Lectures on the English Poets by William Hazlitt
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LECTURE I.—INTRODUCTORYON POETRY IN GENERAL.
The best general notion which I can give of poetryis, that it is the natural impression of any objector event, by its vividness exciting an involuntarymovement of imagination and passion, and producing,by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, orsounds, expressing it.
In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of thesubject-matter of it, next of the forms of expressionto which it gives birth, and afterwards of its connectionwith harmony of sound.
Poetry is the language of the imagination and thepassions. It relates to whatever gives immediatepleasure or pain to the human mind. It comeshome to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothingbut what so comes home to them in the most generaland intelligible shape, can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heartholds with nature and itself. He who has a contemptfor poetry, cannot have much respect for himself,or for any thing else. It is not a mere frivolousaccomplishment, (as some persons have been led to imagine)the trifling amusem*nt of a few idle readers or leisurehours—it has been the study and delightof mankind in all ages. Many people suppose thatpoetry is something to be found only in books, containedin 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 itssweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beautyto the sun,”—there is poetry,in its birth. If history is a grave study, poetrymay be said to be a graver: its materials liedeeper, and are spread wider. History treats,for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldly massesof things, the empty cases in which the affairs ofthe world are packed, under the heads of intrigueor war, in different states, and from century to century:but there is no thought or feeling that can have enteredinto the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicateto others, or which they would listen to with delight,that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is nota branch of authorship: it is “the stuffof which our life is made.” The rest is“mere oblivion,” a dead letter: forall that is worth remembering in life, is the poetryof it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, loveis poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse,admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, areall poetry. Poetry is that fine particle withinus, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our wholebeing: without it “man’s life is pooras beast’s.” Man is a poetical animal:and those of us who do not study the principles ofpoetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere’sBourgeois Gentilhomme, who had always spokenprose without knowing it. The child is a poetin fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats
the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boyis a poet, when he first crowns his mistress witha garland of flowers; the countryman, when he stopsto look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice, when hegazes after the Lord-Mayor’s show; the miser,when he hugs his gold; the courtier, who builds hishopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idolwith blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or thetyrant, who fancies himself a god;—thevain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man,the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, therich and the poor, the young and the old, all livein a world of their own making; and the poet doesno more than describe what all the others think andact. If his art is folly and madness, it is follyand madness at second hand. “There iswarrant for it.” Poets alone have not “suchseething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehendmore than cooler reason” can.“The lunatic,the lover, and the poet
Are of imaginationall compact.
One sees moredevils than vast hell can hold;
The madman. While the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’sbeauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’seye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance fromheav’n to earth, from earth to heav’n;
And as imaginationbodies forth
The forms of thingsunknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them toshape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitationand a name.
Such tricks hathstrong imagination.”
If poetry is a dream, the business of life is muchthe same. If it is a fiction, made up of whatwe wish things to be, and fancy that they are, becausewe 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 mistresson the barks of trees, as much enamoured of her charmsas he? Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles:but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Platobanished the poets from his Commonwealth, lest theirdescriptions of the natural man should spoil his mathematicalman, who was to be without passions and affections,who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow noranger, to be cast down nor elated by any thing. This was a chimera, however, which never existedbut in the brain of the inventor; and Homer’spoetical world has outlived Plato’s philosophicalRepublic.
Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imaginationand 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 emphaticallanguage that can be found for those creations of themind “which ecstacy is very cunning in.”Neither a mere description of natural objects, nora mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinctor forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aimof poetry, without the heightenings of the imagination.
The light of poetry is not only a direct but alsoa 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 inmostrecesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest otherforms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into theuniverse. It describes the flowing, not thefixed. It does not define the limits of sense,or analyze the distinctions of the understanding,but signifies the excess of the imagination beyondthe actual or ordinary impression of any object orfeeling. The poetical impression of any objectis that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or powerthat cannot be contained within itself; that is impatientof all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strivesto link itself to some other image of kindred beautyor grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in thehighest forms of fancy, and to relieve the achingsense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner,and by the most striking examples of the same qualityin other instances. Poetry, according to LordBacon, for this reason, “has something divinein it, because it raises the mind and hurries it intosublimity, by conforming the shows of things to thedesires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soulto external things, as reason and history do.”It is strictly the language of the imagination; andthe imagination is that faculty which represents objects,not as they are in themselves, but as they are mouldedby other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite varietyof shapes and combinations of power. This languageis not the less true to nature, because it is falsein point of fact; but so much the more true and natural,if it conveys the impression which the object underthe influence of passion makes on the mind. Letan object, for instance, be presented to the sensesin a state of agitation or fear— and theimagination will distort or magnify the object, andconvert it into the likeness of whatever is most properto encourage the fear. “Our eyes are madethe fools” of our other faculties. Thisis the universal law of the imagination,“That if it would but apprehendsome 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 theflame to accord with the speaker’s own feelings,is true poetry. The lover, equally with thepoet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistressas locks of shining gold, because the least tingeof yellow in the hair has, from novelty and a sense
of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to theimagination than the purest gold. We comparea man of gigantic stature to a tower: not thathe is any thing like so large, but because the excessof his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect,or the usual size of things of the same class, producesby contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderousstrength than another object of ten times the samedimensions. The intensity of the feeling makesup for the disproportion of the objects. Thingsare equal to the imagination, which have the powerof affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror,admiration, delight, or love. When Lear callsupon the heavens to avenge his cause, “for theyare old like him,” there is nothing extravagantor impious in this sublime identification of his agewith theirs; for there is no other image which coulddo justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs andhis despair!Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy andfeeling. As in describing natural objects, itimpregnates sensible impressions with the forms offancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure orpain, by blending them with the strongest movementsof passion, and the most striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned speciesof it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmostpoint of sublimity or pathos, by all the force ofcomparison or contrast; loses the sense of presentsuffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it; exhauststhe terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it;grapples with impossibilities in its desperate impatienceof restraint; throws us back upon the past, forwardinto the future; brings every moment of our beingor object of nature in startling review before us;and in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from thedepths of woe to the highest contemplations on humanlife. When Lear says of Edgar, “Nothingbut his unkind daughters could have brought him tothis;” what a bewildered amazement, what a wrenchof the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceiveof any other cause of misery than that which has bowedit down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own!His sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources ofall other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims inthe mad scene, “The little dogs and all, Tray,Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!”it is passion lending occasion to imagination to makeevery creature in league against him, conjuring upingratitude and insult in their least looked-for andmost galling shapes, searching every thread and fibreof his heart, and finding out the last remaining imageof 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 fromher heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it ofa weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, whichhad pressed upon it for years. What a fine returnof the passion upon itself is that in Othello—withwhat a mingled agony of regret and despair he clingsto the last traces of departed happiness—whenhe 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 circ*mstance 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 rageslike a tide in its sounding course, when in answerto the doubts expressed of his returning love, hesays,
“Never,Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy currentand compulsive course
Ne’er feelsretiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Proponticand the Hellespont:
Even so my bloodythoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne’erlook back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capableand wide revenge
Swallow them up.”—
The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemonais at that line [sic],
“But therewhere I had garner’d up my heart,
To be discardedthence!”—
One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passionexcites our sympathy without raising our disgust is,that in proportion as it sharpens the edge of calamityand disappointment, it strengthens the desire of good. It enhances our consciousness of the blessing, bymaking us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion lays bare and shews us the richdepths of the human soul: the whole of our existence,the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of thatwhich we desire and that which we dread, is broughtbefore us by contrast; the action and re-action areequal; the keenness of immediate suffering only givesus a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimateparticipation with the antagonist world of good; makesus drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs atthe heart-strings; loosens the pressure about them;and calls the springs of thought and feeling intoplay with tenfold force.
Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral andintellectual part of our nature, as well as of thesensitive—of the desire to know, the willto act, and the power to feel; and ought to appealto these different parts of our constitution, in orderto be perfect. The domestic or prose tragedy,which is thought to be the most natural, is in thissense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusivelyto one of these faculties, our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo, for this reason,however affecting at the time, oppress and lie likea dead weight upon the mind, a load of misery whichit 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 allthe forms of imagination, and with the deepest workingsof 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 fictitiousand fanciful thing. It is not an anomaly ofthe imagination. It has its source and ground-workin the common love of strong excitement. AsMr. 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 notthen the difference between fiction and reality thatsolves the difficulty. Children are satisfiedwith the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose:nor do the hawkers of full, true, and particular accountsof murders and executions about the streets, findit necessary to have them turned into penny ballads,before they can dispose of these interesting and authenticdocuments. The grave politician drives a thrivingtrade of abuse and calumnies poured out against thosewhom he makes his enemies for no other end than thathe may live by them. The popular preacher makesless frequent mention of heaven than of hell. Oaths and nicknames are only a more vulgar sort ofpoetry or rhetoric. We are as fond of indulgingour violent passions as of reading a description ofthose of others. We are as prone to make a tormentof our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer willbe, Because we cannot help it. The sense of poweris as strong a principle in the mind as the love ofpleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercisethe same despotic control over it as those of loveor beauty. It is as natural to hate as to love,to despise as to admire, to express our hatred orcontempt, as our love or admiration.
“Masterlesspassion sways us to the mood
Of what it likesor loathes.”
Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulgeour hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperateour idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity andextravagance of illustration; to make it a bugbearto ourselves, to point it out to others in all thesplendour 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 willagainst it, to know the worst we have to contend with,and to contend with it to the utmost. Poetryis only the highest eloquence of passion, the mostvivid form of expression that can be given to ourconception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful,mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and thewords with the feeling we have, and of which we cannotget rid in any other way, that gives an instant “satisfactionto the thought.” This is equally the originof wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublimeand pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord Mayor’sshew,—
“Now night descending,the proud scene is o’er,
But lives in Settle’s numbers one daymore!”
—when Collins makes Danger, “withlimbs of giant mould,”
------“Throw him on the steepOf some loose hanging rock asleep:”
when Lear calls out in extreme anguish,
“Ingratitude, thou marble-heartedfiend,
How much more hideous shew’st in a child
Than the sea-monster!”
—the passion of contempt in the one case,of terror in the other, and of indignation in thelast, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thingourselves, and shew it to others as we feel it to exist,and as, in spite of ourselves, we are compelled tothink of it. The imagination, by thus embodyingand turning them to shape, gives an obvious reliefto the indistinct and importunate cravings of thewill.—We do not wish the thing to be so;but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledgeis conscious power; and the mind is no longer, inthis case, the dupe, though it may be the victim ofvice or folly.
Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imaginationand the passions, of fancy and will. Nothing,therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry whichhas been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics,for reducing the language of poetry to the standardof common sense and reason: for the end and useof poetry, “both at the first and now, was andis to hold the mirror up to nature,” seen throughthe medium of passion and imagination, not divestedof that medium by means of literal truth or abstractreason. The painter of history might as wellbe required to represent the face of a person who hasjust trod upon a serpent with the still-life expressionof a common portrait, as the poet to describe themost striking and vivid impressions which things canbe supposed to make upon the mind, in the languageof common conversation. Let who will strip natureof the colours and the shapes of fancy, the poet isnot bound to do so; the impressions of common senseand strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference,cannot be the same, and they must have a separatelanguage to do justice to either. Objects muststrike differently upon the mind, independently ofwhat they are in themselves, as long as we have a differentinterest in them, as we see them in a different pointof view, nearer or at a greater distance (morallyor physically speaking) from novelty, from old acquaintance,from our ignorance of them, from our fear of theirconsequences, 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 preternaturallight; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt ourcuriosity to explore their obscurity. Those whowould dispel these various illusions, to give us theirdrab-coloured creation in their stead, are not verywise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch theglow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and findit next morning nothing but a little grey worm; letthe poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening,
when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescentmoon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. This is also one part of nature, one appearance whichthe glow-worm presents, and that not the least interesting;so poetry is one part of the history of the humanmind, though it is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot be concealed, however, that the progressof knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circ*mscribethe limits of the imagination, and to clip the wingsof poetry. The province of the imagination isprincipally visionary, the unknown and undefined:the understanding restores things to their naturalboundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasmis much the same; and both have received a sensibleshock from the progress of experimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon that gives birthand scope to the imagination; we can only fancy whatwe do not know. As in looking into the mazesof a tangled wood we fill them with what shapes weplease, with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, anddrear enchantments, so in our ignorance of the worldabout us, we make gods or devils of the first objectwe see, and set no bounds to the wilful suggestionsof our hopes and fears.“And visions,as poetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leafand 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 averseto the imagination, nor will they return to us on thesquares of the distances, or on Doctor Chalmers’sDiscourses. Rembrandt’s picture bringsthe matter nearer to us.—It is not onlythe progress of mechanical knowledge, but the necessaryadvances of civilization that are unfavourable tothe spirit of poetry. We not only stand in lessawe of the preternatural world, but we can calculatemore surely, and look with more indifference, uponthe regular routine of this. The heroes of thefabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we are less exposed to the vicissitudesof good or evil, to the incursions of wild beastsor “bandit fierce,” or to the unmitigatedfury of the elements. The time has been that“our fell of hair would at a dismal treatiserouse and stir as life were in it.” Butthe police spoils all; and we now hardly so much asdream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is onlytolerated in this country for the sake of the music;and in the United States of America, where the philosophicalprinciples of government are carried still fartherin theory and practice, we find that the Beggar’sOpera is hooted from the stage. Society, by degrees,is constructed into a machine that carries us safelyand insipidly from one end of life to the other, ina very comfortable prose style.
“Obscurityher curtain round them drew,
And siren Slotha dull quietus sung.”
The remarks which have been here made, would, in somemeasure, lead to a solution of the question of thecomparative merits of painting and poetry. Ido not mean to give any preference, but it should seemthat the argument which has been sometimes set up,that painting must affect the imagination more strongly,because it represents the image more distinctly, isnot well founded. We may assume without muchtemerity, that poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or connoisseurs talk on stilts aboutthe poetry of painting, they shew that they know littleabout poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives the object itself; poetry what itimplies. Painting embodies what a thing containsin itself: poetry suggests what exists out ofit, in any manner connected with it. But thislast is the proper province of the imagination. Again, as it relates to passion, painting gives theevent, poetry the progress of events: but itis during the progress, in the interval of expectationand suspense, while our hopes and fears are strainedto the highest pitch of breathless agony, that thepinch of the interest lies.
“Betweenthe acting of a dreadful thing
And the firstmotion, all the interim is
Like a phantasmaor a hideous dream.
The mortal instrumentsare then in council;
And the stateof man, like to a little kingdom,
Suffers then thenature of an insurrection.”
But by the time that the picture is painted, all isover. Faces are the best part of a picture;but even faces are not what we chiefly remember inwhat interests us most.—But it may be askedthen, Is there anything better than Claude Lorraine’slandscapes, than Titian’s portraits, than Raphael’scartoons, or the Greek statues? Of the two firstI shall say nothing, as they are evidently picturesque,rather than imaginative. Raphael’s cartoonsare certainly the finest comments that ever were madeon the Scriptures. Would their effect be thesame 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 nightbefore his death. But that chapter does notneed a commentary! It is for want of some suchresting place for the imagination that the Greek statuesare little else than specious forms. They aremarble to the touch and to the heart. They havenot an informing principle within them. In theirfaultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they are raised above the frailtiesof passion or suffering. By their beauty theyare deified. But they are not objects of religiousfaith to us, and their forms are a reproach to commonhumanity. They seem to have no sympathy withus, and not to want our admiration.
Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery orfeeling, combined with passion and fancy. Inits mode of conveyance, it combines the ordinary useof language with musical expression. There isa question of long standing, in what the essence ofpoetry consists; or what it is that determines whyone set of ideas should be expressed in prose, anotherin verse. Milton has told us his idea of poetryin a single line—
“Thoughtsthat voluntary move
Harmonious numbers.”
As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements,and the song and dance go together, so there are,no doubt, certain thoughts that lead to certain tonesof voice, or modulations of sound, and change “thewords of Mercury into the songs of Apollo.”There is a striking instance of this adaptation ofthe movement of sound and rhythm to the subject, inSpenser’s description of the Satyrs accompanyingUna to the cave of Sylvanus.
“So from the ground shefearless doth arise
And walketh forth without suspect of crime.
They, all as glad as birds of joyous prime,
Thence lead her forth, about her dancinground,
Shouting and singing all a shepherd’srhyme;
And with green branches strewing all theground,
Do worship her as queen with olive garland crown’d.
And all the way their merry pipesthey 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 ornatural in the ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntarysigns of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangementsin common speech, is there any principle of naturalimitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas,or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyedto others. The jerks, the breaks, the inequalities,and harshnesses of prose, are fatal to the flow ofa poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumblinghorse disturbs the reverie of an absent man. But poetry makes these odds all even. It isthe music of language, answering to the music of themind, untying as it were “the secret soul ofharmony.” Wherever any object takes sucha hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, andbrood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, orkindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;—wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressedon the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeatthe emotion, to bring all other objects into accordwith it, and to give the same movement of harmony,sustained and continuous, or gradually varied accordingto the occasion, to the sounds that express it—thisis poetry. The musical in sound is the sustainedand continuous; the musical in thought is the sustainedand continuous also. There is a near connectionbetween music and deep-rooted passion. Mad peoplesing. As often as articulation passes naturallyinto intonation, there poetry begins. Where oneidea gives a tone and colour to others, where onefeeling melts others into it, there can be no reasonwhy the same principle should not be extended to the
sounds by which the voice utters these emotions ofthe soul, and blends syllables and lines into eachother. It is to supply the inherent defect ofharmony in the customary mechanism of language, tomake the sound an echo to the sense, when the sensebecomes a sort of echo to itself—to minglethe tide of verse, “the golden cadences of poetry,”with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring asit flows—in short, to take the languageof the imagination from off the ground, and enableit to spread its wings where it may indulge its ownimpulses—“Sailingwith supreme dominion
Through the azuredeep of air—”
without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted withthe abruptnesses and petty obstacles, and discordantflats 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 arriveat a certain harmony by the modulations of the voice:in poetry the same thing is done systematically bya regular collocation of syllables. It has beenwell observed, that every one who declaims warmly,or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sortof blank verse or measured prose. The merchant,as described in Chaucer, went on his way “soundingalways the increase of his winning.” Everyprose-writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation,except poets, who, when deprived of the regular mechanismof verse, seem to have no principle of modulation leftin their writings.
An excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner. It is but fair that the ear should linger on thesounds that delight it, or avail itself of the samebrilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence ofsyllables, that have been displayed in the inventionand collocation of images. It is allowed thatrhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit and shrewdnesshas been heard to say, that the only four good linesof poetry are the well known ones which tell the numberof days in the months of the year.
“Thirtydays hath September,” &c.
But if the jingle of names assists the memory, mayit not also quicken the fancy? and there are otherthings worth having at our fingers’ ends, besidesthe contents of the almanac.—Pope’sversification is tiresome, from its excessive sweetnessand uniformity. Shakspeare’s blank verseis the perfection of dramatic dialogue.
All is not poetry that passes for such: nor doesverse make the whole difference between poetry andprose. The Iliad does not cease to be poetryin a literal translation; and Addison’s Campaignhas been very properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from poetry, as treating forthe most part either of such trite, familiar, andirksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinaryimpulse to the imagination, or else of such difficultand laborious processes of the understanding, as donot admit of the wayward or violent movements eitherof the imagination or the passions.
I will mention three works which come as near to poetryas possible without absolutely being so, namely, thePilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and theTales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translatedsome of the last into English rhyme, but the essenceand the power of poetry was there before. Thatwhich lifts the spirit above the earth, which drawsthe soul out of itself with indescribable longings,is poetry in kind, and generally fit to become soin name, by being “married to immortal verse.”If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fixthe imagination, whether we will or no, to make theeye of childhood glisten with the starting tear, tobe never thought of afterwards with indifference,John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to passfor poets in their way. The mixture of fancyand reality in the Pilgrim’s Progress was neverequalled in any allegory. His pilgrims walk abovethe earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, whatbeauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feelingin the description of Christian’s swimming acrossthe water at last, and in the picture of the ShiningOnes within the gates, with wings at their backs andgarlands on their heads, who are to wipe all tearsfrom his eyes! The writer’s genius, thoughnot “dipped in dews of Castalie,” was baptisedwith the Holy Spirit and with fire. The printsin this book are no small part of it. If theconfinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnoswas a subject for the most beautiful of all the Greektragedies, what shall we say to Robinson Crusoe inhis? Take the speech of the Greek hero on leavinghis cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with thereflections of the English adventurer in his solitaryplace of confinement. The thoughts of home,and of all from which he is for ever cut off, swelland press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rollsits ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and thevery beatings of his heart become audible in the eternalsilence that surrounds him. Thus he says,
“As I walked about, either in my hunting,or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soulat my condition would break out upon me on a sudden,and my very heart would die within me to think of thewoods, the mountains, the deserts I was in; and howI was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal barsand bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness,without redemption. In the midst of the greatestcomposures of my mind, this would break out upon melike a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weeplike a child. Sometimes it would take me inthe middle of my work, and I would immediately sitdown and sigh, and look upon the ground for an houror two together, and this was still worse to me, forif I could burst into tears or vent myself in words,it would go off, and the grief having exhausted itselfwould abate.” P. 50.
The story of his adventures would not make a poemlike the Odyssey, it is true; but the relator hadthe true genius of a poet. It has been madea question whether Richardson’s romances arepoetry; and the answer perhaps is, that they are notpoetry, because they are not romance. The interestis worked up to an inconceivable height; but it isby an infinite number of little things, by incessantlabour and calls upon the attention, by a repetitionof blows that have no rebound in them. The sympathyexcited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is unforced and spontaneous. Thereis a want of elasticity and motion. The storydoes not “give an echo to the seat where loveis throned.” The heart does not answerof itself like a chord in music. The fancy doesnot run on before the writer with breathless expectation,but is dragged along with an infinite number of pinsand wheels, like those with which the Lilliputiansdragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.—SirCharles Grandison is a coxcomb. What sort ofa figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem,by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divineClarissa, is too interesting by half. She isinteresting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers,her aunts and uncles—she is interestingin all that is uninteresting. Such things, howeverintensely they may be brought home to us, are notconductors to the imagination. There is infinitetruth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extractedfrom a caput mortuum of circ*mstances:it does not evaporate of itself. His poeticalgenius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, andrequires an artificial process to let it out. Shakspeare says—
“Ourpoesy is as a gum
Which issues whence’tis nourished, our gentle flame
Provokes itself,and like the current flies
Each bound itchafes.” [1]
I shall conclude this general account with some remarkson four of the principal works of poetry in the world,at different periods of history—Homer,the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. InHomer, the principle of action or life is predominant;in the Bible, the principle of faith and the ideaof Providence; Dante is a personification of blindwill; and in Ossian we see the decay of life, andthe lag end of the world. Homer’s poetryis the heroic: it is full of life and action:it is bright as the day, strong as a river. Inthe vigour of his intellect, he grapples with allthe objects of nature, and enters into all the relationsof social life.
___[1] Burke’s writings are not poetry, notwithstanding the vividness ofthe fancy, because the subject matter is abstruse and dry, not natural,but artificial. The difference between poetry and eloquence is, that theone is the eloquence of the imagination, and the other of theunderstanding. Eloquence tries to persuade the will, and convince thereason: poetry produces its effect by instantaneous sympathy. Nothing isa subject for poetry that admits of a dispute. Poets are in general badprose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are notto the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetrywants the forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic.And some of our own poetry which has been most admired, is only poetryin the rhyme, and in the studied use of poetic diction.___
He saw many countries, and the manners of many men;and he has brought them all together in his poem. He describes his heroes going to battle with a prodigalityof life, arising from an exuberance of animal spirits:we see them before us, their number, and their orderof battle, poured out upon the plain “all plumedlike estriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton asgoats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and gorgeousas the sun at midsummer,” covered with glitteringarmour, with dust and blood; while the Gods quafftheir nectar in golden cups, or mingle in the fray;and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy riseup with reverence as Helen passes by them. Themultitude of things in Homer is wonderful; their splendour,their truth, their force, and variety. His poetryis, 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 andof faith: it is abstract and disembodied:it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not ofmultitude, but of immensity. It does not divideinto many, but aggrandizes into one. Its ideasof nature are like its ideas of God. It is notthe poetry of social life, but of solitude: eachman seems alone in the world, with the original formsof 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 resignationto the power that governs the universe. As theidea of God was removed farther from humanity, anda scattered polytheism, it became more profound andintense, as it became more universal, for the Infiniteis present to every thing: “If we fly intothe uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also;if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escapefrom it.” Man is thus aggrandised in theimage of his Maker. The history of the patriarchsis of this kind; they are founders of a chosen raceof people, the inheritors of the earth; they existin 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 overit. The spirit of the Christian religion consistsin the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in theHebrew dispensation, Providence took an immediateshare in the affairs of this life. Jacob’sdream arose out of this intimate communion betweenheaven and earth: it was this that let down,in the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden ladderfrom the sky to the earth, with angels ascending anddescending upon it, and shed a light upon the lonelyplace, which can never pass away. The storyof Ruth, again, is as if all the depth of naturalaffection in the human race was involved in her breast. There are descriptions in the book of Job more prodigalof imagery, more intense in passion, than any thingin 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 boldlyfigurative. Things were collected more intomasses, and gave a greater momentum to the imagination.Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he maytherefore claim a place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic darknessand barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it toburst the thraldom in which the human mind had beenso long held, is felt in every page. He stoodbewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore whichseparates the ancient and the modern world; and sawthe glories of antiquity dawning through the abyssof time, while revelation opened its passage to theother world. He was lost in wonder at what hadbeen done before him, and he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been indebted to the Bible forthe gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for the propheticfury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he isutterly unlike Homer. His genius is not a sparklingflame, but the sullen heat of a furnace. Heis power, passion, self-will personified. Inall that relates to the descriptive or fanciful partof poetry, he bears no comparison to many who hadgone before, or who have come after him; but thereis a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lieslike 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 usin dreams; an identity of interest, which moulds everyobject to its own purposes, and clothes all thingswith the passions and imaginations of the human soul,—thatmake amends for all other deficiencies. Theimmediate objects he presents to the mind are notmuch in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, andorder; but they become every thing by the force ofthe character he impresses upon them. His mindlends its own power to the objects which it contemplates,instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantageeven of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the shades of death, andbroods over the silent air. He is the severestof all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the
most opposite to the flowery and glittering; who reliesmost on his own power, and the sense of it in others,and who leaves most room to the imagination of hisreaders. Dante’s only endeavour is to interest;and he interests by exciting our sympathy with theemotion by which he is himself possessed. Hedoes not place before us the objects by which thatemotion 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 thrillingand overwhelming sensation, which is caught by gazingon the face of a person who has seen some object ofhorror. The improbability of the events, theabruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are excessive:but the interest never flags, from the continued earnestnessof the author’s mind. Dante’s greatpower is in combining internal feelings with externalobjects. Thus the gate of hell, on which thatwithering inscription is written, seems to be endowedwith speech and consciousness, and to utter its dreadwarning, not without a sense of mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely localand individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions ofthe lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with theinscription, “I am the tomb of Pope Anastasiusthe Sixth”: and half the personages whomhe has crowded into the Inferno are his own acquaintance. All this, perhaps, tends to heighten the effect bythe bold intermixture of realities, and by an appeal,as it were, to the individual knowledge and experienceof the reader. He affords few subjects for picture. There is, indeed, one gigantic one, that of CountUgolino, 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 whomI cannot persuade myself to think a mere modern inthe groundwork, is Ossian. He is a feeling anda name that can never be destroyed in the minds ofhis readers. As Homer is the first vigour andlustihed, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of thepast. There is one impression which he conveysmore entirely than all other poets, namely, the senseof privation, the loss of all things, of friends,of good name, of country—he is even withoutGod in the world. He converses only with thespirits of the departed; with the motionless and silentclouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustreon 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 sighand rustle like the dry reeds in the winter’swind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, ofthe loss of the pith and sap of existence, of theannihilation of the substance, and the clinging tothe shadow of all things as in a mock-embrace, is
here perfect. In this way, the lamentation ofSelma for the loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it were indeed possible to shew that this writerwas nothing, it would only be another instance ofmutability, another blank made, another void leftin the heart, another confirmation of that feelingwhich makes him so often complain, “Roll on,ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wingto Ossian!”LECTURE II.ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER.
Having, in the former Lecture, given some accountof the nature of poetry in general, I shall proceed,in the next place, to a more particular considerationof 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 greatestnames in poetry, which this country has to boast. Both of them, however, were much indebted to the earlypoets of Italy, and may be considered as belonging,in a certain degree, to the same school. Thefreedom and copiousness with which our most originalwriters, in former periods, availed themselves of theproductions of their predecessors, frequently transcribingwhole passages, without scruple or acknowledgment,may appear contrary to the etiquette of modern literature,when the whole stock of poetical common-places hasbecome public property, and no one is compelled totrade upon any particular author. But it is notso much a subject of wonder, at a time when to readand write was of itself an honorary distinction, whenlearning was almost as great a rarity as genius, andwhen in fact those who first transplanted the beautiesof other languages into their own, might be consideredas public benefactors, and the founders of a nationalliterature.—There are poets older thanChaucer, and in the interval between him and Spenser;but their genius was not such as to place them inany point of comparison with either of these celebratedmen; and an inquiry into their particular merits ordefects might seem rather to belong to the provinceof the antiquary, than be thought generally interestingto the lovers of poetry in the present day.
