
William Hazlitt
1873 Press
First Published 1825All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.Published in the United States by 1873 Press, New York.1873 Press and colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.Book Design by Ericka O'Rourke, Elm Designwww.elmdesign.comISBN 0-594-04108-2
IntroductionI. Introductory---On Poetry in GeneralII. On Chaucer and SpenserIII. On Shakspeare and MiltonIV. On Dryden and PopeV. On Thomson and CowperVI. On Swift, Young, Gray, Collins, etc.VII. On Burns, and the Old English BalladsVIII. On the Living Poets
HAZLITT'S Lectures on the English Poets were delivered at the Surrey Institution in 1818, and were published in the same year. Sergeant Talfourd was present at their delivery, and it is interesting to note what so acute a person as he thought of them at the time. They formed one of three courses of lectures at the same place, the other two being On the English Comic Writers and On the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. The audience, we are told, "consisted chiefly of Dissenters, who agreed with him in his hatred of Lord Castlereagh, but who 'loved no plays;' of Quakers, who approved him as the opponent of slavery and capital punishment, but who 'heard no music;' of citizens, devoted to the main chance, who had a hankering after 'the improvement of the mind,' but to whom his favourite doctrine of its natural disinterestedness was a riddle; of a few enemies, who came to sneer; and a few friends, who were eager to learn and to admire;" an audience, in fact, of varying elements, such as one might expect to find to-day represented in a university extension lecture room. "He once had an edifying advantage over them. He was enumerating the humanities which endeared Dr. Johnson to his mind, and, at the close of an agreeable catalogue, mentioned, as last and noblest, 'his carrying the poor victim of disease and dissipation on his back through Fleet Street'---at which a titter arose from some, who were struck by the picture as ludicrous, and a murmur from others, who deemed the allusion unfit for ears polite. He paused for an instant, and then added in his sturdiest and most impressive manner, 'an act which realises the parable of the good Samaritan,' at which his moral and delicate hearers shrunk rebuked into deep silence. He was not eloquent in the true sense of the term; for his thoughts were too weighty to be moved along by the shallow stream of feeling which an evening's excitement can rouse. He wrote all his lectures, and read them as they were written; but his deep voice and earnest manner suited his matter well." In an article on these lectures which appeared in The Westminster Review, a word is used which exactly expresses the prevailing attribute of Hazlitt as a critic: "He handles the subject with great gusto, metaphysical acuteness, and rich illustration." It is this quality of being able to see the highest in poet and novelist and painter and politician and philosopher which makes Hazlitt "the perfect lover, to whom their achievement was as an enchanted garden." Again and again are we made aware of quick intelligence, of thought leaping reponsively to thought, and of a keen capacity to enjoy. It is Hazlitt's gusto which most impresses us when we read his work, whether it be merely a hastily written dramatic notice for The Examiner or a carefully thought out "character." He had read widely, and, though he was imperiously careless in the matter of quotations, the way in which he presses the words of others into his own service, in order to emphasise something which he wished to point out in the character or works of the author under discussion, is nearly always happy and appropriate. He is ever alive and alert; he enjoyed life; he loved many things---women and pictures and plays and poems; he saw the good in prize-fighting (who does not know his account of the fight between Hickman and Bill Neate?) and was himself a fives-player; he hated and he loved; he was, says Thackeray, "one of the keenest and brightest critics that ever lived;" and the truth of his last words---"Well, I've had a happy life "---can be seen in every volume of his works. A good deal of this happiness arose, doubtless, from his love of strife; he had what has been called "a fine pugnaciousness of mind;" he indulged in many quarrels and he did not shrink from entrance to a quarrel; he was akin, in spirit, to the man who is always "agin the government;" but, setting all this on one side, let it be said as his supreme virtue that he really loved what was great, and when a man is blessed with the capacity for that love he has a source of happiness within himself which nothing can take away.
It would be impertinent to point out the various good qualities of the lectures which are contained in this present volume: their virtues are self-evident; but a word of warning may be allowed. Hazlitt is often a creature of prejudice, of prejudice so irrational as to make him uncritical. His very individuality, his originality, is sometimes a snare; he never enjoyed running in double harness, and he sometimes kicks over the traces from sheer wilfulness. He can be hopelessly unjust, as in the essay on Scott in The Spirit of the Age, in the present volume; but you have only to turn to the lecture on Burns, or to the criticism of Pope, or to the well-known passage on Coleridge towards the close of the lecture On the Living Poets, to be in the presence of one who knows what genius is and can appraise it.
Gifford reviewed The English Poets in The Quarterly Review, and his notice was "abject; the inspiration venal; the matter the very dirt of the mind."1 Hazlitt replied in the savage Letter to William Gifford. Both review and reply belong, let us hope, to a school of criticism that is dead. The attack might easily have aroused a less fiery nature than Hazlitt's to reprisals; and the rejoinder does not fall short of what might be expected.
The Spirit of the Age was published anonymously in January 1825, with a characteristic motto upon the title page---"To know another well were to know one's self well." A second edition was published in the same year, with additions to the article on Coleridge and an essay on Cobbett which had previously been published in Table Talk. Some of the "contemporary portraits" had appeared in The New Monthly Magazine and The London Magazine. In the interval between The English Poets and The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt had published his Lectures on the English Comic Writers, the "quintessential salt of an epistle" to William Gifford above referred to, his Political Essays, his Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and his Table Talk, besides many articles in journals and newspapers which were collected later. The Spirit of the Age, naturally, is more mature than some of the earlier volumes and it contains some of the very best of Hazlitt's work. It is a splendid portrait-gallery, wherein some of his contemporaries appear in the pillory and others in frames of honour. He had earned Coleridge's praise earlier in respect of his power as a painter of character portraits; and here we have his impressions of a score or more of his contemporaries related in the style which led R. L. Stevenson to declare "we are mighty fine fellows, but we cannot write like William Hazlitt." With his politics we may not agree, and it needs but little education in literary history to be able to detect his prejudices; allowances have to be made for this and for that; but, when the devil's advocate has said his worst, there remains, in the two volumes here reprinted and in those which saw the light between their dates of publication, such a series of critical essays upon men and manners as no one in England had produced before. The only person with whom Hazlitt can be compared is Sainte-Beuve. He is not so "safe" as the French critic; he is not so careful; he lacks that lucidity of style which apparently is the inalienable birthright of all French critics; but there is more vigour in him than there is in the southern writer, less of that cool detachment which may chill the enthusiastic but which is a healthy corrective against prejudice.
"I have loitered my life away," said Hazlitt, "reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best." And we should be thankful for the loitering.
A. R. W.
Cambridge, 29th May 1910.
1Henley.
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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 Molière'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 story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice, when he gazes after the Lord-Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god;---the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second hand. 'There is warrant for it.' Poets alone have not 'such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler reason' can.
'The lunatic, the lover, and the poetAre 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 forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet's penTurns them to shape, and gives to airy nothingA 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. The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that while it shews us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner, and by the most striking examples of the same quality in other instances. Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason, 'has something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do.' It is strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power. This language is not the less true to nature, because it is false in point of fact; but so much the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear---and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. 'Our eyes are made the fools' of our other faculties. This is the universal law 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' taperBows toward her, and would under-peep her lidsTo 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 of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the imagination than the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower: not that he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous strength than another object of ten times the same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, 'for they are old like him,' there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could in justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and his despair!
Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As dodescribing 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 everFarewel 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 throatsTh' 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 courseNe'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due onTo 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 revengeSwallow them up.'---
The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that line,
'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 reaction 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 heartstrings; 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 groundwork 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 moodOf 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 steepOf 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 childThan 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 drabcoloured 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, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. This is also one part of nature, one appearance which the glow-worm presents, and that not the least interesting; so poetry is one part of the history of the human mind, though it is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot be concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from the progress of experimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon that gives birth and scope to the imagination; we can only fancy what we do not know. As in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill them with what shapes we please, with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, and drear enchantments, so in our ignorance of the world about us, we make gods or devils of the first object we see, and set no bounds to the wilful suggestions of our hopes and fears.
'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 thingAnd the first motion, all the interim isLike 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 moveHarmonious 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 ariseAnd 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 sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into each other. It is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself---to mingle the tide of verse, 'the golden cadences of poetry,' with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows---in short, to take the language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses---
'Sailing with supreme dominionThrough 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 gumWhich issues whence 'tis nourished, our gentle flameProvokes itself, and like the current fliesEach 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. 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 it---an invisible hand is suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation, Providence took an immediate share in the affairs of this life. Jacob's dream arose out of this intimate communion between heaven and earth: it was this that let down, in the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon the lonely place, which can never pass away. The story of Ruth, again, is as if all the depth of natural affection in the human race was involved in her breast. There are descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal of imagery, more intense in passion, than any thing in Homer, as that of the state of his prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night. The metaphors in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative. Things were collected more into masses, and gave a greater momentum to the imagination.
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 most opposite to the flowery and glittering; who relies most on his own power, and the sense of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed. He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been created; but he seizes on the attention, by shewing us the effect they produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same thrilling and overwhelming sensation, which is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are excessive: but the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness of the author's mind. Dante's great power is in combining internal feelings with external objects. Thus the gate of hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, 'I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth': and half the personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own acquaintance. All this, perhaps, tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and by an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the reader. He affords few subjects for picture. There is, indeed, one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted.
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 mockembrace, is here perfect. In this way, the lamentation of Selma for the loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain, 'Roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian!'
1Burke'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.
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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 prosewriters, 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 employment. Chaucer was an active partisan, a religious reformer, and from the share he took in some disturbances, on one occasion, he was obliged to fly the country On his return, he was imprisoned, and made his peace with government, as it is said, by a discovery of his associates. Fortitude does not appear, at any time, to have been the distinguishing virtue of poets---There is, however, an obvious similarity between the practical turn of Chaucer's mind and restless impatience of his character, and the tone of his writings. Yet it would be too much to attribute the one to the other as cause and effect: for Spenser, whose poetical temperament was an effeminate as Chaucer's was stern and masculine, was equally engaged in public affairs, and had mixed equally in the great world. So much does native disposition predominate over accidental circumstances, moulding them to its previous bent and purposes! For while Chaucer's intercourse with the busy world, and collision with the actual passions and conflicting interests of others, seemed to brace the sinews of his understanding, and gave to his writings the air of a man who describes persons and things that he had known and been intimately concerned in; the same opportunities, operating on a differently constituted frame, only served to alienate Spenser's mind the more from the 'close-pent up' scenes of ordinary life, and to make him 'rive their concealing continents,' to give himself up to the unrestrained indulgence of 'flowery tenderness.'
