temper of my age should be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.
And as when all the summer trees
are seen
So bright and green,
The Holly leaves their fadeless hues display
Less bright than they,
But when the bare and wintry woods we see,
What then so cheerful as the Holly Tree?
So serious should my youth appear
among
The thoughtless throng,
So would I seem amid the young and gay
More grave than they,
That in my age as cheerful I might be
As the green winter of the Holly Tree.”—
___
It remains that I should say a few words of Mr. Coleridge; and there is no one who has a better right to say what he thinks of him than I have. “Is there here any dear friend of Caesar? To him I say, that Brutus’s love to Caesar was no less than his.” But no matter.—His Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the only one that I could point out to any one as giving an adequate idea of his great natural powers. It is high German, however, and in it he seems to “conceive of poetry but as a drunken dream, reckless, careless, and heedless, of past, present, and to come.” His tragedies (for he has written two) are not answerable to it; they are, except a few poetical passages, drawling sentiment and metaphysical jargon. He has no genuine dramatic talent. There is one fine passage in his Christobel, that which contains the description of the quarrel between Sir Leoline and Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, who had been friends in youth.
“Alas!
they had been friends in youth,
But whispering
tongues can poison truth;
And constancy
lives in realms above;
And life is thorny;
and youth is vain;
And to be wroth
with one we love,
Doth work like
madness in the brain:
And thus it chanc’d
as I divine,
With Roland and
Sir Leoline.
Each spake words
of high disdain
And insult to
his heart’s best brother,
And parted ne’er
to meet again!
But neither ever
found another
To free the hollow
heart from paining—
They
stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which
had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now
flows between,
But neither heat,
nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do
away I ween
The marks of that
which once hath been.
Sir
Leoline a moment’s space
Stood gazing on
the damsel’s face;
And the youthful
lord of Tryermaine
Came back upon
his heart again.”
It might seem insidious if I were to praise his ode entitled Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, as an effusion of high poetical enthusiasm, and strong political feeling. His Sonnet to Schiller conveys a fine compliment to the author of the Robbers, and an equally fine idea of the state of youthful enthusiasm in which he composed it.
“Schiller!
that hour I would have wish’d to die,
If
through the shudd’ring midnight I had sent
From
the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,
That fearful voice,
a famish’d father’s cry—
That in no after
moment aught less vast
Might
stamp me mortal! A triumphant shout
Black
Horror scream’d, and all her goblin rout
From the more
with’ring scene diminish’d pass’d.
Ah! Bard
tremendous in sublimity!
Could
I behold thee in thy loftier mood,
Wand’ring
at eve, with finely frenzied eye,
Beneath
some vast old tempest-swinging wood!
Awhile,
with mute awe gazing, I would brood,
Then weep aloud
in a wild ecstacy!”—
His Conciones ad Populum, Watchman, &c. are dreary trash. Of his Friend, I have spoken the truth elsewhere. But I may say of him here, that he is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learnt any thing. There is only one thing he could learn from me in return, but that he has not. He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought. His mind was clothed with wings; and raised on them, he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions, you then saw the progress of human happiness and liberty in bright and never-ending succession, like the steps of Jacob’s ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending, and with the voice of God at the top of the ladder. And shall I, who heard him then, listen to him now? Not I! . . . That spell is broke; that time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no more: but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dying sound.
“What
though the radiance which was once so bright,
Be now for ever
taken from my sight,
Though nothing
can bring back the hour
Of glory in the
grass, of splendour in the flow’r;
I
do not grieve, but rather find
Strength
in what remains behind;
In
the primal sympathy,
Which
having been, must ever be;
In
the soothing thoughts that spring
Out
of human suffering;
In years that
bring the philosophic mind!”—
I have thus gone through the task I intended, and have come at last to the level ground. I have felt my subject gradually sinking from under me as I advanced, and have been afraid of ending in nothing. The interest has unavoidably decreased at almost every successive step of the progress, like a play that has its catastrophe in the first or second act. This, however, I could not help. I have done as well as I could.