Chaucer (who has been very properly considered asthe father of English poetry) preceded Spenser bytwo centuries. He is supposed to have been bornin London, in the year 1328, during the reign of EdwardIII. and to have died in 1400, at the age of seventy-two. He received a learned education at one, or at bothof the universities, and travelled early into Italy,where he became thoroughly imbued with the spirit andexcellences of the great Italian poets and prose-writers,Dante, Petrarch, and Boccace; and is said to havehad a personal interview with one of these, Petrarch. He was connected, by marriage, with the famous Johnof Gaunt, through whose interest he was introducedinto several public employments. Chaucer wasan active partisan, a religious reformer, and fromthe 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 beenthe distinguishing virtue of poets.—Thereis, however, an obvious similarity between the practicalturn of Chaucer’s mind and restless impatienceof his character, and the tone of his writings. Yet it would be too much to attribute the one tothe other as cause and effect: for Spenser, whosepoetical temperament was an effeminate as Chaucer’swas stern and masculine, was equally engaged in publicaffairs, and had mixed equally in the great world. So much does native disposition predominate overaccidental circ*mstances, moulding them to its previousbent and purposes! For while Chaucer’s intercoursewith the busy world, and collision with the actualpassions and conflicting interests of others, seemedto brace the sinews of his understanding, and gaveto his writings the air of a man who describes personsand things that he had known and been intimately concernedin; the same opportunities, operating on a differentlyconstituted frame, only served to alienate Spenser’smind the more from the “close-pent up”scenes of ordinary life, and to make him “rivetheir concealing continents,” to give himselfup to the unrestrained indulgence of “flowerytenderness.”It is not possible for any two writers to be moreopposite in this respect. Spenser delightedin luxurious enjoyment; Chaucer, in severe activityof mind. As Spenser was the most romantic andvisionary, Chaucer was the most practical of all thegreat poets, the most a man of business and the world. His poetry reads like history. Every thing hasa downright reality; at least in the relator’smind. A simile, or a sentiment, is as if itwere given in upon evidence. Thus he describesCressid’s first avowal of her love.
“And asthe new abashed nightingale,
That stintethfirst when she beginneth sing,
When that sheheareth any herde’s tale,
Or in the hedgesany wight stirring,
And after, sicker,doth her voice outring;
Right so Cresseide,when that her dread stent,
Open’d herheart, 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 passethyere by yere, and day by day,
Till it felleones in a morwe of May,
That Emelie thatfayrer was to sene
Than is the lilieupon his stalke grene;
And fresher thanthe May with floures newe,
For with the rose-colourstrof hire hewe:
I n’ot whichwas 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, wherehe compares the meeting between Palamon and Arciteto a hunter waiting for a lion in a gap;—
“That stondethat a gap with a spere,
Whan hunted isthe lion or the bere,
And hereth himcome rushing in the greves,
And breking boththe boughes and the leves:”—
or that still finer one of Constance, when she iscondemned to death:—
“Have yenot seen somtime a pale face
(Among a prees)of him that hath been lad
Toward his deth,wheras he geteth no grace,
And swiche a colourin his face hath had,
Men mighten knowhim that was so bestad,
Amonges all thefaces in that route;
So stant Custance,and loketh hire aboute.”
The beauty, the pathos here does not seem to be ofthe poet’s seeking, but a part of the necessarytexture of the fable. He speaks of what he wishesto describe with the accuracy, the discrimination ofone who relates what has happened to himself, or hashad the best information from those who have beeneye-witnesses of it. The strokes of his pencilalways tell. He dwells only on the essential,on that which would be interesting to the personsreally concerned: yet as he never omits any materialcirc*mstance, he is prolix from the number of pointson which he touches, without being diffuse on anyone; and is sometimes tedious from the fidelity withwhich he adheres to his subject, as other writersare from the frequency of their digressions from it. The chain of his story is composed of a number offine links, closely connected together, and rivettedby a single blow. There is an instance of theminuteness which he introduces into his most seriousdescriptions in his account of Palamon when left alonein his cell:
“Swichesorrow he maketh that the grete tour
Resouned of hisyelling and clamour:
The pure fetterson his shinnes grete
Were of his bittersalte teres wete.”
The mention of this last circ*mstance looks like apart of the instructions he had to follow, which hehad no discretionary power to leave out or introduceat pleasure. He is contented to find grace andbeauty in truth. He exhibits for the most partthe naked object, with little drapery thrown overit. His metaphors, which are few, are not forornament, but use, and as like as possible to the thingsthemselves. He does not affect to shew his powerover the reader’s mind, but the power whichhis subject has over his own. The readers ofChaucer’s poetry feel more nearly what the personshe describes must have felt, than perhaps those ofany other poet. His sentiments are not voluntaryeffusions of the poet’s fancy, but founded onthe natural impulses and habitual prejudices of thecharacters he has to represent. There is an inveteracyof purpose, a sincerity of feeling, which never relaxesor grows vapid, in whatever they do or say. There is no artificial, pompous display, but a strictparsimony of the poet’s materials, like the rudesimplicity of the age in which he lived. His
poetry resembles the root just springing from theground, rather than the full-blown flower. Hismuse is no “babbling gossip of the air,”fluent and redundant; but, like a stammerer, or adumb person, that has just found the use of speech,crowds many things together with eager haste, withanxious pauses, and fond repetitions to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the objects, likethe eye or finger. There were none of the common-placesof poetic diction in our author’s time, no reflectedlights of fancy, no borrowed roseate tints; he wasobliged to inspect things for himself, to look narrowly,and almost to handle the object, as in the obscurityof morning we partly see and partly grope our way;so that his descriptions have a sort of tangible characterbelonging to them, and produce the effect of sculptureon the mind. Chaucer had an equal eye for truthof nature and discrimination of character; and hisinterest in what he saw gave new distinctness andforce to his power of observation. The picturesqueand the dramatic are in him closely blended together,and hardly distinguishable; for he principally describesexternal appearances as indicating character, as symbolsof internal sentiment. There is a meaning inwhat he sees; and it is this which catches his eyeby sympathy. Thus the costume and dress of theCanterbury Pilgrims—of the Knight—theSquire—the Oxford Scholar—theGap-toothed Wife of Bath, and the rest, speak forthemselves. To take one or two of these at random:“There wasalso a nonne, a Prioresse,
That of hire smilingwas ful simple and coy;
Hire gretest othen’as but by seint Eloy:
And she was clepedMadame Eglentine.
Ful wel she sangethe service divine
Entuned in hirenose ful swetely;
And Frenche shespake ful fayre and fetisly,
After the scoleof Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frenche ofParis was to hire unknowe.
At mete was shewel ytaughte withalle;
She lette no morselfrom hire lippes falle,
Ne wette hirefingres in hire sauce depe.
* * * * * *
And sikerly shewas of great disport,
And ful plesant,and amiable of port,
And peined hireto contrefeten chere
Of court, andben estatelich of manere,
And to ben holdendigne of reverence.
Butfor to speken of hire conscience,
She was so charitableand so pitous,
She wolde wepeif that she saw a mous
Caughte in a trappe,if it were ded or bledde.
Of smale houndeshadde she, that she fedde
With rosted flesh,and milk, and wastel brede.
But sore weptshe if on of hem were dede,
Or if men smoteit with a yerde smert:
And all was conscienceand tendre herte.
Fulsemely hire wimple ypinched was;
Hire nose tretis;hire eyen grey as glas;
Hire mouth fulsmale; and therto soft and red;
But sickerly shehadde a fayre forehed.
It was almosta spanne brode, I trowe.”
“A Monkthere was, a fayre for the maistrie,
An out-rider,that loved venerie:
A manly man, toben an abbot able.
Ful many a deintehors hadde he in stable:
And whan he rode,men mighte his bridel here,
Gingeling in awhistling wind as clere,
And eke as loude,as doth the chapell belle,
Ther as this lordwas keper of the celle.
Thereule of Seint Maure and of Seint Beneit,
Because that itwas olde and somdele streit,
This ilke monklette olde thinges pace,
And held afterthe newe world the trace. [*]
He yave not ofthe text a pulled hen,
That saith, thathunters ben not holy men;—
Therfore he wasa prickasoure a right:
Greihoundes hehadde as swift as foul of flight:
Of pricking andof hunting for the hare
Was all his lust,for no cost wolde he spare.
Isaw his sleves purfiled at the hond
With gris, andthat the finest of the lond.
And for to fastenhis hood under his chinne,
He had of goldywrought a curious pinne:
A love-knottein the greter end ther was.
His hed was balled,and shone as any glas,
And eke his face,as it hadde ben anoint.
He was a lordful fat and in good point.
His eyen stepe,and rolling in his hed,
That stemed asa forneis of a led.
His botes souple,his hors in gret estat,
Now certainlyhe was a fayre prelat.
He was not paleas a forpined gost.
A fat swan lovedhe best of any rost.
His palfrey wasas broune as is a bery.”
___[*] PG transcriber’s note:“space” instead of “trace” in some editions.___
The Serjeant at Law is the same identical individualas Lawyer Dowling in Tom Jones, who wished to dividehimself into a hundred pieces, to be in a hundredplaces at once.
“No wherso besy a man as he ther n’as,
And yet he semedbesier than he was.”
The Frankelein, in “whose hous it snewed ofmete and drinke”; the Shipman, “who rodeupon a rouncie, as he couthe”; the Doctour ofPhisike, “whose studie was but litel of the Bible”;the Wif of Bath, in
“All whoseparish ther was non,
That to the offringbefore hire shulde gon,
And if ther did,certain so wroth was she,
That she was outof alle charitee;”
—the poure Persone of a toun, “whoseparish was wide, and houses fer asonder”; theMiller, and the Reve, “a slendre colerike man,”are all of the same stamp. They are every onesamples of a kind; abstract definitions of a species. Chaucer, it has been said, numbered the classes ofmen, as Linnaeus numbered the plants. Most ofthem remain to this day: others that are obsolete,and may well be dispensed with, still live in hisdescriptions of them. Such is the Sompnoure:
“A Sompnourewas ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fire-redcherubinnes face,
For sauseflemehe was, with eyen narwe,
As hote he was,and likerous as a sparwe,
With scalled browesblake, and pilled berd:
Of his visagechildren were sore aferd.
Ther n’asquicksilver, litarge, ne brimston,
Boras, ceruse,ne oile of tartre non,
Ne oinement thatwolde clense or bite,
That him mighthelpen of his whelkes white,
Ne of the knobbessitting on his chekes.
Wel loved he garlike,onions, and lekes,
And for to drinkestrong win as rede as blood.
Than wolde hespeke, and crie as he were wood.
And whan thathe wel dronken had the win,
Than wold he spekenno word but Latin.
A fewe termescoude he, two or three,
That he had lernedout of som decree;
No wonder is,he heard it all the day.—
Indanger hadde he at his owen gise
The yonge girlesof the diocise,
And knew hir conseil,and was of hir rede.
A gerlond haddehe sette upon his hede
As gret as itwere for an alestake:
A bokeler haddehe made him of a cake.
With him therrode a gentil Pardonere—
That hadde a voisas smale as hath a gote.”
It would be a curious speculation (at least for thosewho think that the characters of men never change,though manners, opinions, and institutions may) toknow what has become of this character of the Sompnourein the present day; whether or not it has any technicalrepresentative in existing professions; into what channelsand conduits it has withdrawn itself, where it lurksunseen in cunning obscurity, or else shews its faceboldly, pampered into all the insolence of office,in some other shape, as it is deterred or encouragedby circ*mstances. Chaucer’s characters modernised,upon this principle of historic derivation, wouldbe an useful addition to our knowledge of human nature.But who is there to undertake it?
The descriptions of the equipage, and accoutrementsof the two kings of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight’sTale, are as striking and grand, as the others arelively and natural:
“Ther maistthou se coming with Palamon
Licurge himself,the grete king of Trace:
Blake was hisberd, and manly was his face,
The cercles ofhis eyen in his hed
They glowedenbetwixen yelwe and red,
And like a griffonloked he about,
With kemped hereson his browes stout;
His limmes gret,his braunes hard and stronge,
His shouldresbrode, his armes round and longe
And as the guisewas in his contree,
Ful highe upona char of gold stood he,
With foure whitebolles in the trais.
Instede of cote-armureon his harnais,
With nayles yelwe,
He hadde a beresskin, cole-blake for old.
His longe herewas kempt behind his bak,
As any ravenesfether it shone for blake.
A wreth of goldarm-gret, of huge weight,
Upon his hed satefull of stones bright,
Of fine rubins[sic] and of diamants.
About his charther wenten white alauns,
Twenty and mo,as gret as any stere,
To hunten at theleon or the dere,
And folwed him,with mosel fast ybound.—
WithArcita, in stories as men find,
The grete Emetrius,the king of Inde,
Upon a stede bay,trapped in stele,
Covered with clothof gold diapred wele,
Came riding likethe god of armes Mars.
His cote-armurewas of a cloth of Tars,
Couched with perles,white, and round and grete.
His sadel wasof brent gold new ybete;
A mantelet uponhis shouldres hanging
Bret-ful of rubiesred, as fire sparkling.
His crispe herelike 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 fraknesin his face yspreint,
Betwixen yelweand blake somdel ymeint,
And as a leonhe his loking caste.
Of five and twentyyere his age I caste.
His berd was welbegonnen for to spring;
His vois was asa trompe thondering.
Upon his hed hewered of laurer grene
A gerlond fresheand lusty for to sene.
Upon his hondhe bare for his deduit
An egle tame,as any lily whit.—
About this kingther ran on every part
Ful many a tameleon and leopart.”
What a deal of terrible beauty there is containedin this description! The imagination of a poetbrings such objects before us, as when we look atwild beasts in a menagerie; their claws are pared,their eyes glitter like harmless lightning; but wegaze at them with a pleasing awe, clothed in beauty,formidable in the sense of abstract power.
Chaucer’s descriptions of natural scenery possessthe same sort of characteristic excellence, or whatmight be termed gusto. They have a localtruth and freshness, which gives the very feeling ofthe air, the coolness or moisture of the ground. Inanimate objects are thus made to have a fellow-feelingin the interest of the story; and render back thesentiment of the speaker’s mind. One ofthe finest parts of Chaucer is of this mixed kind. It is the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf, wherehe describes the delight of that young beauty, shrowdedin her bower, and listening, in the morning of theyear, to the singing of the nightingale; while herjoy rises with the rising song, and gushes out afreshat every pause, and is borne along with the full tideof pleasure, and still increases, and repeats, andprolongs itself, and knows no ebb. The coolnessof the arbour, its retirement, the early time of theday, the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouringbushes, the eager delight with which they devour andrend the opening buds and flowers, are expressed witha truth and feeling, which make the whole appear likethe recollection of an actual scene:
“Which asme thought was right a pleasing sight,
And eke the briddessong for to here,
Would haue rejoycedany earthly wight,
And I that couthnot yet in no manere
Heare the nightingaleof all the yeare,
Ful busily herkenedwith herte and with eare,
If I her voiceperceiue coud any where.
And I that allthis pleasaunt sight sie,
Thought sodainlyI felt so sweet an aire
Of the eglentere,that certainely
There is no herteI deme in such dispaire,
Ne with thoughtsfroward and contraire,
So ouerlaid, butit should soone haue bote,
If it had onesfelt this savour sote.
And as I stoodand cast aside mine eie,
I was ware ofthe fairest medler tree
That ever yetin all my life I sie
As full of blossomesas it might be,
Therein a goldfinchleaping pretile
Fro bough to bough,and as him list he eet
Here and thereof buds and floures sweet.