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 more of May,That Emelie that fayrer was to seneThan 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 breaking both the boughes and the leves:'---
or that still finer one of Constance, when she is condemned to death:---
'Have ye not seen sometime a pale face(Among a prees) of him that hath been ladToward 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 tourResouned of his yelling and clamour:The pure fetters on his shinnes greteWere 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 poetry resembles the root just springing from the ground, rather than the full-blown flower. His muse is no 'babbling gossip of the air,' fluent and redundant; but, like a stammerer, or a dumb person, that has just found the use of speech, crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and fond repetitions to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the objects, like the eye or finger. There were none of the common-places of poetic diction in our author's time, no reflected lights of fancy, no borrowed roseate tints; he was obliged to inspect things for himself, to look narrowly, and almost to handle the object, as in the obscurity of morning we partly see and partly grope our way; so that his descriptions have a sort of tangible character belonging to them, and produce the effect of sculpture on the mind. Chaucer had an equal eye for truth of nature and discrimination of character; and his interest in what he saw gave new distinctness and force to his power of observation. The picturesque and the dramatic are in him closely blended together, and hardly distinguishable; for he principally describes external appearances as indicating character, as symbols of internal sentiment. There is a meaning in what he sees; and it is this which catches his eye by sympathy. Thus the costume and dress of the Canterbury Pilgrims---of the Knight---the Squire---the Oxford Scholar---the Gap-toothed Wife of Bat, and the rest, speak for themselves. To take one or two of these at random:
'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 divineEntuned 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 pleasant, and amiable of port,And peined hire to contrefeten chereOf 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 mousCaughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.Of smale houndes hadde she, that she feddeWith 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 might 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 like 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 hareWas all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare.I saw his sleves purfiled at the hondWith 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 greater 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.'
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 their n'as,And yet he seemed besier than he was.'
The Frankelein, in 'whose house it snewed of mete and drinke'; the Shipman,'who rode upon a rouncie, as he couthe'; the Doctour of Phisike, 'whose studied was but litel of the Bible'; the Wif of Bath, in
'All whose parish ther was non,That to the offering before hire shulde gon,And if their 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 Linnæus 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 drunken had the win,Than wold he speken no word but Latin.A fewe terms coude he, two or three,That he had learned out of som decree;No wonder is, he heard it all the day.---In danger hadde he at his owen giseThe yonge girles of the diocise,And knew hir conseil, and was of hir rede.A gerlond hadde he sette upon his hedeAs gret as it were for an alestake:A bokeler hadde he made him of a cake.With him their 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 PalamonLicurge himself, the grete king of Trace:Blake was his berd, and manly was his face.The cercles of his eyen in his hedThey gloweden betwixen yelwe and red,And like a griffon looked 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, and bright as any gold,He hadde a beres skin, cole-blake for old.His longe here was kempt behind his bak,As any ravenes fether it shone for blake.A wreth of gold arm-gret, of huge weight,Upon his hed sate full of stones bright,Of fine rubins and of diamants.About his char ther wenten white alauns,Twenty and mo, as gret as any stere,To hunten at the leon or the dere,And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound.---With Arcita, in stories as men find,The grete Emetrius, the king of Inde,Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele,Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,Came riding like the god of armes Mars.His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars,Couched with perles, white, and round and grete.His sadel was of brent gold new ybete;A mantelet upon his shouldres hangingBret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling.His crispe here like ringes was yronne,And that was yelwe, and glitered as the Sonne.His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin,His lippes round, his colour was sanguin,A fewe fraknes in his face yspreint,Betwixen yelwe and blake somdel ymeint,And as a leon he his loking caste.Of five and twenty yere his age I caste.His berd was wel begonnen for to spring;His vois was as a trompe thondering.Upon his hed he wered of laurer greneA gerlond fresh and lusty for to sene.Upon his hond he bare for his deduitAn egle tame, as any lily whit.---About this king their ran on every partFul many a tame leon and leopart.'
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 manereHeare 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 pleasant sight sie,Thought sodainly I felt so sweet an aireOf the eglentere, that certainelyThere 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 treeThat ever yet in all my life I sieAs full of blossomes as it might be,Therein a goldfinch leaping pretileFro bough to bough, and as him list he eetHere and there of buds and floures sweet.And to the herber side was joyningThis 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 manifoldIt was more pleasant than I coud deuise,And whan his song was ended in this wise,The nightingale with so merry a noteAnswered him, that all the wood rongSo sodainly, that as it were a sote,I stood astonied, so was I with the songThorow 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 busilyOn euery side, if I her might see,And at the last I gan full well aspieWhere 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 wasInto Paradice, where my desireWas for to be, and no further passeAs 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 beginningOf the world was neur scene or thanSo pleasaunt a ground of none earthly manAnd as I sat the birds harkening thus,Me thought that I heard voices sodainly,The most sweetest and most deliciousThat euer any wight I trow trulyHeard in their life, for the armonyAnd 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 be never mo.And shortly to concluded 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 knowHis 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 graveAlone 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 allThe purtreiture that was upon the wallWithin the temple of mighty Mars the rede---That highte the gret temple of Mars in TraceIn thilke colde and frosty region,Ther as Mars hath his sovereine mansion.First on the wall was pointed a forest,In which their wonneth neyther man ne best,With knotty knarry barrein trees oldOf stubbes sharpe and hideous to behold;In which their ran a romble and a swough,As though a storme should 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 stoodArmed, and looked grim as he were wood.A wolf ther stood before him at his feteWith 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 villageHadden hir bestes and her herbergage,And of hir labour toke hir sustenance,After that the earthe yave hem habundance.Among this poure folk their dwelt a man,Which that was holden pourest of hem all:But highe God sometime senden canHis 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 tonneShe 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 virginiteeTher was enclosed sad and ripe courage:And in gret reverence and chariteeHire 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 bringWortes and other herbes times oft,The which she shred and sethe for hire living,And made hire bed ful hard, and nothing softAnd ay she kept hire fadres lif on loftWith every obeisance and diligence,That child may don to fadres reverence,Upon Grisilde, this poure creature,Ful often site this markis sette his sye,As he on hunting rode paraventure:And whan it fell that he might hire espie,He not with wanton looking of folieHis eyen cast on hire, but in sad wiseUpon hire chere he wold him oft avise,Commending in his herte hire womanhede,And eke hire vertue, passing any wightOf so yong age, as wel in chere as dede.For though the people have no gret insightIn vertue, he considered ful rightHire bountee, and disposed that he woldWedde 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 well is went,And cometh home as sone as ever she may.For wel she had herd say, that thilke dayThe 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 seeThe markisesse, and therto wol I fondTo 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 anonBeside 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 portray 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 form can possibly represent, but by a courtesy of speech, or by a distant analogy. The moral impression of Death is essentially visionary; its reality is in the mind's eye. Words are here the only things; and things, physical forms, the mere mockeries of the understanding. The less definite, the less bodily the conception, the more vast, unformed, and unsubstantial, the nearer does it approach to some resemblance of that omnipresent, lasting, universal, irresistible principle, which every where, and at some time or other, exerts its power over all things. Death is a mighty abstraction, like Night, or Space, or Time. He is an ugly customer, who will not be invited to supper, or to sit for his picture. He is with us and about us, but we do not see him. He stalks on before us, and we do not mind him: he follows us close behind, and we do not turn to look back at him. We do not see him making faces at us in our life-time, nor perceive him afterwards sitting in mock-majesty, a twin-skeleton, beside us, tickling our bare ribs, and staring into our hollow eye-balls! Chaucer knew this. He makes three riotous companions go in search of Death to kill him, they meet with an old man whom they reproach with his age, and ask why he does not die, to which he answers thus:
'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 change 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 all the cares and business of life. Of all the poets, he is the most poetical. Though much later than Chaucer, his obligations to preceding writers were less. He has in some measure borrowed the plan of his poem (as a number of distinct narratives) from Ariosto; but he has engrafted upon it an exuberance of fancy, and an endless voluptuousness of sentiment, which are not to be found in the Italian writer. Farther, Spenser is even more of an inventor in the subject-matter. There is an originality, richness, and variety in his allegorical personages and fictions, which almost vies with the splendor of the ancient mythology. If Ariosto transports us into the regions of romance, Spenser's poetry is all fairy-land. In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground, in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough. In Spenser, we wander in another world, among ideal beings. The poet takes and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and fairer valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected to find it; and fulfils the delightful promise of our youth. He waves his wand of enchantment---and at once embodies airy beings, and throws a delicious veil over all actual objects. The two worlds of reality and of fiction are poised on the wings of his imagination. His ideas, indeed, seem more distinct than his perceptions. He is the painter of abstractions, and describes them with dazzling minuteness. In the Mask of Cupid he makes the God of Love 'clap on high his coloured winges twain': and it is said of Gluttony, in the Procession of the Passions,
'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 diverselyWith sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drestDid shake and seem'd to daunce for jollity;Like to an almond tree mounted highOn top of green Selenis all alone,With blossoms brave bedecked daintily;Her tender locks do tremble every oneAt 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 softA trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft,Mix'd with a murmuring wind, much like the soundOf swarming Bees, did cast him in a swound.No other noise, nor people's troublous cries.That still are wont t' annoy the walled townMight there be heard; but careless Quiet liesWrapt 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 soundOf 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 eareWas there consorted in one harmonee:Birds, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree.The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shadeTheir notes unto the voice attempred sweet:The angelical soft trembling voices madeTo th' instruments divine respondence meet.The silver sounding instruments did meetWith 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 sheDoth first peep forth with bashful modesty,That fairer seems the less ye see her may!Lo! see soon after, how more bold and freeHer bared bosom she doth broad display;Lo! see soon after, how she fades and falls away!So passeth in the passing of a dayOf mortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower;Ne more doth flourish after first decay,That erst was sought to deck both bed and bowerOf 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.1He ceased; and then gan all the quire of birdsTheir 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 wayThrough many covert groves and thickets close,In which they creeping did at last display2That wanton lady with her lover loose,Whose sleepy head she in her lap did soft dispose.Upon a bed of roses she was laidAs 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 seeOf scorched dew, do not in the air more lightly flee.Her snowy breast was bare to greedy spoilOf hungry eyes which n' ote therewith be fill'd,And yet through languor of her late sweet toilFew drops more clear than nectar forth distill'd,That like pure Orient perles down it trill'd;And her fair eyes sweet smiling in delightMoisten'd their fiery beams, with which she thrill'dFrail hearts, yet quenched not; like starry light,Which sparkling on the silent waves does seem more bright.'
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 remembered of King Nine,Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine';
the description of Belphœbe; 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 restWas for like need enforc'd to disarray.Tho when as vailed was her lofty crest,Her golden locks that were in trammels gayUpbounden, did themselves down display,And raught unto her heels like sunny beamsThat 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 Belphœbe, 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 beardDropped down 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 seatHis 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 LecheryUpon a bearded goat, whose rugged hairAnd 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 and fraught with fickleness;And learned had to love with secret looks;And well could dance; and sing with ruefulness;And fortunes tell; and read in loving books;And thousand other ways to bait his fleshly hooks.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 sweetThan 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 boyOf 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 arrayTheir 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 bearThat 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 ycladIn a discolour'd coat of strange disguise,That at his back a broad capuccio had,And sleeves dependent 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 stayHis 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 needStrange horror to deform his grisly shade;A net in th' one hand, and a rusty bladeIn th' other was; this Mischiefe, that Mishap;With th' one his foes he threatened 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 himself not safe enough thereby,But fear'd each shadow moving to and fro;And his own arms when glittering he did spyOr 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 holdAn holy-water sprinkle dipt in dew,With which she sprinkled favours manifoldOn whom she list, and did great liking shew,Great liking unto many, but true love to few.Next after them, the winged God himselfCame riding on a lion ravenous,Taught to obey the menage of that elfeThat man and beast with power imperiousSubdueth to his kingdom tyrannous:His blindfold eyes he bade awhile unbind,That his proud spoil of that same dolorousFair 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, which is more properly the dramatic; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance---all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable---but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into Jealousy. The following stanzas, in the description of the Cave of Mammon, the grisly house of Plutus, are unrivalled for the portentous massiness of the forms, the splendid chiaro-scuro, and shadowy horror.
'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 liftHer 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,3And hid in darkness that none could beholdThe hue thereof, for view of cheerful dayDid 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 nightDoes shew to him that walks in fear and sad affright.And over all sad Horror with grim hueDid 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.'
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.
1 Taken from Tasso.
2 This word is an instance of those unwarrantable freedoms which Spenser sometimes took with language.
3 '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.
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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 was of a later age, and not the worse for it)---Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio, the Greek sculptors and tragedians,---all lived near the beginning of their arts---perfected, and all but created them. These giant-sons of genius stand indeed upon the earth, but they tower above their fellows; and the long line of their successors, in different ages, does not interpose any object to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength and stature they are unrivalled; in grace and beauty they have not been surpassed. In after-ages, and more refined periods, (as they are called) great men have arisen, one by one, as it were by throes and at intervals; though in general the best of these cultivated and artificial minds were of an inferior order; as Tasso and Pope, among poets; Guido and Vandyke, among painters. But in the earlier stages of the arts, as soon as the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the language was sufficiently acquired, they rose by clusters, and in constellations, never so to rise again!
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 his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives---as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies 'nodded to him, and did him curtesies': and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of 'his so potent art.' The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into, all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, 'subject to the same skyey influences,' the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality. Thus the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a language and manners of its own, but the scenery and situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, 'his frequent haunts and ancient neighbourhood,' are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and with all the familiarity of an old recollection. The whole 'coheres semblably together' in time, place, and circumstance. In reading this author, you do not merely learn what his characters say,---you see their persons. By something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to decypher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the grouping, the bye-play, as we might see it on the stage. A word, an epithet paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole years in the history of the person represented. So (as it has been ingeniously remarked) when Prospero describes himself as left alone in the boat with his daughter, the epithet which he applies to her,'Me and thy crying self,' flings the imagination instantly back from the grown woman to the helpless condition of infancy, and places the first and most trying scene of his misfortunes before us, with all that he must have suffered in the interval. How well the silent anguish of Macduff is conveyed to the reader, by the friendly expostulation of Malcolm---' What! man, ne'er pull your hat upon your brows!' Again, Hamlet, in the scene with Rosencrans and Guildenstern, somewhat abruptly concludes his fine soliloquy on life by saying, 'Man delights not me, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.' Which is explained by their answer--- 'My lord, we had no such stuff in our thoughts. But we smiled to think, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive from you, whom we met on the way':---as if while Hamlet was making this speech, his two old schoolfellows from Wittenberg had been really standing by, and he had seen them smiling by stealth, at the idea of the players crossing their minds. It is not 'a combination and a form' of words, a set speech or two, a preconcerted theory of a character, that will do this: but all the persons concerned must have been present in the poet's imagination, as at a kind of rehearsal; and whatever would have passed through their minds on the occasion, and have been observed by others, passed through his, and is made known to the reader.---I may add in passing, that Shakspeare always gives the best directions for the costume and carriage of his heroes. Thus to take one example, Ophelia gives the following account of Hamlet; and as Ophelia had seen Hamlet, I should think her word ought to be taken against that of any modern authority.
'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 hellTo 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 hardThen 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 I.
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 employment 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 lago as 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 sleepWhich 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 loudlashed 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 hung 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 lostAll her original brightness, nor appear'dLess than archangel ruin'd, and th' excessOf 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. Æneas says to Agamemnon,
'I ask that I may waken reverence,And on the cheek be ready with a blushModest as morning, when she coldly eyesThe youthful Phœbus.'
Ulysses urging Achilles to shew himself in the field, says---,
'No man is the lord of anything,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 reverberatesThe voice again, or like a gate of steel,Fronting the sun, receives and renders backIts figure and its heat.'
Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice.
'Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton CupidShall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,And like a dew-drop from the lion's maneBe 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 hieroglyphical. 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 Æschylus 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 Mæonides,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 spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years yet, I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases: to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs. Although it nothing content me to have disclosed thus much beforehand; but that I trust hereby to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.'
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 broughtThe 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 seatWas fair Damascus, on the fertile banksOf 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 kidsOn hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springsOf Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;But in his way lights on the barren plainsOf Sericana, where Chineses driveWith 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 astrayThrough 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 soonSaw 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 tiarCircled his head, nor less his locks behindIllustrious on his shoulders fledge with wingsLay waving round; on some great charge employ'dHe seem'd, or fix'd in cogitation deep.Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hopeTo find who might direct his wand'ring flightTo 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 delayAnd now a stripling cherub he appears,Not of the prime, yet such as in his faceYouth smiled celestial, and to every limbSuitable grace diffus'd, so well he feign'd:Under a coronet his flowing hairIn curls on either cheek play'd; wings he woreOf many a colour'd plume sprinkled with gold,His habit fit for speed succinct, and heldBefore 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 bearThe 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 worksCreated 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 knownIn Heaven by many a tower'd structure high;---Nor was his name unheard or unador'dIn ancient Greece: and in the Ausonian landMen called him Mulciber: and how he fellFrom Heaven, they failed, thrown by angry JoveSheer o'er the crystal battlements; from mornTo noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,A summer's day; and with the setting sunDropt from the zenith like a falling starOn Lemnos, the Ægean isle: thus they relate,Erring.'---'---But chief the spacious hallThick swarm'd, both on the ground and in the air,Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings. As beesIn spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides,Pour forth their populous youth about the hiveIn clusters; they among fresh dews and flow'rsFly to and fro: or on the smoothed plank,The suburb of their straw-built citadel,New rubb'd with balm, expatiate and conferTheir state affairs. So thick the airy crowdSwarm'd and were straiten'd; till the signal giv'n,Behold a wonder! They but now who seem'dIn bigness to surpass earth's giant sons,Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow roomThrong numberless, like that Pygmean raceBeyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves,Whose midnight revels by a forest sideOr fountain, some belated peasant sees,Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moonSits arbitress, and nearer to the earthWheels her pale course: they on their mirth and danceIntent, 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 stoodSo high above the circling canopyOf night's extended shade) from th' eastern pointOf Libra to the fleecy star that bearsAndromeda far off Atlantic seasBeyond the horizon: then from pole to poleHe views in breadth, and without longer pauseDown right into the world's first region throwsHis flight precipitant, and winds with easeThrough the pure marble air his oblique wayAmongst innumerable stars that shoneStars 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 pierceIn notes with many a winding boutOf 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 fireHath 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 seatThat we must change for Heaven; this mournful gloomFor that celestial light? Be it so, since heWho now is sov'rain can dispose and bidWhat shall be right: farthest from him is best,Whom reason hath equal'd, force hath made supremeAbove his equals. Farewel happy fields,Where joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hailInfernal world, and thou profoundest Hell,Receive thy new possessor: one who bringsA mind not to be chang'd by place or time.The mind is its own place, and in itselfCan 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 heWhom thunder hath made greater? Here at leastWe shall be free; th' Almighty hath not builtHere for his envy, will not drive us hence:Here we may reign secure, and in my choiceTo 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 employment 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 in it is the fault of the reader, not of the poet, is that when any interest of a practical kind takes a shape that can be at all turned into this, (and there is little doubt that Milton had some such in his eye in writing it,) each party converts it to its own purposes, feels the absolute identity of these abstracted and high speculations; and that, in fact, a noted political writer of the present day has exhausted nearly the whole account of Satan in the Paradise Lost, by applying it to a character whom he considered as after the devil, (though I do not know whether he would make even that exception) the greatest enemy of the human race. This may serve to shew that Milton's Satan is not a very insipid personage.
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, fighting, 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 strifeOf 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 another, with the voice of their Maker walking in the garden, and ministering angels attendant on their steps, winged messengers from heaven like rosy clouds descending in their sight. Nature played around them her virgin fancies wild; and spread for them a repast where no crude surfeit reigned. Was there nothing in this scene, which God and nature alone witnessed, to interest a modern critic? What need was there of action, where the heart was full of bliss and innocence without it! They had nothing to do but feel their own happiness, and 'know to know no more.' 'They toiled not, neither did they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' All things seem to acquire fresh sweetness, and to be clothed with fresh beauty in their sight. They tasted as it were for themselves and us, of all that there ever was pure in human bliss. 'In them the burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened.' They stood awhile perfect, but they afterwards fell, and were driven out of Paradise, tasting the first fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss. But their pangs were such as a pure spirit might feel at the sight---their tears 'such as angels weep.' The pathos is of that mild contemplative kind which arises from regret for the loss of unspeakable happiness, and resignation to inevitable fate. There is none of the fierceness of intemperate passion, none of the agony of mind and turbulence of action, which is the result of the habitual struggles of the will with circumstances, irritated by repeated disappointment, and constantly setting its desires most eagerly on that which there is an impossibility of attaining. This would have destroyed the beauty of the whole picture. They had received their unlooked-for happiness as a free gift from their Creator's hands, and they submitted to its loss, not without sorrow, but without impious and stubborn repining.