And to the herberside was joyning
This faire tree,of which I haue you told,
And at the lastthe brid began to sing,
Whan he had eatenwhat he eat wold,
So passing sweetly,that by manifold
It was more pleasauntthan I coud deuise,
And whan his songwas ended in this wise,
The nightingalewith so merry a note
Answered him,that all the wood rong
So sodainly, thatas it were a sote,
I stood astonied,so was I with the song
Thorow rauished,that till late and long,
I ne wist in whatplace I was, ne where,
And ayen me thoughtshe song euen by mine ere.
Wherefore I waitedabout busily
On euery side,if I her might see,
And at the lastI gan full well aspie
Where she satin a fresh grene laurer tree,
On the furtherside euen right by me,
That gaue so passinga delicious smell,
According to theeglentere full well.
Whereof I hadso inly great pleasure,
That as me thoughtI surely rauished was
Into Paradice,where my desire
Was for to be,and no ferther passe
As for that day,and on the sote grasse,
I sat me downe,for as for mine entent,
The birds songwas more conuenient,
And more pleasauntto me by manifold,
Than meat or drinke,or any other thing,
Thereto the herberwas so fresh and cold,
The wholesomesauours eke so comforting,
That as I demed,sith the beginning
Of the world wasneur seene or than
So pleasaunt aground of none earthly man.
And as I sat thebirds harkening thus,
Me thought thatI heard voices sodainly,
The most sweetestand most delicious
That euer anywight I trow truly
Heard in theirlife, for the armony
And sweet accordwas in so good musike,
That the uoiceto angels was most like.”
There is here no affected rapture, no flowery sentiment:the whole is an ebullition of natural delight “wellingout of the heart,” like water from a crystalspring. Nature is the soul of art: thereis a strength as well as a simplicity in the imaginationthat reposes entirely on nature, that nothing elsecan supply. It was the same trust in nature,and reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucerto describe the grief and patience of Griselda; thefaith of Constance; and the heroic perseverance ofthe little child, who, going to school through thestreets of Jewry,
“Oh AlmaRedemptoris mater, loudly sung,”
and who after his death still triumphed in his song. Chaucer has more of this deep, internal, sustainedsentiment, than any other writer, except Boccaccio. In depth of simple pathos, and intensity of conception,never swerving from his subject, I think no otherwriter comes near him, not even the Greek tragedians. I wish to be allowed to give one or two instancesof what I mean. I will take the following fromthe Knight’s Tale. The distress of Arcite,in consequence of his banishment from his love, isthus described:
“Whanthat Arcite to Thebes comen was,
Ful oft a dayhe swelt and said Alas,
For sene his ladyshall he never mo.
And shortly toconcluden all his wo,
So mochel sorwehadde never creature,
That is or shallbe, while the world may dure.
His slepe, hismete, 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 hewas, and ever alone,
And wailing allthe night, making his mone.
And if he herdesong or instrument,
Than wold he wepe,he mighte not be stent.
So feble werehis spirites, and so low,
And changed so,that no man coude know
His speche nehis vois, though men it herd.”
This picture of the sinking of the heart, of the wastingaway of the body and mind, of the gradual failureof all the faculties under the contagion of a ranklingsorrow, cannot be surpassed. Of the same kindis his farewel to his mistress, after he has gainedher hand and lost his life in the combat:
“Alasthe wo! alas the peines stronge,
That I for youhave suffered, and so longe!
Alas the deth!alas min Emilie!
Alas departingof our compagnie;
Alas min hertesquene! alas my wif!
Min hertes ladie,ender of my lif!
What is this world?what axen men to have?
Now with his love,now in his colde grave
Alone withoutenany compagnie.”
The death of Arcite is the more affecting, as it comesafter triumph and victory, after the pomp of sacrifice,the solemnities of prayer, the celebration of thegorgeous rites of chivalry. The descriptionsof the three temples of Mars, of Venus, and Diana,of the ornaments and ceremonies used in each, withthe reception given to the offerings of the lovers,have a beauty and grandeur, much of which is lost inDryden’s version. For instance, such linesas the following are not rendered with their truefeeling.
“Why shuldeI not as well eke tell you all
The purtreiturethat was upon the wall
Within the templeof mighty Mars the rede—
That highte thegret temple of Mars in Trace
In thilke coldeand frosty region,
Ther as Mars hathhis sovereine mansion.
First on the wallwas peinted a forest,
In which therwonneth neyther man ne best,
With knotty knarrybarrein trees old
Of stubbes sharpeand hidous to behold;
In which therran a romble and a swough,
As though a stormeshuld bresten every bough.”
And again, among innumerable terrific images of deathand slaughter painted on the wall, is this one:
“The statueof Mars upon a carte stood
Armed, and lookedgrim as he were wood.
A wolf ther stoodbeforne him at his fete
With eyen red,and of a man he ete.”
The story of Griselda is in Boccaccio; but the Clerkof Oxenforde, who tells it, professes to have learnedit from Petrarch. This story has gone all overEurope, and has passed into a proverb. In spiteof the barbarity of the circ*mstances, which are abominable,the sentiment remains unimpaired and unalterable. It is of that kind, “that heaves no sigh, thatsheds no tear”; but it hangs upon the beatingsof the heart; it is a part of the very being; it isas inseparable from it as the breath we draw. It is still and calm as the face of death. Nothingcan touch it in its ethereal purity: tender asthe yielding flower, it is fixed as the marble firmament. The only remonstrance she makes, the only complaintshe utters against all the ill-treatment she receives,is that single line where, when turned back nakedto her father’s house, she says,
“Let menot like a worm go by the way.”
The first outline given of the character is inimitable:
“Noughtfer fro thilke paleis honourable,
Wher as this markisshope his marriage,
Ther stood a thorpe,of sighte delitable,
In which thatpoure folk of that village
Hadden hir bestesand her herbergage,
And of hir labourtoke hir sustenance,
After that theerthe yave hem habundance.
Among this pourefolk ther dwelt a man,
Which that washolden pourest of hem all:
But highe Godsometime senden can
His grace untoa litel oxes stall:
Janicola men ofthat thorpe him call.
A doughter hadhe, faire ynough to sight,
And Grisildisthis yonge maiden hight.
But for to spekeof vertuous beautee,
Than was she onthe fairest under Sonne:
Ful pourely yfostredup was she:
No likerous lustwas in hire herte yronne;
Ful ofter of thewell than of the tonne
She dranke, andfor she wolde vertue plese,
She knew wel labour,but non idel ese.
But though thismayden tendre were of age,
Yet in the brestof hire virginitee
Ther was enclosedsad and ripe corage:
And in gret reverenceand charitee
Hire olde pourefader fostred she:
A few sheep spinningon the feld she kept,
She wolde notben idel til she slept.
And whan she homwardcame she wolde bring
Wortes and otherherbes times oft,
The which sheshred and sethe for hire living,
And made hirebed ful hard, and nothing soft:
And ay she kepthire fadres lif on loft
With every obeisanceand diligence,
That child maydon to fadres reverence,
Upon Grisilde,this poure creature,
Ful often sithethis markis sette his sye, [sic]
As he on huntingrode paraventure:
And whan it fellthat he might hire espie,
He not with wantonloking of folie
His eyen caston hire, but in sad wise
Upon hire cherehe wold him oft avise,
Commending inhis herte hire womanhede,
And eke hire vertue,passing any wight
Of so yong age,as wel in chere as dede.
For though thepeople have no gret insight
In vertue, heconsidered ful right
Hire bountee,and disposed that he wold
Wedde hire only,if ever he wedden shold.
Grisilde of this(God wot) ful innocent,
That for hireshapen was all this array,
To fetchen waterat a welle is went,
And cometh homeas sone as ever she may.
For wel she hadherd say, that thilke day
The markis shuldewedde, and, if she might,
She wolde faynhan seen som of that sight.
She thought, “Iwol with other maidens stond,
That ben my felawes,in our dore, and see
The markisesse,and therto wol I fond
To don at home,as sone as it may be,
The labour whichlongeth unto me,
And than I mayat leiser hire behold,
If she this wayunto the castel hold.”
And she woldeover the threswold gon,
The markis cameand gan hire for to call,
And she set dounher water-pot anon
Beside the threswoldin an oxes stall,
And doun uponhire knees she gan to fall.
And with sad countenancekneleth still,
Till she had herdwhat was the lordes will.”
The story of the little child slain in Jewry, (whichis told by the Prioress, and worthy to be told byher who was “all conscience and tender heart,”)is not less touching than that of Griselda. Itis simple and heroic to the last degree. Thepoetry of Chaucer has a religious sanctity about it,connected with the manners and superstitions of theage. It has all the spirit of martyrdom.
It has also all the extravagance and the utmost licentiousnessof comic humour, equally arising out of the mannersof the time. In this too Chaucer resembled Boccacciothat he excelled in both styles, and could pass atwill “from grave to gay, from lively to severe”;but he never confounded the two styles together (exceptfrom that involuntary and unconscious mixture of thepathetic and humorous, which is almost always to befound in nature,) and was exclusively taken up withwhat he set about, whether it was jest or earnest. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (which Pope hasvery admirably modernised) is, perhaps, unequalledas a comic story. The co*ck and the Fox is alsoexcellent for lively strokes of character and satire. January and May is not so good as some of the others. Chaucer’s versification, considering the timeat which he wrote, and that versification is a thingin a great degree mechanical, is not one of his leastmerits. It has considerable strength and harmony,and its apparent deficiency in the latter respectarises chiefly from the alterations which have sincetaken place in the pronunciation or mode of accentingthe words of the language. The best general rulefor reading him is to pronounce the final e,as in reading Italian.
It was observed in the last Lecture that paintingdescribes what the object is in itself, poetry whatit implies or suggests. Chaucer’s poetryis not, in general, the best confirmation of the truthof this distinction, for his poetry is more picturesqueand historical than almost any other. But thereis one instance in point which I cannot help givingin this place. It is the story of the three thieveswho go in search of Death to kill him, and who meetingwith him, are entangled in their fate by his words,without knowing him. In the printed catalogueto 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 producedby a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching,as it were with fire, the features and edges of ageneral mass of awful obscurity; but in painting,such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply thatthe artist wanted the power to pourtray the conceptionsof his fancy. Mr. West was of opinion that todelineate a physical form, which in its moral impressionwould approximate to that of the visionary Death ofMilton, 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 perspicuityof his pencil on the central figure.”—Onemight suppose from this, that the way to representa shadow was to make it as substantial as possible. Oh, no! Painting has its prerogatives, (andhigh ones they are) but they lie in representing thevisible, not the invisible. The moral attributesof Death are powers and effects of an infinitely wideand general description, which no individual or physical
form can possibly represent, but by a courtesy of speech,or by a distant analogy. The moral impressionof Death is essentially visionary; its reality isin the mind’s eye. Words are here the onlythings; and things, physical forms, the meremockeries of the understanding. The less definite,the less bodily the conception, the more vast, unformed,and unsubstantial, the nearer does it approach to someresemblance of that omnipresent, lasting, universal,irresistible principle, which every where, and atsome 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 notbe 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 tolook back at him. We do not see him making facesat us in our life-time, nor perceive him afterwardssitting in mock-majesty, a twin-skeleton, beside us,tickling our bare ribs, and staring into our holloweye-balls! Chaucer knew this. He makes threeriotous companions go in search of Death to kill him,they meet with an old man whom they reproach withhis age, and ask why he does not die, to which heanswers thus:“Ne Deth,alas! ne will not han my lif.
Thus walke I likea restless caitiff,
And on the ground,which is my modres gate,
I knocke withmy staf, erlich and late,
And say to hire,“Leve mother, let me in.
Lo, how I vanish,flesh and blood and skin,
Alas! when shallmy bones ben at reste?
Mother, with youwolde I changen my cheste,
That in my chambrelonge time hath be,
Ye, for an herencloute to wrap in me.”
But yet to meshe will not don that grace,
For which fulpale and welked is my face.”
They then ask the old man where they shall find outDeath to kill him, and he sends them on an errandwhich ends in the death of all three. We hearno more of him, but it is Death that they have encountered!
The interval between Chaucer and Spenser is long anddreary. There is nothing to fill up the chasmbut the names of Occleve, “ancient Gower,”Lydgate, Wyatt, Surry, and Sackville. Spenserflourished in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and wassent with Sir John Davies into Ireland, of which hehas left behind him some tender recollections in hisdescription of the bog of Allan, and a record in anably written paper, containing observations on thestate 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 supposedin distressed circ*mstances. The treatment hereceived from Burleigh is well known. Spenser,as well as Chaucer, was engaged in active life; butthe genius of his poetry was not active: it isinspired by the love of ease, and relaxation from
all the cares and business of life. Of all thepoets, he is the most poetical. Though muchlater than Chaucer, his obligations to preceding writerswere less. He has in some measure borrowed theplan of his poem (as a number of distinct narratives)from Ariosto; but he has engrafted upon it an exuberanceof 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 thesubject-matter. There is an originality, richness,and variety in his allegorical personages and fictions,which almost vies with the splendor of the ancientmythology. If Ariosto transports us into theregions of romance, Spenser’s poetry is allfairy-land. In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground,in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough. In Spenser, we wander in another world, among idealbeings. The poet takes and lays us in the lapof a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams,among greener hills and fairer valleys. He paintsnature, not as we find it, but as we expected to findit; and fulfils the delightful promise of our youth. He waves his wand of enchantment—and atonce embodies airy beings, and throws a deliciousveil over all actual objects. The two worldsof reality and of fiction are poised on the wingsof his imagination. His ideas, indeed, seemmore distinct than his perceptions. He is thepainter of abstractions, and describes them with dazzlingminuteness. In the Mask of Cupid he makes theGod of Love “clap on high his coloured wingestwain”: and it is said of Gluttony,in the Procession of the Passions,“In greenvine leaves he was right fitly clad.”
At times he becomes picturesque from his intense loveof beauty; as where he compares Prince Arthur’screst to the appearance of the almond tree:
“Upon thetop of all his lofty crest,
Abunch of hairs discolour’d diversely
With sprinkledpearl and gold full richly drest
Didshake and seem’d to daunce for jollity;
Like to an almondtree ymounted high
Ontop of green Selenis all alone,
With blossomsbrave bedecked daintily;
Hertender locks do tremble every one
At every littlebreath that under heav’n is blown.”
The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, isthe moving principle of his mind; and he is guidedin his fantastic delineations by no rule but the impulseof an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriatesequally in scenes of Eastern magnificence; or thestill solitude of a hermit’s cell—inthe extremes of sensuality or refinement.
In reading the Faery Queen, you see a little witheredold man by a wood-side opening a wicket, a giant,and a dwarf lagging far behind, a damsel in a boatupon an enchanted lake, wood-nymphs, and satyrs, andall of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace,with tapers burning, amidst knights and ladies, withdance and revelry, and song, “and mask, andantique pageantry.” What can be more solitary,more shut up in itself, than his description of thehouse of Sleep, to which Archimago sends for a dream:
“And moreto lull him in his slumber soft
Atrickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
And ever-drizzlingrain upon the loft,
Mix’dwith a murmuring wind, much like the sound
Of swarming Bees,did cast him in a swound.
Noother noise, nor people’s troublous cries.