'In either hand the hast'ning angel caughtOur ling'ring parents, and to th' eastern gateLed them direct, and down the cliff as fastTo the subjected plain; then disappear'd.They looking back, all th' eastern side beheldOf Paradise, so late their happy seat,Wav'd over by that flaming brand, the gateWith 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 chooseTheir place of rest, and Providence their guide.'
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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 of sense, of observation, and the world, with a keen relish for the elegances of art, or of nature when embellished by art, a quick tact for propriety of thought and manners as established by the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the sentiments and habitudes of human life, as he felt them within the little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet, not of nature, but of art; and the distinction between the two, as well as I can make it out, is this---The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakspeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker. The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe.
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, that trembles through the cottage window, and cheers the watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to him, was the greatest; the fashion of the day bore sway in his mind over the immutable laws of nature. He preferred the artificial to the natural in external objects, because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with the self-love of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw, than admiration of that which was interesting to all mankind. He preferred the artificial to the natural in passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating impulses of the one hurried him away with a force and vehemence with which he could not grapple; while he could trifle with the conventional and superficial modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or admire, put them on or off like a masquerade-dress, make much or little of them, indulge them for a longer or a shorter time, as he pleased; and because while they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind was the antithesis of strength and grandeur; its power was the power of indifference. He had none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion.
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 brightnessThe herd hath more annoyance by the brizeThan by the tyger: but when the splitting windMakes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,And flies fled under shade, why thenThe 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 lightning 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 seeOf 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 beamsLaunch'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 sun, her eyes the gazers strike;And like the sun, they shine on all alike.Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:If to her share some female errors fall,Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,Nourish'd two locks, which graceful hung behindIn equal curls, and well conspir'd to deckWith 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; noneGo 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 bringsTo 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,Dragg'd 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 unknownDipp'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 received 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 rollStrong 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. Dryden recurs to the object often, takes fresh sittings of nature, and gives us new strokes of character as well as of his pencil. The Hind and Panther is an allegory as well as a satire; and so far it tells less home; the battery is not so point-blank. But otherwise it has more genius, vehemence, and strength of description than any other of Dryden's works, not excepting the Absalom and Achitophel. It also contains the finest examples of varied and sounding versification. I will quote the following as an instance of what I mean. He is complaining of the treatment which the Papists, under James II. received from the church of England.
'Besides these jolly birds, whose corpse impureRepaid 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 thoughtA 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 familyTo sacred rites; and vex the ethereal powersWith 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 mightLie 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 fallsOf crowing chanticleers in cloister'd walls.Expell'd for this, and for their lands they fled;And sister Partlet with her hooded headWas 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 a 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.1
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 Cithæron!'
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.
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 boatsong, 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 naïveté 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 borrowComfort in the midst of sorrow;Makes the desolatest place2To her presence be a grace;And the blackest discontentsBe her fairest ornaments.In my former days of blissHer 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 spreadShut 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 nowMake this churlish place allowSome things that may sweeten gladnessIn 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 eldest moss,The rude portals that give lightMore to terror than delight,This my chamber of neglect,Wall'd about with disrespect,From all these and this dull air,A fit object for despair,She hath taught me by her mightTo draw comfort and delight.Therefore, thou best earthly bliss,I will cherish thee for this.Poesie; thou sweet'st contentThat ere Heav'n to mortals lent:Though they as a trifle leave thee,Whose dull thoughts cannot conceive thee,Though thou be to them a scorn,That to nought but earth are born:Let my life no longer beThan I am in love with thee.Though our wise ones call thee madness,Let me never taste of sadness,If I love not thy maddest fits,Above all their greatest wits.And though some too seeming holy,Do account thy raptures folly,Thou dost teach me to contemnWhat makes knaves and fools of them.'
1 '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.'
2 Written in the Fleet Prison.
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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 deathbed, 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 other is gross, gaudy, and meretricious.---All that is admirable in the Seasons, is the emanation of a fine natural genius, and sincere love of his subject, unforced, unstudied, that comes uncalled for, and departs unbidden. But he takes no pains, uses no self-correction; or if he seems to labour, it is worse than labour lost. His genius 'cannot be constrained by mastery.' The feeling of nature, of the changes of the seasons, was in his mind; and he could not help conveying this feeling to the reader, by the mere force of spontaneous expression; but if the expression did not come of itself, he left the whole business to chance; or, willing to evade instead of encountering the difficulties of his subject, fills up the intervals of true inspiration with the most vapid and worthless materials, pieces out a beautiful half line with a bombastic allusion, or overloads an exquisitely natural sentiment or image with a cloud of painted, pompous, cumbrous phrases, like the shower of roses, in which he represents the Spring, his own lovely, fresh, and innocent Spring, as descending to the earth.
'Come, gentle Spring! ethereal Mildness! come,And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,While music wakes around, veil'd in a showerOf 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 offFar 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 touchDissolving 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 sleetsDeform the day delightless; so that scarceThe bittern knows his time with bill ingulphtTo shake the sounding marsh, or from the shoreThe plovers when to scatter o'er the heath,And sing their wild notes to the listening 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 minutiæ of a landscape, but describes the vivid impression which the whole makes upon his own imagination; and thus transfers the same unbroken, unimpaired impression to the imagination of his readers. The colours with which he paints seem yet wet and breathing, like those of the living statue in the Winter's Tale. Nature in his descriptions is seen growing around us, fresh and lusty as in itself. We feel the effect of the atmosphere, its humidity or clearness, its heat or cold, the glow of summer, the gloom of winter, the tender promise of the spring, the full overshadowing foliage, the declining pomp and deepening tints of autumn. He transports us to the scorching heat of vertical suns, or plunges us into the chilling horrors and desolation of the frozen zone. We hear the snow drifting against the broken casement without, and see the fire blazing on the hearth within. The first scattered drops of a vernal shower patter on the leaves above our heads, or the coming storm resounds through the leafless groves. In a word, he describes not to the eye alone, but to the other senses, and to the whole man. He puts his heart into his subject, writes as he feels, and humanises whatever he touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life and vivifying soul. His faults were those of his style---of the author and the man; but the original genius of the poet, the pith and marrow of his imagination, the fine natural mould in which his feelings were bedded, were too much for him to counteract by neglect, or affectation, or false ornaments. It is for this reason that he is, perhaps, the most popular of all our poets, treating of a subject that all can understand, and in a way that is interesting to all alike, to the ignorant or the refined, because he gives back the impression which the things themselves make upon us in nature. 'That,' said a man of genius, seeing a little shabby soiled copy of Thomson's Seasons lying on the window-seat of an obscure country alehouse---'That is true fame!'
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 stockdove'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 hotFrom all the boundless furnace of the sky,And the wide-glitt'ring waste of burning sand,A suffocating wind the pilgrim smitesWith instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,Son of the desert, ev'n the camel feelsShot 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 gathering eddies play;Nearer and nearer still they dark'ning come,Till with the general all-involving stormSwept 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 caravanIs buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets,Th' impatient merchant, wondering, 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 depthExpel him, circling through his ev'ry shift.He sweeps the forest oft, and sobbing seesThe glades mild opening to the golden day,Where in kind contest with his butting friendsHe 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, that 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 aroundStrikes his sad eye but deserts lost in snow,And heavy-loaded groves, and solid floods,That stretch athwart the solitary vastTheir icy horrors to the frozen main;And cheerless towns far distant, never bless'd,Save when its annual course the caravanBends 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 employment 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 flakesFall broad and wide, and fast, dimming the dayWith a continual flow. The cherish'd fieldsPut on their winter-robe of purest white:'Tis brightness all, save where the new snow meltsAlong the mazy current. Low the woodsBow 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 wideThe works of man. Drooping, the lab'rer-oxStands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demandsThe fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heav'n,Tam'd by the cruel season, crowd aroundThe winnowing store, and claim the little boonWhich Providence assigns them. One alone,The redbreast, sacred to the household Gods,Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,In joyless fields and thorny thickets leavesHis shivering mates, and pays to trusted manHis annual visit. Half-afraid, he firstAgainst the window beats; then, brisk, alightsOn 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-crumbsAttract his slender feet. The foodless wildsPour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,Though timorous of heart, and hard besetBy death in various forms, dark snares and dogs,And more unpitying men, the garden seeks,Urg'd on by fearless want. The bleating kindEye 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 'unboughtt 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 view with a look of consciousness and attention to etiquette, as a fine gentleman hands a lady out to dance a minuet. He is delicate to fastidiousness, and glad to get back, after a romantic adventure with crazy Kate, a party of gypsies or a little child on a common, to the drawing room and the ladies again, to the sofa and the tea-kettle---No, I beg his pardon, not to the singing, well-scoured tea-kettle, but to the polished and loud-hissing urn. His walks and arbours are kept clear of worms and snails, with as much an appearance of petit-maitreship as of humanity. He has some of the sickly sensibility and pampered refinements of Pope; but then Pope prided himself in them: whereas, Cowper affects to be all simplicity and plainness. He had neither Thomson's love of the unadorned beauties of nature, nor Pope's exquisite sense of the elegances of art. He was, in fact, a nervous man, afraid of trusting himself to the seductions of the one, and ashamed of putting forward his pretensions to an intimacy with the other: but to be a coward, is not the way to succeed either in poetry, in war, or in love! Still he is a genuine poet, and deserves all his reputation. His worst vices are amiable weaknesses, elegant trifling. Though there is a frequent dryness, timidity, and jejuneness in his manner, he has left a number of pictures of domestic comfort and social refinement, as well as of natural imagery and feeling, which can hardly be forgotten but with the language itself. Such, among others, are his memorable description of the post coming in, that of the preparations for tea in a winter's evening in the country, of the unexpected fall of snow, of the frosty morning (with the fine satirical transition to the Empress of Russia's palace of ice), and most of all, the winter's walk at noon. Every one of these may be considered as distinct studies, or highly finished cabinet-pieces, arranged without order or coherence. I shall be excused for giving the last of them, as what has always appeared to me one of the most feeling, elegant, and perfect specimens of this writer's manner.
'The night was winter in his roughest mood;The morning sharp and clear. But now at noonUpon 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 speckThe 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 perceiveThe soothing influence of the wafted strains,And settle in soft musings as I treadThe walk, still verdant, under oaks and elms,Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.The roof, though moveable through all its length,As the wind sways it, has yet well suffic'd,And, intercepting in their silent fallThe frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.The redbreast warbles still, but is contentWith slender notes, and more than half suppress'd.Pleas'd with his solitude, and flitting lightFrom spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakesFrom many a twig the pendent drop of ice,That tinkle in the wither'd leaves below.Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,Charms more than silence. Meditation hereMay think down hours to moments. Here the heartMay give a useful lesson to the head,And Learning wiser grow without his books.Knowledge and Wisdom, far from being one,Have oft-times no connection. Knowledge dwellsIn heads replete with thoughts of other men;Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.Books are not seldom talismans and spells,By which the magic art of shrewder witsHolds an unthinking multitude enthrall'd.Some to the fascination of a nameSurrender judgment hood-wink'd. Some the styleInfatuates, and through labyrinths and wildsOf error leads them, by a tune entranc'd,While sloth seduces more, too weak to bearThe insupportable fatigue of thought,And swallowing therefore without pause or choiceThe total grist unsifted, husks and all.But trees, and rivulets whose rapid courseDefies the check of winter, haunts of deer,And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs,And lanes, in which the primrose ere her timePeeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root,Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth,Not shy, as in the world, and to be wonBy slow solicitation, seize at onceThe roving thought, and fix it on themselves.
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 eyesHer 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 naïveté, 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 genius can hope to arrive at, after the lapse of one or two generations, is the perfection of that more refined and effeminate style of studied elegance and adventitious ornament, which is the result, not of nature, but of art. In fact, no other style of poetry has succeeded, or seems likely to succeed, in the present day. The public taste hangs like a millstone round the neck of all original genius that does not conform to established and exclusive models. The writer is not only without popular sympathy, but without a rich and varied mass of materials for his mind to work upon and assimilate unconsciously to itself; his attempts at originality are looked upon as affectation, and in the end, degenerate into it from the natural spirit of contradiction, and the constant uneasy sense of disappointment and undeserved ridicule. But to return.
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 reservations; 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. His poetical morality is taken from Burn's Justice, or the Statutes against Vagrants. He sets his own imagination in the stocks, and his Muse, like Malvolio, 'wears cruel garters.' He collects all the petty vices of the human heart, and superintends, as in a panopticon, a select circle of rural malefactors. He makes out the poor to be as bad as the rich---a sort of vermin for the others to hunt down and trample upon, and this he thinks a good piece of work. With him there are but two moral categories, riches and poverty, authority and dependence. His parish apprentice, Richard Monday, and his wealthy baronet, Sir Richard Monday, of Monday-place, are the same individual---the extremes of the same character, and of his whole system. 'The latter end of his Commonwealth does not forget the beginning.' But his parish ethics are the very worst model for a state: any thing more degrading and helpless cannot well be imagined. He exhibits just the contrary view of human life to that which Gay has done in his Beggar's Opera. In a word, Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded in the still life of tragedy: who gives the stagnation of hope and fear---the deformity of vice without the temptation---the pain of sympathy without the interest---and who seems to rely, for the delight he is to convey to his reader, on the truth and accuracy with which he describes only what is disagreeable.
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 in the language is that prose-poem, Walton's Complete Angler. That well-known work has a beauty and romantic interest equal to its simplicity, and arising out of it. In the description of a fishing-tackle, you perceive the piety and humanity of the author's mind. It is to be doubted whether Sannazarius's Piscatory Eclogues are equal to the scenes described by Walton on the banks of the river Lea. He gives the feeling of the open air: we walk with him along the dusty road-side, or repose on the banks of the river under a shady tree; and in watching for the finny prey, imbibe what he beautifully calls 'the patience and simplicity of poor honest fishermen.' We accompany them to their inn at night, and partake of their simple, but delicious fare; while Maud, the pretty milkmaid, at her mother's desire, sings the classical ditties of the poet Marlow; 'Come live with me, and be my love.' Good cheer is not neglected in this work, any more than in Homer, or any other history that sets a proper value on the good things of this life. The prints in the Complete Angler give an additional reality and interest to the scenes it describes. While Tottenham Cross shall stand, and longer, thy work, amiable and happy old man, shall last!---It is in the notes to it that we find that character of 'a fair and happy milkmaid,' by Sir Thomas Overbury, which may vie in beauty and feeling with Chaucer's character of Griselda.
'A fair and happy milkmaid 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 newmade 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 never alone, for she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones; yet they have their efficacy, in that they are not palled with ensuing idle cogitations. Lastly, her dreams are so chaste, that she dare tell them; only a Friday's dream is all her superstition; that she conceals for fear of anger. Thus lives she; and all her care is she may die in the springtime, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet.'
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 employment 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.1 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 storeOf 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!'
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 friendly or adverse to me, lie hid within it. There is an infinity of motives, passions, and ideas, contained in that narrow compass, of which I know nothing, and in which I have no share. Each individual is a world to himself, governed by a thousand contradictory and wayward impulses. I can, therefore, make no inference from one individual to another; nor can my habitual sentiments, with respect to any individual, extend beyond himself to others. A crowd of people presents a disjointed, confused, and unsatisfactory appearance to the eye, because there is nothing to connect the motley assemblage into one continuous or general impression, unless when there is some common object of interest to fix their attention, as in the case of a full pit at the play-house. The same principle will also account for that feeling of littleness, vacuity, and perplexity, which a stranger feels on entering the streets of a populous city. Every individual he meets is a blow to his personal identity. Every new face is a teazing, unanswered riddle. He feels the same wearisome sensation in walking from Oxford Street to Temple Bar, as a person would do who should be compelled to read through the first leaf of all the volumes in a library. But it is otherwise with respect to nature. A flock of sheep is not a contemptible, but a beautiful sight. The greatest number and variety of physical objects do not puzzle the will, or distract the attention, but are massed together under one uniform and harmonious feeling. The heart reposes in greater security on the immensity of Nature's works, 'expatiates freely there,' and finds elbow room and breathing space. We are always at home with Nature. There is neither hypocrisy, caprice, nor mental reservation in her favours. Our intercourse with her is not liable to accident or change, suspicion or disappointment: she smiles on us still the same. A rose is always sweet, a lily is always beautiful: we do not hate the one, nor envy the other. If we have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulled into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its foot, we are sure that wherever we can find a shady stream, we can enjoy the same pleasure again; so that when we imagine these objects, we can easily form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade. Hence the origin of the Grecian mythology. All objects of the same kind being the same, not only in their appearance, but in their practical uses, we habitually confound them together under the same general idea; and whatever fondness we may have conceived for one, is immediately placed to the common account. The most opposite kinds and remote trains of feeling gradually go to enrich the same sentiment; and in our love of nature, there is all the force of individual attachment, combined with the most airy abstraction. It is this circumstance which gives that refinement, expansion, and wild interest, to feelings of this sort, when strongly excited, which every one must have experienced who is a true lover of nature.
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 giveThoughts 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 beholdA 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 beLinked 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!
1 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.
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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 praise-worthy 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 prosewriters 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 than she tells. She laughs at the tricks she shews us, and blushes, or would be thought to do so, at what she keeps concealed. Prior has translated several of Fontaine's Tales from the French; and they have lost nothing in the translation, either of their wit or malice. I need not name them: but the one I like the most, is that of Cupid in search of Venus's doves. No one could insinuate a knavish plot, a tender point, a loose moral, with such unconscious archness, and careless raillery, as if he gained new self-possession and adroitness from the perplexity and confusion into which he throws scrupulous imaginations, and knew how to seize on all the ticklish parts of his subject, from their involuntarily shrinking under his grasp. Some of his imitations of Boileau's servile addresses to Louis XIV. which he has applied with a happy mixture of wit and patriotic enthusiasm to King William, or as he familiarly calls him, to
'Little Will, the scourge of France,No Godhead, but the first of men,'
are excellent, and shew the same talent for doule-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 in the language. The elegance of the composition is in exact proportion to the coarseness of the materials: by 'happy alchemy of mind,' the author has extracted an essence of refinement from the dregs of human life, and turns its very dross into gold. The scenes, characters, and incidents are, in themselves, of the lowest and most disgusting kind but, by the sentiments and reflections which are put into the mouths of highwaymen, turnkeys, their mistresses, wives, or daughters, he has converted this motley group into a set of fine gentlemen and ladies, satirists and philosophers. He has also effected this transformation without once violating probability, or 'o'erstepping the modesty of nature.' In fact, Gay has turned the tables on the critics; and by the assumed licence of the mock-heroic style, has enabled himself to do justice to nature, that is, to give all the force, truth, and locality of real feeling to the thoughts and expressions, without being called to the bar of false taste and affected delicacy. The extreme beauty and feeling of the song, 'Woman is like the fair flower in its lustre,' are only equalled by its characteristic propriety and naïveté. Polly describes her lover going to the gallows, with the same touching simplicity, and with all the natural fondness of a young girl in her circumstances, who sees in his approaching catastrophe nothing but the misfortunes and the personal accomplishments of the object of her affections. 'I see him sweeter than the nosegay in his hand; the admiring crowd lament that so lovely a youth should come to an untimely end:---even butchers weep, and Jack Ketch refuses his fee rather than consent to tie the fatal knot.' The preservation of the character and costume is complete. It has been said by a great authority---'There is some soul of goodness in things evil':---and the Beggar's Opera is a good-natured but instructive comment on this text. The poet has thrown all the gaiety and sunshine of the imagination, all the intoxication of pleasure, and the vanity of despair, round the shortlived existence of his heroes; while Peachum and Lockitt are seen in the back-ground, parcelling out their months and weeks between them. The general view exhibited of human life is of the most subtle and abstracted kind. The author has, with great felicity, brought out the good qualities and interesting emotions almost inseparable from the lowest conditions; and with the same penetrating glance, has detected the disguises which rank and circumstances lend to exalted vice. Every line in this sterling comedy sparkles with wit, and is fraught with the keenest sarcasm. The very wit, however, takes off from the offensiveness of the satire; and I have seen great statesmen, very great statesmen, heartily enjoying the joke, laughing most immoderately at the compliments paid to them as not much worse than pickpockets and cut-throats in a different line of life, and pleased, as it were, to see themselves humanised by some sort of fellowship with their kind. Indeed, it may be said that the moral of the piece is to shew the vulgarity of vice; or that the same violations of integrity and decorum, the same habitual sophistry in palliating their want of principle, are common to the great and powerful, with the meanest and most contemptible of the species. What can be more convincing than the arguments used by these would-be politicians, to shew that in hypocrisy, selfishness, and treachery, they do not come up to many of their betters? The exclamation of Mrs. Peachum, when her daughter marries Macheath, 'Hussy, hussy, you will be as ill used, and as much neglected, as if you had married a lord,' is worth all Miss Hannah More's laboured invectives on the laxity of the manners of high life!