That still arewont t’ annoy the walled town
Mightthere be heard; but careless Quiet lies
Wrapt in eternalsilence, 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 inbeauty) is the following description of the Bower ofBliss:
“Eftsoonesthey heard a most melodious sound
Ofall that mote delight a dainty ear;
Such as at oncemight not on living ground,
Savein this Paradise, be heard elsewhere:
Right hard itwas for wight which did it hear,
Totell what manner musicke that mote be;
For all that pleasingis to living eare
Wasthere consorted in one harmonee:
Birds, voices,instruments, windes, waters, all agree.
The joyous birdesshrouded in chearefull shade
Theirnotes unto the voice attempred sweet:
The angelicalsoft trembling voices made
Toth’ instruments divine respondence meet.
The silver soundinginstruments did meet
Withthe base murmur of the water’s fall;
The water’sfall with difference discreet,
Nowsoft, now loud, unto the wind did call;
The gentle warblingwind low answered to all.”
The remainder of the passage has all that voluptuouspathos, and languid brilliancy of fancy, in whichthis writer excelled:
“The whilessome one did chaunt this lovely lay;
Ah!see, whoso fayre thing dost thou fain to see,
In springing flowerthe image of thy day!
Ah!see the virgin rose, how sweetly she
Doth first peepforth with bashful modesty,
Thatfairer seems the less ye see her may!
Lo! see soon after,how more bold and free
Herbared bosom she doth broad display;
Lo! see soon after,how she fades and falls away!
So passeth inthe passing of a day
Ofmortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower;
Ne more doth flourishafter first decay,
Thaterst was sought to deck both bed and bower
Of many a ladyand many a paramour!
Gathertherefore the rose whilst yet is prime,
For soon comesage that will her pride deflower;
Gatherthe rose of love whilst yet is time,
Whilst lovingthou mayst loved be with equal crime. [2]
He ceased; andthen gan all the quire of birds
Theirdivers notes to attune unto his lay,
As in approvanceof his pleasing wordes.
Theconstant pair heard all that he did say,
Yet swerved not,but kept their forward way
Throughmany covert groves and thickets close,
In which theycreeping did at last display [3]
Thatwanton lady with her lover loose,
Whose sleepy headshe in her lap did soft dispose.
Upon a bed ofroses she was laid
Asfaint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin;
And was arrayedor rather disarrayed,
Allin a veil of silk and silver thin,
That hid no whither alabaster skin,
Butrather shewed more white, if more might be:
More subtle webArachne cannot spin;
Northe fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew,do not in the air more lightly flee.
Her snowy breastwas bare to greedy spoil
Ofhungry eyes which n’ ote therewith be fill’d,
And yet throughlanguor of her late sweet toil
Fewdrops more clear than nectar forth distill’d,
That like pureOrient perles adown it trill’d;
Andher fair eyes sweet smiling in delight
Moisten’dtheir fiery beams, with which she thrill’d
Frailhearts, yet quenched not; like starry light,
Which sparklingon the silent waves does seem more bright.”
___[2] Taken from Tasso.[3] This word is an instance of those unwarrantable freedoms whichSpenser sometimes took with language.___
The finest things in Spenser are, the character ofUna, in the first book; the House of Pride; the Caveof Mammon, and the Cave of Despair; the account ofMemory, of whom it is said, among other things,
“The warshe well remember’d of King Nine,
Of old Assaracusand Inachus divine”;
the description of Belphoebe; the story of Florimeland the Witch’s son; the Gardens of Adonis,and the Bower of Bliss; the Mask of Cupid; and ColinClout’s vision, in the last book. But somepeople will say that all this may be very fine, butthat they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thoughtit would bite them: they look at it as a childlooks at a painted dragon, and think it will stranglethem in its shining folds. This is very idle.If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegorywill not meddle with them. Without minding itat all, the whole is as plain as a pike-staff. It might as well be pretended that we cannot see Poussin’spictures for the allegory, as that the allegory preventsus from understanding Spenser. For instance,when Britomart, seated amidst the young warriors,lets fall her hair and discovers her sex, is it necessaryto know the part she plays in the allegory, to understandthe beauty of the following stanza?
“And ekethat stranger knight amongst the rest
Wasfor like need enforc’d to disarray.
Tho when as vailedwas her lofty crest,
Hergolden locks that were in trammels gay
Upbounden, didthemselves adown display,
Andraught unto her heels like sunny beams
That in a cloudtheir light did long time stay;
Theirvapour faded, shew their golden gleams,
And through thepersant air shoot forth their azure streams.”
Or is there any mystery in what is said of Belphoebe,that her hair was sprinkled with flowers and blossomswhich had been entangled in it as she fled throughthe woods? Or is it necessary to have a more distinctidea of Proteus, than that which is given of him inhis boat, with the frighted Florimel at his feet,while
“------the cold icicles from his rough beardDropped adown upon her snowy breast!”
Or is it not a sufficient account of one of the sea-godsthat pass by them, to say—
“That wasArion crowned:—
So went he playingon the watery plain.”
Or to take the Procession of the Passions that drawthe coach of Pride, in which the figures of Idleness,of Gluttony, of Lechery, of Avarice, of Envy, andof Wrath speak, one should think, plain enough forthemselves; such as this of Gluttony:
“And byhis side rode loathsome Gluttony,
Deformedcreature, on a filthy swine;
His belly wasup blown with luxury;
Andeke with fatness swollen were his eyne;
And like a cranehis neck was long and fine,
Withwhich he swallowed up excessive feast,
For want whereof poor peopleoft did pine.
In green vineleaves he was right fitly clad;
Forother clothes he could not wear for heat:
And on his headan ivy garland had,
Fromunder which fast trickled down the sweat:
Still as he rode,he somewhat still did eat.
Andin his hand did bear a bouzing can,
Of which he suptso oft, that on his seat
Hisdrunken corse he scarce upholden can;
In shape and size more likea monster than a man.”
Or this of Lechery:
“And nextto him rode lustfull Lechery
Upona bearded goat, whose rugged hair
And whaly eyes(the sign of jealousy)
Waslike the person’s self whom he did bear:
Who rough andblack, and filthy did appear.
Unseemlyman to please fair lady’s eye:
Yet he of ladiesoft was loved dear,
Whenfairer faces were bid standen by:
O! who does know the bentof woman’s fantasy?
In a green gownhe clothed was full fair,
Whichunderneath did hide his filthiness;
And in his handa burning heart he bare,
Fullof vain follies and new fangleness;
For he was false
Andlearned had to love with secret looks;
And well coulddance; and sing with ruefulness;
Andfortunes tell; and read in loving books;
And thousand other ways tobait his fleshly hooks.
Inconstant manthat loved all he saw,
Andlusted after all that he did love;
Ne would his looserlife be tied to law;
Butjoyed weak women’s hearts to tempt and prove,
If from their loyal loveshe might them move.”
This is pretty plain-spoken. Mr. Southey saysof 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 mysterieswhich 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 theMask of Cupid, with his train of votaries:
“The firstwas Fancy, like a lovely boy
Ofrare aspect, and beauty without peer;
His garment neitherwas of silk nor say,
Butpainted plumes in goodly order dight,
Like as the sun-burntIndians do array
Theirtawny bodies in their proudest plight:
As those sameplumes so seem’d he vain and light,
Thatby his gait might easily appear;
For still he far’das dancing in delight,
Andin his hand a windy fan did bear
That in the idle air he mov’dstill here and there.
And him besidemarch’d amorous Desire,
Whoseem’d of riper years than the other swain,
Yet was that otherswain this elder’s sire,
Andgave him being, common to them twain:
His garment wasdisguised very vain,
Andhis embroidered bonnet sat awry;
Twixt both hishands few sparks he close did strain,
Whichstill he blew, and kindled busily,
That soon they life conceiv’dand forth in flames did fly.
Next after himwent Doubt, who was yclad
Ina discolour’d coat of strange disguise,
That at his backa broad capuccio had,
Andsleeves dependant Albanese-wise;
He lookt askewwith his mistrustful eyes,
Andnicely trod, as thorns lay in his way,
Or that the floorto shrink he did avise;
Andon a broken reed he still did stay
His feeble steps, which shrunkwhen hard thereon he lay.
With him wentDaunger, cloth’d in ragged weed,
Madeof bear’s skin, that him more dreadful made;
Yet his own facewas dreadfull, ne did need
Strangehorror to deform his grisly shade;
A net in th’one hand, and a rusty blade
Inth’ other was; this Mischiefe, that Mishap;
With th’one his foes he threat’ned to invade,
Withth’ other he his friends meant to enwrap;
For whom he could not killhe practiz’d to entrap.
Next him was Fear,all arm’d from top to toe,
Yetthought himselfe not safe enough thereby,
But fear’deach shadow moving to and fro;
Andhis own arms when glittering he did spy
Or clashing heard,he fast away did fly,
Asashes pale of hue, and winged-heel’d;
And evermore onDaunger fixt his eye,
’Gainstwhom he always bent a brazen shield,
Which his right hand unarmedfearfully did wield.
With him wentHope in rank, a handsome maid,
Ofchearfull look and lovely to behold;
In silken samiteshe was light array’d,
Andher fair locks were woven up in gold;
She always smil’d,and in her hand did hold
Anholy-water sprinkle dipt in dew,
With which shesprinkled favours manifold
Onwhom she list, and did great liking shew,
Great liking unto many, buttrue love to few.
Next after them,the winged God himself
Cameriding on a lion ravenous,
Taught to obeythe menage of that elfe
Thatman and beast with power imperious
Subdueth to hiskingdom tyrannous:
Hisblindfold eyes he bade awhile unbind,
That his proudspoil of that same dolorous
Fairdame he might behold in perfect kind;
Which seen, he much rejoicedin his cruel mind.
Of which fullproud, himself uprearing high,
Helooked round about with stern disdain,
And did surveyhis goodly company:
Andmarshalling the evil-ordered train,
With that thedarts which his right hand did strain,
Fulldreadfully he shook, that all did quake,
And clapt on highhis colour’d winges twain,
Thatall his many it afraid did make:
Tho, blinding him again, hisway he forth did take.”
The description of Hope, in this series of historicalportraits, 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. Inreading these descriptions, one can hardly avoid beingreminded of Rubens’s allegorical pictures; butthe account of Satyrane taming the lion’s whelpsand lugging the bear’s cubs along in his armswhile yet an infant, whom his mother so naturallyadvises to “go seek some other play-fellows,”has even more of this high picturesque character. Nobody but Rubens could have painted the fancy ofSpenser; and he could not have given the sentiment,the airy dream that hovers over it! With allthis, Spenser neither makes us laugh nor weep. The only jest in his poem is an allegorical playupon words, where he describes Malbecco as escapingin the herd of goats, “by the help of his fayrehornes on hight.” But he has been unjustlycharged with a want of passion and of strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has notindeed the pathos of immediate action or suffering,
which is more properly the dramatic; but he has allthe pathos of sentiment and romance—allthat 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 assumesa character of vastness and sublimity seen throughthe same visionary medium, and blended with the appallingassociations of preternatural agency. We needonly turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair,or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the changeof Malbecco into Jealousy. The following stanzas,in the description of the Cave of Mammon, the grislyhouse of Plutus, are unrivalled for the portentousmassiness of the forms, the splendid chiaro-scuro,and shadowy horror.“That house’sform within was rude and strong,
Likean huge cave hewn out of rocky clift,
From whose roughvault the ragged breaches hung,
Embossedwith massy gold of glorious gift,
And with richmetal loaded every rift,
Thatheavy ruin they did seem to threat:
And over themArachne high did lift
Hercunning web, and spread her subtle net,
Enwrapped in foul smoke, andclouds more black than jet.
Both roof andfloor, and walls were all of gold,
Butovergrown with dust and old decay, [4]
And hid in darknessthat none could behold
Thehue thereof: for view of cheerful day
Did never in thathouse itself display,
Buta faint shadow of uncertain light;
Such as a lampwhose life doth fade away;
Oras the moon clothed with cloudy night
Does shew to him that walksin fear and sad affright.
* * * * * * *
And over all sadHorror with grim hue
Didalways soar, beating his iron wings;
And after himowls and night-ravens flew,
Thehateful messengers of heavy things,
Of death and dolourtelling sad tidings;
Whilessad Celleno, sitting on a clift,
A song of bitterbale and sorrow sings,
Thatheart of flint asunder could have rift;
Which having ended, afterhim she flieth swift.”
___[4] “That all with one consent praise new-born gauds,Tho’ they are made and moulded of things past,And give to Dust, that is a little gilt,More laud than gold o’er-dusted.”Troilus and Cressida.___
The Cave of Despair is described with equal gloominessand power of fancy; and the fine moral declamationof the owner of it, on the evils of life, almost makesone in love with death. In the story of Malbecco,who is haunted by jealousy, and in vain strives torun away from his own thoughts—
“High over hill and overdale he flies”—
the truth of human passion and the preternatural endingare equally striking.—It is not fair tocompare Spenser with Shakspeare, in point of interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus; and the resultwould not be unfavourable to Spenser. There isonly one work of the same allegorical kind, whichhas more interest than Spenser (with scarcely lessimagination): and that is the Pilgrim’sProgress. The three first books of the FaeryQueen are very superior to the three last. Onewould think that Pope, who used to ask if any onehad ever read the Faery Queen through, had only dippedinto these last. The only things in them equalto 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 borrowedfrom the different languages of Europe, both ancientand modern. He was, probably, seduced into acertain license of expression by the difficulty offilling up the moulds of his complicated rhymed stanzafrom the limited resources of his native language. This stanza, with alternate and repeatedly recurringrhymes, is borrowed from the Italians. It waspeculiarly fitted to their language, which aboundsin similar vowel terminations, and is as little adaptedto ours, from the stubborn, unaccommodating resistancewhich the consonant endings of the northern languagesmake to this sort of endless sing-song.—Notthat I would, on that account, part with the stanzaof Spenser. We are, perhaps, indebted to thisvery necessity of finding out new forms of expression,and to the occasional faults to which it led, for apoetical language rich and varied and magnificentbeyond all former, and almost all later example. His versification is, at once, the most smooth andthe most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinthof sweet sounds, “in many a winding bout oflinked sweetness long drawn out”—thatwould cloy by their very sweetness, but that the earis constantly relieved and enchanted by their continuedvariety of modulation— dwelling on thepauses of the action, or flowing on in a fuller tideof harmony with the movement of the sentiment. It has not the bold dramatic transitions of Shakspeare’sblank verse, nor the high-raised tone of Milton’s;but it is the perfection of melting harmony, dissolvingthe soul in pleasure, or holding it captive in thechains of suspense. Spenser was the poet of ourwaking dreams; and he has invented not only a language,but a music of his own for them. The undulationsare infinite, like those of the waves of the sea:but the effect is still the same, lulling the sensesinto a deep oblivion of the jarring noises of theworld, from which we have no wish to be ever recalled.
LECTURE III.ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON.