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 herFull 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 SolomonBut 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 TolloShall David as Uriah slay him?Or dextrous Deborah Siserah him?No!---none of these! Heaven spare his lifeBut 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 little consequence; the power is somewhere, and it is a power that has moved the world. The power is not that of big words and vaunting common places. Swift left these to those who wanted them; and has done what his acuteness and intensity of mind alone could enable any one to conceive or to perform. His object was to strip empty pride and grandeur of the imposing air which external circumstances throw around them; and for this purpose he has cheated the imagination of the illusions which the prejudices of sense and of the world put upon it, by reducing every thing to the abstract predicament of size. He enlarges or diminishes the scale, as he wishes to shew the insignificance or the grossness of our overweening self-love. That he has done this with mathematical precision, with complete presence of mind and perfect keeping, in a manner that comes equally home to the understanding of the man and of the child, does not take away from the merit of the work or the genius of the author. He has taken a new view of human nature, such as a being of a higher sphere might take of it; he has torn the scales from off his moral vision; he has tried an experiment upon human life, and sifted its pretensions from the alloy of circumstances; he has measured it with a rule, has weighed it in a balance, and found it, for the most part, wanting and worthless---in substance and in shew. Nothing solid, nothing valuable is left in his system but virtue and wisdom. What a libel is this upon mankind! What a convincing proof of misanthropy! What presumption and what malice prepense, to shew men what they are, and to teach them what they ought to be! What a mortifying stroke aimed at national glory, is that unlucky incident of Gulliver's wading across the channel and carrying off the whole fleet of Blefuscu! After that, we have only to consider which of the contending parties was in the right. What a shock to personal vanity is given in the account of Gulliver's nurse Glumdalclitch! Still, notwithstanding the disparagement to her personal charms, her good-nature remains the same amiable quality as before. I cannot see the harm, the misanthropy, the immoral and degrading tendency of this. The moral lesson is as fine as the intellectual exhibition is amusing. It is an attempt to tear off the mask of imposture from the world; and nothing but imposture has a right to complain of it. It is, indeed, the way with our quacks in morality to preach up the dignity of human nature, to pamper pride and hypocrisy with the idle mockeries of the virtues they pretend to, and which they have not: but it was not Swift's way to cant morality, or any thing else; nor did his genius prompt him to write unmeaning panegyrics on mankind!
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, as a diversion to the more painful knowledge of the world around him: they only made him laugh, while men and women made him angry. His feverish impatience made him view the infirmities of that great baby the world, with the same scrutinizing glance and jealous irritability that a parent regards the failings of its offspring; but, as Rousseau has well observed, parents have not on this account been supposed to have more affection for other people's children than their own. In other respects, and except from the sparkling effervescence of his gall, Swift's brain was as 'dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.' He hated absurdity---Rabelais loved it, exaggerated it with supreme satisfaction, luxuriated in its endless varieties, rioted in nonsense, 'reigned there and revelled.' He dwelt on the absurd and ludicrous for the pleasure they gave him, not for the pain. He lived upon laughter, and died laughing. He indulged his vein, and took his full swing of folly. He did not baulk his fancy or his readers. His wit was to him 'as riches fineless'; he saw no end of his wealth in that way, and set no limits to his extravagance: he was communicative, prodigal, boundless, and inexhaustible. His were the Saturnalia of wit, the riches and the royalty, the health and long life. He is intoxicated with gaiety, mad with folly. His animal spirits drown him in a flood of mirth: his blood courses up and down his veins like wine. His thirst of enjoyment is as great as his thirst of drink: his appetite for good things of all sorts is unsatisfied, and there is a never-ending supply. Discourse is dry; so they moisten their words in their cups, and relish their dry jests with plenty of Botargos and dried neats' tongues. It is like Camacho's wedding in Don Quixote, where Sancho ladled out whole pullets and fat geese from the soup-kettles at a pull. The flagons are set a running, their tongues wag at the same time, and their mirth flows as a river. How Friar John roars and lays about him in the vineyard! How Panurge whines in the storm, and how dexterously he contrives to throw the sheep overboard! How much Pantagruel behaves like a wise king! How Gargantua mewls, and pules, and slabbers his nurse, and demeans himself most like a royal infant! what provinces he devours! what seas he drinks up! How he eats, drinks, and sleeps---sleeps, eats, and drinks! The style of Rabelais is no less prodigious than his matter. His words are of marrow, unctuous, dropping fatness. He was a mad wag, the king of good fellows, and prince of practical philosophers!
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 of the enchanter into little dry crumbling leaves! He is a Parisian. He never exaggerates, is never violent: he treats things with the most provoking sang froid; and expresses his contempt by the most indirect hints, and in the fewest words, as if he hardly thought them worth even his contempt. He retains complete possession of himself and of his subject. He does not effect his purpose by the eagerness of his blows, but by the delicacy of his tact. The poisoned wound he inflicted was so fine, as scarcely to be felt till it rankled and festered in its 'mortal consequences.' His callousness was an excellent foil for the antagonists he had mostly to deal with. He took knaves and fools on his shield well. He stole away its cloak from grave imposture. If he reduced other things below their true value, making them seem worthless and hollow, he did not degrade the pretensions of tyranny and superstition below their true value, by making them seem utterly worthless and hollow, as contemptible as they were odious. This was the service he rendered to truth and mankind! His Candide is a masterpiece of wit. It has been called 'the dull product of a scoffer's pen'; it is indeed the 'product of a scoffer's pen'; but after reading the Excursion, few people will think it dull. It is in the most perfect keeping, and without any appearance of effort. Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like one sentence. There is something sublime in Martin's sceptical indifference to moral good and evil. It is the repose of the grave. It is better to suffer this living death, than a living martyrdom. 'Nothing can touch him further.' The moral of Candide (such as it is) is the same as that of Rasselas: the execution is different. Voltaire says, 'A great book is a great evil.' Dr. Johnson would have laboured this short apophthegm into a voluminous common-place. Voltaire's traveller (in another work) being asked 'whether he likes black or white mutton best,' replies that 'he is indifferent, provided it is tender.' Dr. Johnson did not get at a conclusion by so short a way as this. If Voltaire's licentiousness is objected to me, I say, let it be placed to its true account, the manners of the age and court in which he lived. The lords and ladies of the bedchamber in the reign of Louis xv. found no fault with the immoral tendency of his writings. Why then should our modern purists quarrel with them?---But to return.
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 leavesThe vast concerns of an eternal scene.Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bearsThe palm, "That all men are about to live,"For ever on the brink of being born.All pay themselves the compliment to thinkThey, one day, shall not drivel; and their prideOn this reversion takes up ready praise;At least, their own; their future selves applaudsHow 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 thoughtResolves, 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 fateStrikes 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 shedsO'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 songMay 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 sunSits on yon western tent, whose cloudy skirtsWith 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 leather wing,Or where the beetle windsHis 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 valeMay not unseemly with its stillness suit,As musing slow, I hailThy genial, lov'd return!For when thy folding star arising shewsHis paly circlet, at his warning lampThe fragrant Hours and ElvesWho 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 sweetPrepare thy shadowy car;Then lead, calm Votress, where some sheety lakeCheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow'd pile,Or upland fallows greyReflect 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 sideViews wilds and swelling floods,And hamlets brown, and dim discover'd spires,And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er allThy dewy fingers drawThe 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 sportBeneath 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 some one, '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'dOn his lone hours? Ingenuous views engageHis thoughts, on themes unclassic falsely styl'd,Intent. While cloister'd piety displaysHer mouldering roll, the piercing eye exploresNew manners, and the pomp of elder days,Whence culls the pensive bard his pictur'd stores.Not rough nor barren are the winding waysOf 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 shoreTo 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 groundRepose 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.'
Nothig 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 roundWhich fills the varied interval between;Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.---Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pureNo more return, to cheer my evening road!Yet still one joy remains, that not obscureNor useless, all my vacant days have flow'dFrom 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 him1 who walked in glory and in joyBeside 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 Ætna, to ensure immortality. The brazen slippers alone remain!---
1 Burns.---These lines are taken from the introduction to Mr. Wordsworth's poem of the Leech-gatherer.
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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 rhapodists 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 maybe 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 to himself.'---Chatterton's physiognomy would at least have enabled him to pass incognito. It is quite different from the look of timid wonder and delight with which Annibal Caracci has painted a young Apollo listening to the first sounds he draws from a Pan's pipe, under the tutelage of the old Silenus! If Mr. Croft is sublime on the occasion, Dr. Knox is no less pathetic. 'The testimony of Dr. Knox,' says Dr. Anderson, (Essays, p. 144), 'does equal credit to the classical taste and amiable benevolence of the writer, and the genius and reputation of Chatterton.' 'When I read,' says the Doctor, 'the researches of those learned antiquaries who have endeavoured to prove that the poems attributed to Rowley were really written by him, I observe many ingenious remarks in confirmation of their opinion, which it would be tedious, if not difficult, to controvert.'
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 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 Ælla is I think the best.
'O! synge untoe my roundelaie,O! dropped 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 saveAl 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 brieresRounde hys hallie corse to gre,Ouphante fairies, lyghte your fyres,Heere mie boddie still 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 score,Daunce bie nete, or feaste by daie.Mie love ys dedde,Gonne to hys deathe-bedde,Al under the wyllowe-tree.Water wytches, crownede wythe 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 sounds, or by piling up centos of poetic diction; but for the artificial flowers of poetry, he plucked the mountain-daisy under his feet; and a field-mouse, hurrying from its ruined dwelling, could inspire him with the sentiments of terror and pity. He held the plough or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp; nor did he cut out poetry as we cut out watch-papers, with finical dexterity, nor from the same flimsy materials. Burns was not like Shakspeare in the range of his genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and unaffected character about him. He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a namby-pamby poet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more than Shakspeare. He would as soon hear 'a brazen candlestick tuned, or a dry wheel grate on the axletree.' He was as much of a man---not a twentieth part as much of a poet as Shakspeare. With but little of his imagination or inventive power, he had the same life of mind: within the narrow circle of personal feeling or domestic incidents, the pulse of his poetry flows as healthily and vigorously. He had an eye to see; a heart to feel:---no more. His pictures of good fellowship, of social glee, of quaint humour, are equal to any thing; they come up to nature, and they cannot go beyond it. The sly jest collected in his laughing eye at the sight of the grotesque and ludicrous in manners---the large tear rolled down his manly cheek at the sight of another's distress. He has made us as well acquainted with himself as it is possible to be; has let out the honest impulses of his native disposition, the unequal conflict of the passions in his breast, with the same frankness and truth of description. His strength is not greater than his weakness: his virtues were greater than his vices. His virtues belonged to his genius: his vices to his situation, which did not correspond to his genius.
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 charges against him, shakes his head, and declines giving any opinion in so tremendous a case; so that though the judgment of the former critic is set aside, poor Burns remains just where he was, and nobody gains any thing by the cause but Mr. Wordsworth, in an increasing opinion of his own wisdom and purity. 'Out upon this half-faced fellowship!' The author of the Lyrical Ballads has thus missed a fine opportunity of doing Burns justice and himself honour. He might have shewn himself a philosophical prose-writer, as well as a philosophical poet. He might have offered as amiable and as gallant a defence of the Muses, as my uncle Toby, in the honest simplicity of his heart, did of the army. He might have said at once, instead of making a parcel of wry faces over the matter, that Burns had written Tam o' Shanter, and that that alone was enough; that he could hardly have described the excesses of mad, hairbrained, roaring mirth and convivial indulgence, which are the soul of it, if he himself had not 'drunk full ofter of the ton than of the well'---unless 'the act and practique part of life had been the mistress of his theorique.' Mr. Wordsworth might have quoted such lines as---
'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 strongest impulses; but it is the poet's office to pamper the imagination of his readers and his own with the extremes of present ecstacy or agony, to snatch the swiftwinged golden minutes, the torturing hour, and to banish the dull, prosaic, monotonous realities of life, both from his thoughts and from his practice. Mr. Wordsworth might have shewn how it is that all men of genius, or of originality and independence of mind, are liable to practical errors, from the very confidence their superiority inspires, which makes them fly in the face of custom and prejudice, always rashly, sometimes unjustly; for, after all, custom and prejudice are not without foundation in truth and reason, and no one individual is a match for the world in power, very few in knowledge. The world may altogether be set down as older and wiser than any single person in it.
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 farewell 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 beerbarrels) 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 twineThe 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 mensâ 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 collarShew'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 masterpiece 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 OctoberAe 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 catcht 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 rightFast 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 brother;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 graciousWi' 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 himself 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.Wheel 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 hauling 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!Warlocks and witches in a dance,Nae light cotillion new frae France,But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels,Put life and mettle in their heels.As winnock-bunker, in the east,There sat auld Nick, in shape o' beast;A touzie tyke, black, grim, and large,To gie them music was his charge;He screw'd the pipes, and gart them skirl,Till roof and rafters a' did dirl---Coffins stood round like open presses,That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses;And, by some devilish cantrip slight,Each in its cauld hand held a light---By which heroic Tam was ableTo note upon the haly table,A murderer's banes in gibbet-airns;Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns;A thief, new cutted frae a rape,Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape;Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red rusted;Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted;A garter, which a babe had strangled;A knife, a father's throat had mangled,Whom his ain son o' life bereft,The grey hairs yet stack to the heft;Wi' mair, o' horrible and awfu',Which e'en to name wad be unlawfu'.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 queansA' 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 fykeWhen 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 throughTo 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 dropping in,At service out, amang the farmers roun',Some ca' the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rinA 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, swiftwinged, 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 flameSparkle 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 spyWhat 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 haBible, 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 heartfelt 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 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 stringThe 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 before him, singing to his instrument wildly, but not disagreeably; a little dirty child was playing with the bottom of the harp; a woman in a sick night-cap hanging over the stairs; a boy with crutches fixed in a staring attention, and a girl carding wool in the chimney, and rocking a cradle with her naked feet, interrupted in her business by the charms of the music; all ragged and dirty, and all silently attentive. These figures gave us a most entertaining picture, and would please you or any man of observation; and one reflection gave me a particular comfort, that the assembly before us demonstrated, that even here, the influential sun warmed poor mortals, and inspired them with love and music.'
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 faceTill 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 sail warm us aw,Then sall my love prove true to me.Now Arthur seat sail be my bed,The sheets sall ne'er be fyld by me:Saint Anton's well sail 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 à 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 seenTo mark the revelries which there have been,In the sweet days of merry Robin Hood?Go there with summer, and with evening---goIn the soft shadows, like some wand'ring man---And thou shalt far amid the forest knowThe archer-men in green, with belt and bow,Feasting on pheasant, river-fowl and swan,With Robin at their head, and Marian.'1
1 Sonnet on Sherwood Forest, by J. H. Reynolds, Esq.
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'No more of talk where God or Angel guestWith man, as with his friend, familiar us'dTo 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 idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff, the soothing flattery of favour or of friendship; but it is the spirit of a man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable. It is the power which the intellect exercises over the intellect, and the lasting homage which is paid to it, as such, independently of time and circumstances, purified from partiality and evil-speaking. Fame is the sound which the stream of high thoughts, carried down to future ages, makes as it flows---deep, distant, murmuring evermore like the waters of the mighty ocean. He who has ears truly touched to this music, is in a manner deaf to the voice of popularity.---The love of fame differs from mere vanity in this, that the one is immediate and personal, the other ideal and abstracted. It is not the direct and gross homage paid to himself, that the lover of true fame seeks or is proud of; but the indirect and pure homage paid to the eternal forms of truth and beauty as they are reflected in his mind, that gives him confidence and hope. The love of nature is the first thing in the mind of the true poet: the admiration of himself the last. A man of genius cannot well be a coxcomb; for his mind is too full of other things to be much occupied with his own person. He who is conscious of great powers in himself, has also a high standard of excellence with which to compare his efforts: he appeals also to a test and judge of merit, which is the highest, but which is too remote, grave, and impartial, to flatter his self-love extravagantly, or puff him up with intolerable and vain conceit. This, indeed, is one test of genius and of real greatness of mind, whether a man can wait patiently and calmly for the award of posterity, satisfied with the unwearied exercise of his faculties, retired within the sanctuary of his own thoughts; or whether he is eager to forestal his own immortality, and mortgage it for a newspaper puff. He who thinks much of himself, will be in danger of being forgotten by the rest of the world: he who is always trying to lay violent hands on reputation, will not secure the best and most lasting. If the restless candidate for praise takes no pleasure, no sincere and heartfelt delight in his works, but as they are admired and applauded by others, what should others see in them to admire or applaud? They cannot be expected to admire them because they are his; but for the truth and nature contained in them, which must first be inly felt and copied with severe delight, from the love of truth and nature, before it can ever appear there. Was Raphael, think you, when he painted his pictures of the Virgin and Child in all their inconceivable truth and beauty of expression, thinking most of his subject or of himself? Do you suppose that Titian, when he painted a landscape, was pluming himself on being thought the finest colourist in the world, or making himself so by looking at nature? Do you imagine that Shakspeare, when he wrote Lear or Othello, was thinking of any thing but Lear and Othello? Or that Mr. Kean, when he plays these characters, is thinking of the audience?---No: he who would be great in the eyes of others, must first learn to be nothing in his own. The love of fame, as it enters at times into his mind, is only another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority---that of time.
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 from me, and I must run the gauntlet as well as I can. Another circumstance that adds to the difficulty of doing justice to all parties is, that I happen to have had a personal acquaintance with some of these jealous votaries of the Muses; and that is not the likeliest way to imbibe a high opinion of the rest. Poets do not praise one another in the language of hyperbole. I am afraid, therefore, that I labour under a degree of prejudice against some of the most popular poets of the day, from an early habit of deference to the critical opinions of some of the least popular. I cannot say that I ever learnt much about Shakspeare or Milton, Spenser or Chaucer, from these professed guides; for I never heard them say much about them. They were always talking of themselves and one another. Nor am I certain that this sort of personal intercourse with living authors, while it takes away all real relish or freedom of opinion with regard to their contemporaries, greatly enhances our respect for themselves. Poets are not ideal beings; but have their prose-sides, like the commonest of the people. We often hear persons say, What they would have given to have seen Shakspeare! For my part, I would give a great deal not to have seen him; at least, if he was at all like any body else that I have ever seen. But why should he; for his works are not! This is, doubtless, one great advantage which the dead have over the living. It is always fortunate for ourselves and others, when we are prevented from exchanging admiration for knowledge. The splendid vision that in youth haunts our idea of the poetical character, fades, upon acquaintance, into the light of common day; as the azure tints that deck the mountain's brow are lost on a nearer approach to them. It is well, according to the moral of one of the Lyrical Ballads,---'To leave Yarrow unvisited.' But to leave this 'face-making,' and begin.---
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. I wish I could repay my childish debt of gratitude in terms of appropriate praise. She is a very pretty poetess; and, to my fancy, strews the flowers of poetry most agreeably round the borders of religious controversy. She is a neat and pointed prose-writer. Her 'Thoughts on the Inconsistency of Human Expectations,' is one of the most ingenious and sensible essays in the language. There is the same idea in one of Barrow's Sermons.
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 the 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 greatBeyond 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 formHealth 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 showElaborate; 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 hotpressed 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.'1
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 revolutions of the planets. He unexpectedly appears just in the nick of time, after years of absence, and without any known reason but the convenience of the author and the astonishment of the reader; as if nature were a machine constructed on a principle of complete contrast, to produce a theatrical effect. Nec Deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus. Mr. Campbell's savage never appears but upon great occasions, and then his punctuality is preternatural and alarming. He is the most wonderful instance on record of poetical reliability. The most dreadful mischiefs happen at the most mortifying moments; and when your expectations are wound up to the highest pitch, you are sure to have them knocked on the head by a premeditated and remorseless stroke of the poet's pen. This is done so often for the convenience of the author, that in the end it ceases to be for the satisfaction of the reader.