In looking back to the great works of genius in formertimes, we are sometimes disposed to wonder at thelittle progress which has since been made in poetry,and in the arts of imitation in general. Butthis is perhaps a foolish wonder. Nothing canbe more contrary to the fact, than the suppositionthat in what we understand by the fine arts,as painting, and poetry, relative perfection is onlythe result of repeated efforts in successive periods,and that what has been once well done, constantlyleads to something better. What is mechanical,reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, isprogressive, and admits of gradual improvement:what is not mechanical, or definite, but depends onfeeling, 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 hasgrown up, like many others, from transferring an analogyof one kind to something quite distinct, without takinginto the account the difference in the nature of thethings, or attending to the difference of the results. For most persons, finding what wonderful advanceshave 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 hastilyto conclude, that there was a general tendency in theefforts of the human intellect to improve by repetition,and, in all other arts and institutions, to grow perfectand mature by time. We look back upon the theologicalcreed of our ancestors, and their discoveries in naturalphilosophy, with a smile of pity: science, andthe arts connected with it, have all had their infancy,their youth, and manhood, and seem to contain in themno principle of limitation or decay: and, inquiringno farther about the matter, we infer, in the intoxicationof our pride, and the height of our self-congratulation,that the same progress has been made, and will continueto be made, in all other things which are the workof man. The fact, however, stares us so plainlyin the face, that one would think the smallest reflectionmust suggest the truth, and overturn our sanguinetheories. The greatest poets, the ablest orators,the best painters, and the finest sculptors that theworld ever saw, appeared soon after the birth of thesearts, and lived in a state of society which was, inother respects, comparatively barbarous. Thosearts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicablepower, have always leaped at once from infancy tomanhood, from the first rude dawn of invention totheir meridian height and dazzling lustre, and havein general declined ever after. This is thepeculiar distinction and privilege of each, of scienceand of art:—of the one, never to attainits utmost limit of perfection; and of the other, toarrive 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,—alllived near the beginning of their arts —perfected,and all but created them. These giant-sons ofgenius stand indeed upon the earth, but they towerabove their fellows; and the long line of their successors,in different ages, does not interpose any object toobstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength and stature they are unrivalled; in graceand beauty they have not been surpassed. Inafter-ages, and more refined periods, (as they arecalled) great men have arisen, one by one, as it wereby throes and at intervals; though in general thebest of these cultivated and artificial minds wereof an inferior order; as Tasso and Pope, among poets;Guido and Vandyke, among painters. But in theearlier stages of the arts, as soon as the first mechanicaldifficulties had been got over, and the language wassufficiently acquired, they rose by clusters, and inconstellations, never so to rise again!The arts of painting and poetry are conversant withthe world of thought within us, and with the worldof sense around us—with what we know, andsee, and feel intimately. They flow from thesacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindledat the living lamp of nature. But the pulseof the passions assuredly beat as high, the depthsand soundings of the human heart were as well understoodthree thousand, or three hundred years ago, as theyare at present: the face of nature, and “thehuman face divine” shone as bright then as theyhave ever done. But it is their light,reflected by true genius on art, that marks out itspath before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses’feet, like that which
“CircledUna’s angel face,
And made a sunshinein the shady place.”
The four greatest names in English poetry, are almostthe four first we come to—Chaucer, Spenser,Shakspeare, and Milton. There are no othersthat can really be put in competition with these. The two last have had justice done them by the voiceof common fame. Their names are blazoned inthe very firmament of reputation; while the two first(though “the fault has been more in their starsthan in themselves that they are underlings”)either never emerged far above the horizon, or weretoo soon involved in the obscurity of time. Thethree first of these are excluded from Dr. Johnson’sLives of the Poets (Shakspeare indeed is so from thedramatic form of his compositions): and the fourth,Milton, is admitted with a reluctant and churlish welcome.
In comparing these four writers together, it mightbe 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 useof the term); and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as theyare; Spenser, as we wish them to be; Shakspeare, asthey 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 movingpower, to which this faculty was most subservient inChaucer, 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 varietyof possible circ*mstances; and in Milton, only withthe highest. The characteristic of Chaucer isintensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation;of Shakspeare, every thing.—It has beensaid by some critic, that Shakspeare was distinguishedfrom the other dramatic writers of his day only byhis wit; that they had all his other qualities butthat; that one writer had as much sense, another asmuch fancy, another as much knowledge of character,another the same depth of passion, and another asgreat a power of language. This statement isnot true; nor is the inference from it well-founded,even if it were. This person does not seem tohave been aware that, upon his own shewing, the greatdistinction of Shakspeare’s genius was its virtuallyincluding the genius of all the great men of his age,and not his differing from them in one accidentalparticular. But to have done with such minuteand literal trifling.
The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare’s mindwas its generic quality, its power of communicationwith all other minds—so that it containeda universe of thought and feeling within itself, andhad no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellencemore than another. He was just like any otherman, but that he was like all other men. He wasthe least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that otherswere, or that they could become. He not onlyhad in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling,but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively,into all their conceivable ramifications, throughevery change of fortune or conflict of passion, orturn of thought. He had “a mind reflectingages past,” and present:—all thepeople that ever lived are there. There was norespect of persons with him. His genius shoneequally on the evil and on the good, on the wise andthe foolish, the monarch and the beggar: “Allcorners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids,matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,” arehardly hid from his searching glance. He waslike the genius of humanity, changing places with allof us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes aswith his own. He turned the globe round for
his amusem*nt, and surveyed the generations of men,and the individuals as they passed, with their differentconcerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions,and motives—as well those that they knew,as those which they did not know, or acknowledge tothemselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravingsof despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airybeings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies “nodded to him, and did himcurtesies”: and the night-hag bestrodethe blast at the command of “his so potent art.”The world of spirits lay open to him, like the worldof real men and women: and there is the sametruth in his delineations of the one as of the other;for if the preternatural characters he describes couldbe supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel,and act, as he makes them. He had only to thinkof any thing in order to become that thing, with allthe circ*mstances belonging to it. When he conceivedof a character, whether real or imaginary, he notonly entered into all its thoughts and feelings, butseemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring,to be surrounded with all the same objects, “subjectto the same skyey influences,” the same local,outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occurin reality. Thus the character of Caliban notonly stands before us with a language and mannersof its own, but the scenery and situation of the enchantedisland he inhabits, the traditions of the place, itsstrange noises, its hidden recesses, “his frequenthaunts and ancient neighbourhood,” are givenwith a miraculous truth of nature, and with all thefamiliarity of an old recollection. The whole“coheres semblably together” in time,place, and circ*mstance. In reading this author,you do not merely learn what his characters say,—yousee their persons. By something expressed orunderstood, you are at no loss to decypher their peculiarphysiognomy, 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 throwsus back whole years in the history of the person represented. So (as it has been ingeniously remarked) when Prosperodescribes himself as left alone in the boat with hisdaughter, the epithet which he applies to her, “Meand thy crying self,” flings the imaginationinstantly back from the grown woman to the helplesscondition of infancy, and places the first and mosttrying scene of his misfortunes before us, with allthat he must have suffered in the interval. How well the silent anguish of Macduff is conveyedto 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 onlife by saying, “Man delights not me, nor womanneither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”Which is explained by their answer—“Mylord, we had no such stuff in our thoughts. Butwe smiled to think, if you delight not in man, whatlenten entertainment the players shall receive fromyou, whom we met on the way":—as if whileHamlet was making this speech, his two old schoolfellowsfrom Wittenberg had been really standing by, and hehad seen them smiling by stealth, at the idea of theplayers crossing their minds. It is not “acombination and a form” of words, a set speechor two, a preconcerted theory of a character, thatwill do this: but all the persons concerned musthave been present in the poet’s imagination,as at a kind of rehearsal; and whatever would havepassed through their minds on the occasion, and havebeen observed by others, passed through his, and ismade known to the reader.—I may add inpassing, that Shakspeare always gives the best directionsfor the costume and carriage of his heroes. Thusto take one example, Ophelia gives the following accountof Hamlet; and as Ophelia had seen Hamlet, I shouldthink her word ought to be taken against that of anymodern authority.“Ophelia. My lord, as I was reading in my closet,
Prince Hamlet,with his doublet all unbrac’d,
No hat upon hishead, his stockings loose,
Ungartred, anddown-gyved to his ancle,
Pale as his shirt,his knees knocking each other,
And with a lookso piteous,
As if he had beensent from hell
To speak of horrors,thus he comes before me.
Polonius. Mad for thy love!
Oph. My lord, I do not know,
But truly I dofear it.
Pol. What said he?
Oph. He took me by the wrist, and held me hard,
Then goes he tothe length of all his arm;
And with his otherhand thus o’er his brow,
He falls to suchperusal of my face,
As he would drawit: long staid he so;
At last, a littleshaking of my arm,
And thrice hishead thus waving up and down,
He rais’da sigh so piteous and profound,
As it did seemto shatter all his bulk,
And end his being. That done, he lets me go,
And with his headover his shoulder turn’d,
He seem’dto find his way without his eyes;
For out of doorshe went without their help,
And to the lastbended their light on me.”
Act.II. Scene 1.
How after this airy, fantastic idea of irregular graceand 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 isdifficult to say, unless it be that Hamlet is not bound,by the prompter’s cue, to study the part ofOphelia. The account of Ophelia’s deathbegins thus:
“There isa willow hanging o’er a brook,
That shows itshoary leaves in the glassy stream.”—
Now this is an instance of the same unconscious powerof 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 sortof intuitive power, the same faculty of bringing everyobject in nature, whether present or absent, beforethe mind’s eye, is observable in the speech ofCleopatra, when conjecturing what were the employmentsof Antony in his absence:— “He’sspeaking now, or murmuring, where’s my serpentof old Nile?” How fine to make Cleopatra havethis consciousness of her own character, and to makeher feel that it is this for which Antony is in lovewith her! She says, after the battle of Actium,when Antony has resolved to risk another fight, “Itis 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 casualresource of the imagination, or would have dared toavail himself of it? The thing happens in theplay as it might have happened in fact.—Thatwhich, perhaps, more than any thing else distinguishesthe dramatic productions of Shakspeare from all others,is this wonderful truth and individuality of conception. Each of his characters is as much itself, and asabsolutely independent of the rest, as well as ofthe author, as if they were living persons, not fictionsof the mind. The poet may be said, for the time,to identify himself with the character he wishes torepresent, and to pass from one to another, like thesame soul successively animating different bodies.By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throwshis imagination out of himself, and makes every wordappear to proceed from the mouth of the person inwhose name it is given. His plays alone are properlyexpressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh and blood;they speak like men, not like authors. One mightsuppose that he had stood by at the time, and overheardwhat passed. As in our dreams we hold conversationswith 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 withoutany consciousness of what is to follow, without anyappearance of preparation or premeditation. The gusts of passion come and go like sounds of musicborne on the wind. Nothing is made out by formalinference and analogy, by climax and antithesis:all comes, or seems to come, immediately from nature. Each object and circ*mstance exists in his mind,as it would have existed in reality: each severaltrain of thought and feeling goes on of itself, withoutconfusion or effort. In the world of his imagination,every thing has a life, a place, and being of itsown!
Chaucer’s characters are sufficiently distinctfrom one another, but they are too little varied inthemselves, too much like identical propositions. They are consistent, but uniform; we get no new ideaof them from first to last; they are not placed indifferent lights, nor are their subordinate traitsbrought out in new situations; they are like portraitsor physiognomical studies, with the distinguishingfeatures marked with inconceivable truth and precision,but that preserve the same unaltered air and attitude. Shakspeare’s are historical figures, equallytrue and correct, but put into action, where everynerve and muscle is displayed in the struggle withothers, with all the effect of collision and contrast,with every variety of light and shade. Chaucer’scharacters are narrative, Shakspeare’s dramatic,Milton’s epic. That is, Chaucer told onlyas much of his story as he pleased, as was requiredfor a particular purpose. He answered for hischaracters himself. In Shakspeare they are introducedupon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts ofquestions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakspeare there is a continual composition anddecomposition of its elements, a fermentation of everyparticle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinityor antipathy to other principles which are broughtin contact with it. Till the experiment is tried,we do not know the result, the turn which the characterwill take in its new circ*mstances. Milton tookonly a few simple principles of character, and raisedthem to the utmost conceivable grandeur, and refinedthem from every base alloy. His imagination,“nigh sphered in Heaven,” claimed kindredonly with what he saw from that height, and couldraise to the same elevation with itself. Hesat retired and kept his state alone, “playingwith wisdom”; while Shakspeare mingled withthe crowd, and played the host, “to make societythe sweeter welcome.”
The passion in Shakspeare is of the same nature ashis delineation of character. It is not someone habitual feeling or sentiment preying upon itself,growing out of itself, and moulding every thing toitself; it is passion modified by passion, by allthe other feelings to which the individual is liable,and to which others are liable with him; subject toall the fluctuations of caprice and accident; callinginto play all the resources of the understanding andall the energies of the will; irritated by obstaclesor yielding to them; rising from small beginningsto its utmost height; now drunk with hope, now stungto madness, now sunk in despair, now blown to airwith a breath, now raging like a torrent. Thehuman soul is made the sport of fortune, the prey ofadversity: it is stretched on the wheel of destiny,in restless ecstacy. The passions are in a stateof projection. Years are melted down to moments,and every instant teems with fate. We know theresults, we see the process. Thus after Iagohas been boasting to himself of the effect of hispoisonous suggestions on the mind of Othello, “which,with a little act upon the blood, will work like minesof sulphur,” he adds—
“Look wherehe comes! not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsysyrups of the East,
Shall ever medicinethee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow’dstyesterday.”—
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 aflame; and the explosion is immediate and terribleas a volcano. The dialogues in Lear, in Macbeth,that between Brutus and Cassius, and nearly all thosein Shakspeare, where the interest is wrought up toits highest pitch, afford examples of this dramaticfluctuation of passion. The interest in Chauceris 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 thisway and that, and loud-lashed by furious storms; whilein the still pauses of the blast, we distinguish onlythe cries of despair, or the silence of death!Milton, on the other hand, takes the imaginative partof passion—that which remains after theevent, which the mind reposes on when all is over,which looks upon circ*mstances from the remotest elevationof thought and fancy, and abstracts them from theworld of action to that of contemplation. Theobjects of dramatic poetry affect us by sympathy,by their nearness to ourselves, as they take us bysurprise, or force us upon action, “while ragewith rage doth sympathise”; the objects of epicpoetry affect us through the medium of the imagination,by magnitude and distance, by their permanence anduniversality. The one fill us with terror andpity, the other with admiration and delight. There are certain objects that strike the imagination,and inspire awe in the very idea of them, independentlyof any dramatic interest, that is, of any connectionwith the vicissitudes of human life. For instance,we cannot think of the pyramids of Egypt, of a Gothicruin, or an old Roman encampment, without a certainemotion, a sense of power and sublimity coming overthe mind. The heavenly bodies that hang overour heads wherever we go, and “in their untroubledelement shall shine when we are laid in dust, and allour 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 personin the dialogue makes no answer and feels no concern,yet the eye of that vast luminary is upon him, likethe eye of heaven, and seems conscious of what hesays, like an universal presence. Dramatic poetryand epic, in their perfection, indeed, approximateto and strengthen one another. Dramatic poetryborrows aid from the dignity of persons and things,as the heroic does from human passion, but in theorythey are distinct.—When Richard II. callsfor the looking-glass to contemplate his faded majestyin it, and bursts into that affecting exclamation:“Oh, that I were a mockery-king of snow, to meltaway before the sun of Bolingbroke,” we havehere the utmost force of human passion, combined withthe 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, fromthe sense of irreparable loss, of never-ending, unavailingregret, is perfect.