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, and grandeur. His mind does not brood over the great and permanent; it glances over the surfaces, the first impressions of things, instead of grappling with the deep-rooted prejudices of the mind, its inveterate habits, and that 'perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.' His pen, as it is rapid and fanciful, wants momentum and passion. It requires the same principle to make us thoroughly like poetry, that makes us like ourselves so well, the feeling of continued identity. The impressions of Mr. Moore's poetry are detached, desultory, and physical. Its gorgeous colours brighten and fade like the rainbow's. Its sweetness evaporates like the effluvia exhaled from beds of flowers! His gay laughing style, which relates to the immediate pleasures of love or wine, is better than his sentimental and romantic vein. His Irish melodies are not free from affectation and a certain sickliness of pretension. His serious descriptions are apt to run into flowery tenderness. His pathos sometimes melts into a mawkish sensibility, or crystallizes into all the prettinesses of allegorical language, and glittering hardness of external imagery. But he has wit at will, and of the first quality. His satirical and burlesque poetry is his best: it is first-rate. His Twopenny Post-Bag is a perfect 'nest of spicery'; where the Cayenne is not spared. The politician there sharpens the poet's pen. In this too, our bard resembles the bee---he has its honey and its sting.
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 hueUnto the rainbow, or with taper lightTo 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 nothing to do with it. Mr. Scott has great intuitive power of fancy, great vividness of pencil in placing external objects and events before the eye. The force of his mind is picturesque, rather than moral. He gives more of the features of nature than the soul of passion. He conveys the distinct outlines and visible changes in outward objects, rather than 'their mortal consequences.' He is very inferior to Lord Byron in intense passion, to Moore in delightful fancy, to Mr. Wordsworth in profound sentiment: but he has more picturesque power than any of them; that is, he places the objects themselves, about which they might feel and think, in a much more striking point of view, with greater variety of dress and attitude, and with more local truth of colouring. His imagery is Gothic and grotesque. The manners and actions have the interest and curiosity belonging to a wild country and a distant period of time. Few descriptions have a more complete reality, a more striking appearance of life and motion, than that of the warriors in the Lady of the Lake, who start up at the command of Rhoderic Dhu, from their concealment under the fern, and disappear again in an instant. The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion are the first, and perhaps the best of his works. The Goblin Page, in the first of these, is a very interesting and inscrutable little personage. In reading these poems, I confess I am a little disconcerted, in turning over the page, to find Mr. Westall's pictures, which always seem fac-similes of the persons represented, with ancient costume and a theatrical air. This may be a compliment to Mr. Westall, but it is not one to Walter Scott. The truth is, there is a modern air in the midst of the antiquarian research of Mr. Scott's poetry. It is history or tradition in masquerade. Not only the crust of old words and images is worn off with time,---the substance is grown comparatively light and worthless. The forms are old and uncouth; but the spirit is effeminate and frivolous. This is a deduction from the praise I have given to his pencil for extreme fidelity, though it has been no obstacle to its drawing-room success. He has just hit the town between the romantic and the fashionable; and between the two, secured all classes of readers on his side. In a word, I conceive that he is to the great poet, what an excellent mimic is to a great actor. There is no determinate impression left on the mind by reading his poetry. It has no results. The reader rises up from the perusal with new images and associations, but he remains the same man that he was before. A great mind is one that moulds the minds of others. Mr. Scott has put the Border Minstrelsy and scattered traditions of the country into easy, animated verse. But the Notes to his poems are just as entertaining as the poems themselves, and his poems are only entertaining.
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 Æolian 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 moorWith 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 thirdWhich 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 onWith 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 fetchedThe 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 leastNine roods of sheer ascent) Sir Walter found,Three several hoof-marks which the hunted beastHad left imprinted on the verdant ground.Sir Walter wiped his face and cried, "Till nowSuch 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 frameA bason for that fountain in the dell;And they, who do make mention of the sameFrom 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 tallWith 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 songMade 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.'PART SECOND'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 dellThree 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 toldWhich 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 wellHunt 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 tellWhat 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 drankWhen he had wandered from his mother's side.In April here beneath the scented thornHe heard the birds their morning carols sing;And he, perhaps, for aught we know, was bornNot 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 careFor 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 moreShall 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 prideWith 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 something 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. Authority and fashion, elegance or arrangement, were hooted out of countenance, as pedantry and prejudice. Every one did that which was good in his own eyes. The object was to reduce all things to an absolute level; and a singularly affected and outrageous simplicity prevailed in dress and manners, in style and sentiment. A striking effect produced where it was least expected, something new and original, no matter whether good, bad, or indifferent, whether mean or lofty, extravagant or childish, was all that was aimed at, or considered as compatible with sound philosophy and an age of reason. The licentiousness grew extreme: Coryate's Crudities were nothing to it. The world was to be turned topsy-turvy; and poetry, by the good will of our Adamwits, was to share its fate and begin de novo. It was a time of promise, a renewal of the world and of letters; and the Deucalions, who were to perform this feat of regeneration, were the present poet-laureat and the two authors of the Lyrical Ballads. The Germans, who made heroes of robbers, and honest women of cast-off mistresses, had already exhausted the extravagant and marvellous in sentiment and situation: our native writers adopted a wonderful simplicity of style and matter. The paradox they set out with was, that all things are by nature equally fit subjects for poetry; or that if there is any preference to be given, those that are the meanest and most unpromising are the best, as they leave the greatest scope for the unbounded stores of thought and fancy in the writer's own mind. Poetry had with them 'neither buttress nor coigne of vantage to make its pendant bed and procreant cradle.' It was not 'born so high: its aiery buildeth in the cedar's top, and dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.' It grew like a mushroom out of the ground; or was hidden in it like a truffle, which it required a particular sagacity and industry to find out and dig up. They founded the new school on a principle of sheer humanity, on pure nature void of art. It could not be said of these sweeping reformers and dictators in the republic of letters, that 'in their train walked crowns and crownets; that realms and islands, like plates, dropt from their pockets': but they were surrounded, in company with the Muses, by a mixed rabble of idle apprentices and Botany Bay convicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughters in the family of Christ, of ideot boys and mad mothers, and after them 'owls and night-ravens flew.' They scorned 'degrees, priority, and place, insisture, course, proportion, season, form, office, and custom in all line of order':---the distinctions of birth, the vicissitudes of fortune, did not enter into their abstracted, lofty, and levelling calculation of human nature. He who was more than man, with them was none. They claimed kindred only with the commonest of the people: peasants, pedlars, and village-barbers were their oracles and bosom friends. Their poetry, in the extreme to which it professedly tended, and was in effect carried, levels all distinctions of nature and society; has 'no figures nor no fantasies,' which the prejudices of superstition or the customs of the world draw in the brains of men; 'no trivial fond records' of all that has existed in the history of past ages; it has no adventitious pride, pomp, or circumstance, to set it off; 'the marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe'; neither tradition, reverence, nor ceremony, 'that to great ones 'longs': it breaks in pieces the golden images of poetry, and defaces its armorial bearings, to melt them down in the mould of common humanity or of its own upstart self-sufficiency. They took the same method in their new-fangled 'metre ballad-mongering' scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes---of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world. They were for bringing poetry back to its primitive simplicity and state of nature, as he was for bringing society back to the savage state: so that the only thing remarkable left in the world by this change, would be the persons who had produced it. A thorough adept in this school of poetry and philanthropy is jealous of all excellence but his own. He does not even like to share his reputation with his subject; for he would have it all proceed from his own power and originality of mind. Such a one is slow to admire any thing that is admirable; feels no interest in what is most interesting to others, no grandeur in any thing grand, no beauty in anything beautiful. He tolerates only what he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what can enter into no competition with him, with 'the bare trees and mountains bare, and grass in the green field.' He sees nothing but himself and the universe. He hates all greatness and all pretensions to it, whether well or ill-founded. His egotism is in some respects a madness; for he scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all science and all art; he hates chemistry, he hates conchology; he hates Voltaire; he hates Sir Isaac Newton; he hates wisdom; he hates wit; he hates metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible, and yet he would be thought to understand them; he hates prose; he hates all poetry but his own; he hates the dialogues in Shakespeare; he hates music, dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens, he hates Rembrandt; he hates Raphael, he hates Titian; he hates Vandyke; he hates the antique; he hates the Apollo Belvidere; he hates the Venus of Medicis. This is the reason that so few people take an interest in his writings, because he takes an interest in nothing that others do!---The effect has been perceived as something odd; but the cause or principle has never been distinctly traced to its source before, as far as I know. The proofs are to be found every where---in Mr. Southey's Botany Bay Eclogues, in his book of Songs and Sonnets, his Odes and Inscriptions, so well parodied in the Anti-Jacobin Review, in his Joan of Arc, and last, though not least, in his Wat Tyler:
'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 Raisonné 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!2---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.
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 Cæsar? To him I say, that Brutus's love to Cæsar 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 Christabel, 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 disdainAnd insult to his heart's best brother,And parted ne'er to meet again!But neither ever found anotherTo 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 weenThe marks of that which once hath been.Sir Leoline a moment's spaceStood gazing on the damsel's face;And the youthful lord of TryermaineCame 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 sentFrom the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,That fearful voice, a famish'd father's cry---That in no after moment aught less vastMight stamp me mortal! A triumphant shoutBlack Horror scream'd, and all her goblin routFrom 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 hourOf glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow'r;I do not grieve, but rather findStrength in what remains behind;In the primal sympathy,Which having been, must ever be;In the soothing thoughts that springOut 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.
End of LECTURES ON
THE ENGLISH POETS
1 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.
2 'O reader! hast thou ever stood to seeThe Holly Tree?The eye that contemplates it well perceivesIts glossy leaves,Ordered by an intelligence so wiseAs might confound the Atheist's sophistries.Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seenWrinkled and keen;No grazing cattle through their prickly roundCan 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 TreeCan emblems seeWherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme,Such as may profit in the after time.So, though abroad perchance I might appearHarsh and austere,To those who on my leisure would intrudeReserved 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 dayWould wear away,Till the smooth temper of my age should beLike the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.And as when all the summer trees are seenSo bright and green,The Holly leaves their fadeless hues displayLess 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 amongThe thoughtless throng,So would I seem amid the young and gayMore grave than they,That in my age as cheerful I might beAs the green winter of the Holly Tree.'---
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