The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, thatit is an experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusionof natural sensibility; or what is worse, to divestit both of imaginary splendour and human passion,to surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelingsand devouring egotism of the writers’ own minds. Milton and Shakspeare did not so understand poetry. They gave a more liberal interpretation both to natureand art. They did not do all they could to getrid of the one and the other, to fill up the drearyvoid with the Moods of their own Minds. Theyowe their power over the human mind to their havinghad a deeper sense than others of what was grand inthe objects of nature, or affecting in the eventsof human life. But to the men I speak of thereis 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 cannotunderstand the terms. They are even debarredfrom the last poor, paltry consolation of an unmanlytriumph over fallen greatness; for their minds reject,with a convulsive effort and intolerable loathing,the very idea that there ever was, or was thoughtto be, any thing superior to themselves. Allthat has ever excited the attention or admirationof the world, they look upon with the most perfectindifference; and they are surprised to find that theworld repays their indifference with scorn. “With what measure they mete, it has been metedto them again.”—
Shakespeare’s imagination is of the same plastickind as his conception of character or passion. “It glances from heaven to earth, from earthto heaven.” Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the most opposite extremes; or, as Pucksays, in boasting of his own feats, “puts agirdle round about the earth in forty minutes.”He seems always hurrying from his subject, even whiledescribing it; but the stroke, like the lightning’s,is sure as it is sudden. He takes the widestpossible range, but from that very range he has hischoice of the greatest variety and aptitude of materials. He brings together images the most alike, but placedat the greatest distance from each other; that is,found in circ*mstances of the greatest dissimilitude. From the remoteness of his combinations, and thecelerity with which they are effected, they coalescethe more indissolubly together. The more thethoughts are strangers to each other, and the longerthey have been kept asunder, the more intimate doestheir union seem to become. Their felicity isequal to their force. Their likeness is mademore dazzling by their novelty. They startle,and take the fancy prisoner in the same instant. I will mention one or two which are very striking,and not much known, out of Troilus and Cressida. AEneas says to Agamemnon,
“I ask thatI may waken reverence,
And on the cheekbe ready with a blush
Modest as morning,when she coldly eyes
The youthful Phoebus.”
Ulysses urging Achilles to shew himself in the field,says—
“No manis the lord of any thing,
Till he communicatehis parts to others:
Nor doth he ofhimself know them for aught,
Till he beholdthem formed in the applause,
Where they’reextended! which like an arch reverberates
The voice again,or like a gate of steel,
Fronting the sun,receives and renders back
Its figure andits heat.”
Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice.
“Rouse yourself;and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from yourneck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-dropfrom the lion’s mane
Be shook to air.”
Shakspeare’s language and versification arelike the rest of him. He has a magic power overwords: they come winged at his bidding; and seemto know their places. They are struck out ata heat, on the spur of the occasion, and have allthe truth and vividness which arise from an actualimpression of the objects. His epithets and singlephrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination,fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion. His language is hieroglypnical. It translatesthoughts into visible images. It abounds in suddentransitions and elliptical expressions. Thisis the source of his mixed metaphors, which are onlyabbreviated forms of speech. These, however,give no pain from long custom. They have, infact, become idioms in the language. They arethe building, and not the scaffolding to thought. We take the meaning and effect of a well-known passageentire, and no more stop to scan and spell out theparticular words and phrases, than the syllables ofwhich they are composed. In trying to recollectany other author, one sometimes stumbles, in caseof 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 thewords of the following description,
“------Light thickens,And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,”
he would be greatly at a loss to substitute othersfor them equally expressive of the feeling. These remarks, however, are strictly applicable onlyto the impassioned parts of Shakspeare’s language,which flowed from the warmth and originality of hisimagination, and were his own. The languageused for prose conversation and ordinary business issometimes technical, and involved in the affectationof the time. Compare, for example, Othello’sapology to the senate, relating “his whole courseof love,” with some of the preceding parts relatingto his appointment, and the official dispatches fromCyprus. In this respect, “the businessof the state does him offence.”—Hisversification is no less powerful, sweet, and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of sullen intricacy,crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiestexpansion—from the ease and familiarityof 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, exceptMilton’s, that for itself is readable. It is not stately and uniformly swelling like his,but varied and broken by the inequalities of the groundit has to pass over in its uncertain course,
“And soby many winding nooks it strays,
With willing sportto the wild ocean.”
It remains to speak of the faults of Shakspeare. They are not so many or so great as they have beenrepresented; what there are, are chiefly owing tothe following causes:—The universality ofhis genius was, perhaps, a disadvantage to his singleworks; the variety of his resources, sometimes divertinghim from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of AEschylusand Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his ownmind. If he had been only half what he was,he would perhaps have appeared greater. Thenatural ease and indifference of his temper made himsometimes less scrupulous than he might have been. He is relaxed and careless in critical places; heis in earnest throughout only in Timon, Macbeth, andLear. Again, he had no models of acknowledgedexcellence constantly in view to stimulate his efforts,and by all that appears, no love of fame. Hewrote for the “great vulgar and the small,”in his time, not for posterity. If Queen Elizabethand the maids of honour laughed heartily at his worstjokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were silentat his best passages, he went home satisfied, andslept the next night well. He did not troublehimself about Voltaire’s criticisms. Hewas willing to take advantage of the ignorance ofthe age in many things; and if his plays pleased others,not to quarrel with them himself. His very facilityof production would make him set less value on hisown excellences, and not care to distinguish nicelybetween what he did well or ill. His blundersin chronology and geography do not amount to abovehalf a dozen, and they are offences against chronologyand geography, not against poetry. As to theunities, 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 geniuswas his own. He had no objection to float downwith the stream of common taste and opinion: herose above it by his own buoyancy, and an impulse whichhe 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; andhis tragedies are better than his comedies, becausetragedy is better than comedy. His female characters,which have been found fault with as insipid, are thefinest in the world. Lastly, Shakspeare was theleast of a coxcomb of any one that ever lived, andmuch of a gentleman.
Shakspeare discovers in his writings little religiousenthusiasm, and an indifference to personal reputation;he had none of the bigotry of his age, and his politicalprejudices were not very strong. In these respects,as well as in every other, he formed a direct contrastto Milton. Milton’s works are a perpetualinvocation to the Muses; a hymn to Fame. Hehad his thoughts constantly fixed on the contemplationof the Hebrew theocracy, and of a perfect commonwealth;and he seized the pen with a hand just warm from thetouch of the ark of faith. His religious zealinfused its character into his imagination; so thathe devotes himself with the same sense of duty tothe cultivation of his genius, as he did to the exerciseof virtue, or the good of his country. The spiritof the poet, the patriot, and the prophet, vied witheach other in his breast. His mind appears tohave held equal communion with the inspired writers,and with the bards and sages of ancient Greece andRome;—
“Blind Thamyris,and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias,and Phineus, prophets old.”
He had a high standard, with which he was always comparinghimself, nothing short of which could satisfy hisjealous ambition. He thought of nobler formsand 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 distractit* purposes or alloy its purity, or damp its zeal. “With darkness and with dangers compassed round,”he had the mighty models of antiquity always presentto his thoughts, and determined to raise a monumentof equal height and glory, “piling up everystone of lustre from the brook,” for the delightand wonder of posterity. He had girded himselfup, and as it were, sanctified his genius to thisservice from his youth. “For after,”he says, “I had from my first years, by theceaseless diligence and care of my father, been exercisedto the tongues, and some sciences as my age could suffer,by sundry masters and teachers, it was found thatwhether aught was imposed upon me by them, or betakento of my own choice, the style by certain vital signsit had, was likely to live; but much latelier, in theprivate academies of Italy, perceiving that some trifleswhich I had in memory, composed at under twenty orthereabout, met with acceptance above what was lookedfor; I began thus far to assent both to them and diversof my friends here at home, and not less to an inwardprompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labourand intense study (which I take to be my portion inthis life), joined with the strong propensity of nature,I might perhaps leave something so written to after-timesas they should not willingly let it die. Theaccomplishment of these intentions, which have livedwithin me ever since I could conceive myself anythingworth to my country, lies not but in a power aboveman’s to promise; but that none hath by morestudious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied
spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver ofmyself, as far as life and free leisure will extend. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with anyknowing reader, that for some few years yet, I maygo on trust with him toward the payment of what I amnow indebted, as being a work not to be raised fromthe heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like thatwhich flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist,or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor tobe obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and herSiren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternalspirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge,and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fireof his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whomhe pleases: to this must be added industriousand select reading, steady observation, and insightinto all seemly and generous arts and affairs. Although it nothing content me to have disclosedthus much beforehand; but that I trust hereby to makeit manifest with what small willingness I endure tointerrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these,and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed withcheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubledsea of noises and hoarse disputes, from beholdingthe bright countenance of truth in the quiet and stillair of delightful studies.”So that of Spenser:
“The nobleheart that harbours virtuous thought,
Andis with child of glorious great intent,
Can never restuntil it forth have brought
Theeternal 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 whichit was in his power to do. He always labours,and almost always succeeds. He strives hardto say the finest things in the world, and he doessay them. He adorns and dignifies his subjectto the utmost: he surrounds it with every possibleassociation of beauty or grandeur, whether moral,intellectual, or physical. He refines on hisdescriptions of beauty; loading sweets on sweets, tillthe sense aches at them; and raises his images ofterror to a gigantic elevation, that “makesOssa like a wart.” In Milton, there is alwaysan appearance of effort: in Shakespeare, scarcelyany.
Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, andexhausted 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 originalityscarcely inferior to Homer. The power of hismind is stamped on every line. The fervour ofhis imagination melts down and renders malleable,as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. In reading his works, we feel ourselves under theinfluence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer itapproaches to others, becomes more distinct from them. The quantity of art in him shews the strength of hisgenius: the weight of his intellectual obligationswould have oppressed any other writer. Milton’slearning has the effect of intuition. He describesobjects, of which he could only have read in books,with the vividness of actual observation. Hisimagination has the force of nature. He makeswords tell as pictures.
“Him followedRimmon, whose delightful seat
Was fair Damascus,on the fertile banks
Of Abbana andPharphar, lucid streams.”
The word lucid here gives to the idea all thesparkling effect of the most perfect landscape.
And again:
“As whena vulture on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridgethe roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging froma region scarce of prey,
To gorge the fleshof lambs and yeanling kids
On hills whereflocks are fed, flies towards the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes,Indian streams;
But in his waylights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, whereChineses [sic] drive
With sails andwind their cany waggons light.”
If Milton had taken a journey for the express purpose,he could not have described this scenery and modeof life better. Such passages are like demonstrationsof natural history. Instances might be multipliedwithout end.
We might be tempted to suppose that the vividnesswith which he describes visible objects, was owingto their having acquired an unusual degree of strengthin his mind, after the privation of his sight; butwe find the same palpableness and truth in the descriptionswhich occur in his early poems. In Lycidas hespeaks of “the great vision of the guarded mount,”with that preternatural weight of impression with whichit would present itself suddenly to “the pilotof some small night-foundered skiff”: andthe lines in the Penseroso, describing “thewandering moon,”
“Ridingnear her highest noon,
Like one thathad been led astray
Through the heaven’swide pathless way,”
are as if he had gazed himself blind in looking ather. There is also the same depth of impressionin his descriptions of the objects of all the differentsenses, whether colours, or sounds, or smells—thesame absorption of his mind in whatever engaged hisattention at the time. It has been indeed objectedto Milton, by a common perversity of criticism, thathis ideas were musical rather than picturesque, asif 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 atthe same time) proportionably deficient in other respects. But Milton’s poetry is not cast in any suchnarrow, common-place mould; it is not so barren ofresources. His worship of the Muse was not sosimple or confined. A sound arises “likea steam of rich distilled perfumes”; we hearthe pealing organ, but the incense on the altars isalso there, and the statues of the gods are rangedaround! The ear indeed predominates over theeye, because it is more immediately affected, andbecause the language of music blends more immediatelywith, and forms a more natural accompaniment to, thevariable and indefinite associations of ideas conveyedby words. But where the associations of theimagination are not the principal thing, the individualobject is given by Milton with equal force and beauty. The strongest and best proof of this, as a characteristicpower of his mind, is, that the persons of Adam andEve, of Satan, &c. are always accompanied, in our imagination,with the grandeur of the naked figure; they conveyto 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 delay:And 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 eleganceand precision of a Greek statue; glossy and impurpled,tinged with golden light, and musical as the stringsof Memnon’s harp!
Again, nothing can be more magnificent than the portraitof Beelzebub:
“With Atlanteanshoulders fit to bear
The weight ofmightiest monarchies:”
Or the comparison of Satan, as he “lay floatingmany a rood,” to “that sea beast,”
“Leviathan,which God of all his works
Created hugestthat swim the ocean-stream!”
What a force of imagination is there in this lastexpression! What an idea it conveys of the sizeof that hugest of created beings, as if it shrunkup the ocean to a stream, and took up the sea in itsnostrils as a very little thing? Force of styleis one of Milton’s greatest excellences. Hence, perhaps, he stimulates us more in the reading,and less afterwards. The way to defend Miltonagainst all impugners, is to take down the book andread it.
Milton’s blank verse is the only blank versein the language (except Shakspeare’s) that deservesthe name of verse. Dr. Johnson, who had modelledhis ideas of versification on the regular sing-songof Pope, condemns the Paradise Lost as harsh and unequal. I shall not pretend to say that this is not sometimesthe case; for where a degree of excellence beyondthe mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poetmust sometimes fail. But I imagine that thereare more perfect examples in Milton of musical expression,or of an adaptation of the sound and movement of theverse to the meaning of the passage, than in all ourother writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, puttogether, (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 earfor music, the same power of approximating the varietiesof poetical to those of musical rhythm, as there isin our great epic poet. The sound of his linesis moulded into the expression of the sentiment, almostof the very image. They rise or fall, pauseor hurry rapidly on, with exquisite art, but withoutthe least trick or affectation, as the occasion seemsto 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 fabled, thrown by angry JoveSheer o’er the chrystal 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 AEgean 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 somedifficulty in leaving off.
“Round hesurveys (and well might, where he stood
So high abovethe circling canopy
Of night’sextended shade) from th’ eastern point
Of Libra to thefleecy star that bears
Andromeda faroff Atlantic seas
Beyond the horizon:then from pole to pole
He views in breadth,and without longer pause
Down right intothe world’s first region throws
His flight precipitant,and winds with ease
Through the puremarble air his oblique way
Amongst innumerablestars that shone
Stars distant,but nigh hand seem’d other worlds;
Or other worldsthey 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 asthe meeting soul may pierce
In notes withmany a winding bout
Of linked sweetnesslong drawn out.”
Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaultingPegasus into a rocking-horse. Read any otherblank verse but Milton’s,—Thomson’s,Young’s, Cowper’s, Wordsworth’s,—andit will be found, from the want of the same insightinto “the hidden soul of harmony,” to bemere lumbering prose.
To proceed to a consideration of the merits of ParadiseLost, in the most essential point of view, I meanas to the poetry of character and passion. Ishall say nothing of the fable, or of other technicalobjections or excellences; but I shall try to explainat once the foundation of the interest belonging tothe poem. I am ready to give up the dialoguesin Heaven, where, as Pope justly observes, “Godthe Father turns a school-divine”; nor do Iconsider the battle of the angels as the climax ofsublimity, or the most successful effort of Milton’spen. In a word, the interest of the poem arisesfrom 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-fourthsof the work are taken up with these characters, andnearly all that relates to them is unmixed sublimityand beauty. The two first books alone are liketwo massy pillars of solid gold.
Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosenfor a poem; and the execution is as perfect as thedesign is lofty. He was the first of createdbeings, who, for endeavouring to be equal with thehighest, and to divide the empire of heaven with theAlmighty, was hurled down to hell. His aim wasno less than the throne of the universe; his means,myriads of angelic armies bright, the third part ofthe heavens, whom he lured after him with his countenance,and who durst defy the Omnipotent in arms. Hisambition was the greatest, and his punishment was thegreatest; but not so his despair, for his fortitudewas as great as his sufferings. His strengthof mind was matchless as his strength of body; thevastness of his designs did not surpass the firm, inflexibledetermination with which he submitted to his irreversibledoom, and final loss of all good. His powerof action and of suffering was equal. He wasthe greatest power that was ever overthrown, with thestrongest will left to resist or to endure. He was baffled, not confounded. He stood likea 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 themround, far as the eye can reach; though he keeps alooffrom them in his own mind, and holds supreme counselonly with his own breast. An outcast from Heaven,Hell trembles beneath his feet, Sin and Death areat 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 seemslost in the magnitude of it; the fierceness of tormentingflames is qualified and made innoxious by the greaterfierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite happinessto himself is compensated in thought, by the powerof inflicting infinite misery on others. YetSatan is not the principle of malignity, or of theabstract love of evil—but of the abstractlove of power, of pride, of self-will personified,to which last principle all other good and evil, andeven his own, are subordinate. From this principlehe never once flinches. His love of power andcontempt for suffering are never once relaxed fromthe highest pitch of intensity. His thoughtsburn like a hell within him; but the power of thoughtholds dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness of a determined purpose, of “thatintellectual being, those thoughts that wander througheternity,” though accompanied with endless pain,he prefers to nonentity, to “being swallowedup and lost in the wide womb of uncreated night.”He expresses the sum and substance of all ambitionin one line. “Fallen cherub, to be weakis miserable, doing or suffering!” After sucha conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat inorder, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, issomething; but he does more than this—hefounds a new empire in hell, and from it conquersthis 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 shadowyoutline; the strength is equal to the magnitude ofthe conception. The Achilles of Homer is notmore distinct; the Titans were not more vast; Prometheuschained to his rock was not a more terrific exampleof suffering and of crime. Wherever the figureof Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies,“rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air,”it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriateimages: so that we see it always before us, gigantic,irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed—butdazzling in its faded splendour, the clouded ruinsof a god. The deformity of Satan is only inthe depravity of his will; he has no bodily deformityto excite our loathing or disgust. The hornsand tail are not there, poor emblems of the unbending,unconquered spirit, of the writhing agonies within.Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist tosupport his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump andcloven foot; to bring into the fair field of controversythe good old catholic prejudices of which Tasso andDante have availed themselves, and which the mysticGerman critics would restore. He relied on thejustice of his cause, and did not scruple to givethe devil his due. Some persons may think thathe has carried his liberality too far, and injuredthe cause he professed to espouse by making him thechief person in his poem. Considering the natureof his subject, he would be equally in danger of runninginto this fault, from his faith in religion, and hislove of rebellion; and perhaps each of these motiveshad its full share in determining the choice of hissubject.
Not only the figure of Satan, but his speeches incouncil, his soliloquies, his address to Eve, hisshare 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 speechhe makes:
“Is thisthe region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then thelost archangel, this the seat
That we must changefor Heaven; this mournful gloom
For that celestiallight? Be it so, since he
Who now is sov’raincan dispose and bid
What shall beright: farthest from him is best,
Whom reason hathequal’d, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewel happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells: Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world,and thou profoundest Hell,
Receive thy newpossessor: one who brings
A mind not tobe chang’d by place or time.
The mind is itsown place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’nof Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where,if I be still the same,
And what I shouldbe, all but less than he
Whom thunder hathmade greater? Here at least
We shall be free;th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy,will not drive us hence:
Here we may reignsecure, and in my choice
To reign is worthambition, though in Hell:
Better to reignin Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
The whole of the speeches and debates in Pandemoniumare well worthy of the place and the occasion—withGods for speakers, and angels and archangels for hearers. There is a decided manly tone in the arguments andsentiments, an eloquent dogmatism, as if each personspoke from thorough conviction; an excellence whichMilton probably borrowed from his spirit of partisanship,or else his spirit of partisanship from the naturalfirmness and vigour of his mind. In this respectMilton resembles Dante, (the only modern writer withwhom he has any thing in common) and it is remarkablethat Dante, as well as Milton, was a political partisan. That approximation to the severity of impassionedprose which has been made an objection to Milton’spoetry, and which is chiefly to be met with in thesebitter invectives, is one of its great excellences. The author might here turn his philippics againstSalmasius to good account. The rout in Heavenis like the fall of some mighty structure, noddingto its base, “with hideous ruin and combustiondown.” But, perhaps, of all the passagesin Paradise Lost, the description of the employmentsof the angels during the absence of Satan, some ofwhom “retreated in a silent valley, sing withnotes angelical to many a harp their own heroic deedsand hapless fall by doom of battle,” is the mostperfect example of mingled pathos and sublimity.—Whatproves 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 takea shape that can be at all turned into this, (andthere is little doubt that Milton had some such inhis eye in writing it,) each party converts it to itsown purposes, feels the absolute identity of theseabstracted and high speculations; and that, in fact,a noted political writer of the present day has exhaustednearly the whole account of Satan in the ParadiseLost, by applying it to a character whom he consideredas after the devil, (though I do not know whetherhe would make even that exception) the greatest enemyof the human race. This may serve to shew thatMilton’s Satan is not a very insipid personage.Of Adam and Eve it has been said, that the ordinaryreader can feel little interest in them, because theyhave none of the passions, pursuits, or even relationsof human life, except that of man and wife, the leastinteresting of all others, if not to the parties concerned,at least to the by-standers. The preferencehas on this account been given to Homer, who, it issaid, has left very vivid and infinitely diversifiedpictures of all the passions and affections, publicand private, incident to human nature—therelations of son, of brother, parent, friend, citizen,and many others. Longinus preferred the Iliadto the Odyssey, on account of the greater number ofbattles it contains; but I can neither agree to hiscriticism, nor assent to the present objection. It is true, there is little action in this part ofMilton’s poem; but there is much repose, andmore enjoyment. There are none of the every-dayoccurrences, contentions, disputes, wars, fightings,feuds, jealousies, trades, professions, liveries, andcommon 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 yetto come. But still the die was cast, and in themour doom was sealed. In them
“The generationswere prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs,were ready, the dread strife
Of poor humanity’safflicted will,
Struggling invain with ruthless destiny.”
In their first false step we trace all our futurewoe, with loss of Eden. But there was a shortand precious interval between, like the first blushof morning before the day is overcast with tempest,the dawn of the world, the birth of nature from “theunapparent deep,” with its first dews and freshnesson its cheek, breathing odours. Theirs was thefirst delicious taste of life, and on them dependedall that was to come of it. In them hung tremblingall our hopes and fears. They were as yet alonein the world, in the eye of nature, wondering at theirnew being, full of enjoyment and enraptured with one
another, with the voice of their Maker walking inthe garden, and ministering angels attendant on theirsteps, winged messengers from heaven like rosy cloudsdescending in their sight. Nature played aroundthem her virgin fancies wild; and spread for thema repast where no crude surfeit reigned. Wasthere nothing in this scene, which God and naturealone witnessed, to interest a modern critic?What need was there of action, where the heart wasfull of bliss and innocence without it! Theyhad nothing to do but feel their own happiness, and“know to know no more.” “Theytoiled not, neither did they spin; yet Solomon inall his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”All things seem to acquire fresh sweetness, and tobe clothed with fresh beauty in their sight. They tasted as it were for themselves and us, ofall that there ever was pure in human bliss. “In them the burthen of the mystery, the heavyand 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 haddone of bliss. But their pangs were such asa pure spirit might feel at the sight—theirtears “such as angels weep.” Thepathos is of that mild contemplative kind which arisesfrom regret for the loss of unspeakable happiness,and resignation to inevitable fate. There isnone of the fierceness of intemperate passion, noneof the agony of mind and turbulence of action, whichis the result of the habitual struggles of the willwith circ*mstances, irritated by repeated disappointment,and constantly setting its desires most eagerly onthat which there is an impossibility of attaining. This would have destroyed the beauty of the wholepicture. They had received their unlooked-forhappiness as a free gift from their Creator’shands, and they submitted to its loss, not withoutsorrow, but without impious and stubborn repining.“In eitherhand the hast’ning angel caught
Our ling’ringparents, and to th’ eastern gate
Led them direct,and down the cliff as fast
To the subjectedplain; then disappear’d.
They looking back,all th’ eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, solate their happy seat,
Wav’d overby that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadfulfaces throng’d, and fiery arms:
Some natural tearsthey dropt, but wip’d them soon;
The world wasall before them, where to choose
Their place ofrest, and Providence their guide.”
LECTURE IV.ON DRYDEN AND POPE.
Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificialstyle of poetry in our language, as the poets of whomI have already treated, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare,and Milton, were of the natural; and though this artificialstyle is generally and very justly acknowledged tobe inferior to the other, yet those who stand at thehead of that class, ought, perhaps, to rank higherthan those who occupy an inferior place in a superiorclass. They have a clear and independent claimupon our gratitude, as having produced a kind anddegree of excellence which existed equally nowhereelse. What has been done well by some laterwriters of the highest style of poetry, is includedin, and obscured by a greater degree of power andgenius in those before them: what has been donebest 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 followin the train of Milton and Shakspeare: Pope andDryden walk by their side, though of an unequal stature,and are entitled to a first place in the lists offame. This seems to be not only the reason ofthe thing, but the common sense of mankind, who, withoutany regular process of reflection, judge of the meritof a work, not more by its inherent and absolute worth,than by its originality and capacity of gratifyinga different faculty of the mind, or a different classof readers; for it should be recollected, that theremay be readers (as well as poets) not of the highestclass, though very good sort of people, and not altogetherto be despised.
The question, whether Pope was a poet, has hardlyyet been settled, and is hardly worth settling; forif he was not a great poet, he must have been a greatprose-writer, that is, he was a great writer of somesort. He was a man of exquisite faculties, andof the most refined taste; and as he chose verse (themost obvious distinction of poetry) as the vehicleto express his ideas, he has generally passed for apoet, and a good one. If, indeed, by a greatpoet, we mean one who gives the utmost grandeur toour conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to thepassions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense agreat poet; for the bent, the characteristic powerof his mind, lay the clean contrary way; namely, inrepresenting things as they appear to the indifferentobserver, stripped of prejudice and passion, as inhis Critical Essays; or in representing them in themost 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 trivialincidents and familiar relations of life with theutmost elegance of expression, and all the flatteringillusions 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 thebeauties of nature, or a deep insight into the workingsof the heart; but he was a wit, and a critic, a man
of sense, of observation, and the world, with a keenrelish for the elegances of art, or of nature whenembellished by art, a quick tact for propriety ofthought and manners as established by the forms andcustoms of society, a refined sympathy with the sentimentsand habitudes of human life, as he felt them withinthe little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet, not of nature, but ofart; and the distinction between the two, as well asI can make it out, is this—The poet ofnature is one who, from the elements of beauty, ofpower, and of passion in his own breast, sympathiseswith whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassionedin nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediateappeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts ofall men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth,and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said tohold communion with the very soul of nature; to beidentified with and to foreknow and to record thefeelings of all men at all times and places, as theyare liable to the same impressions; and to exert thesame power over the minds of his readers, that naturedoes. He sees things in their eternal beauty,for he sees them as they are; he feels them in theiruniversal interest, for he feels them as they affectthe first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakspeare, whose works willlast as long as nature, because they are a copy ofthe indestructible forms and everlasting impulsesof nature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennialspring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of theirmaker. The power of the imagination in them,is the representative power of all nature. Ithas its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuitof the universe.Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or inthe first rank of it. He saw nature only dressedby art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he soughtfor truth in the opinions of the world; he judged ofthe feelings of others by his own. The capacioussoul of Shakspeare had an intuitive and mighty sympathywith whatever could enter into the heart of man inall possible circ*mstances: Pope had an exactknowledge of all that he himself loved or hated, wishedor wanted. Milton has winged his daring flightfrom heaven to earth, through Chaos and old Night. Pope’s Muse never wandered with safety, butfrom his library to his grotto, or from his grottointo his library back again. His mind dwelt withgreater pleasure on his own garden, than on the gardenof Eden; he could describe the faultless whole-lengthmirror that reflected his own person, better thanthe smooth surface of the lake that reflects the faceof heaven—a piece of cut glass or a pairof 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, thanwith “the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow,”that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre,
that trembles through the cottage window, and cheersthe watchful mariner on the lonely wave. Inshort, he was the poet of personality and of polishedlife. That which was nearest to him, was thegreatest; the fashion of the day bore sway in his mindover the immutable laws of nature. He preferredthe artificial to the natural in external objects,because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with theself-love of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw, thanadmiration of that which was interesting to all mankind. He preferred the artificial to the natural in passion,because the involuntary and uncalculating impulsesof the one hurried him away with a force and vehemencewith which he could not grapple; while he could triflewith the conventional and superficial modificationsof mere sentiment at will, laugh at or admire, putthem on or off like a masquerade-dress, make much orlittle of them, indulge them for a longer or a shortertime, as he pleased; and because while they amusedhis fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they neveronce disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind was the antithesis of strength and grandeur;its power was the power of indifference. Hehad none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetrywhat the sceptic is in religion.It cannot be denied, that his chief excellence laymore in diminishing, than in aggrandizing objects;in checking, not in encouraging our enthusiasm; insneering at the extravagances of fancy or passion,instead of giving a loose to them; in describing arow of pins and needles, rather than the embattledspears of Greeks and Trojans; in penning a lampoonor 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. HisMuse was on a peace-establishment, and grew somewhateffeminate by long ease and indulgence. He livedin the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favourof the great. In his smooth and polished versewe meet with no prodigies of nature, but with miraclesof wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered flatteries;its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for “thegnarled oak,” he gives us “the soft myrtle”:for rocks, and seas, and mountains, artificial grass-plats,gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for earthquakesand tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or thefall of a china jar; for the tug and war of the elements,or the deadly strife of the passions, we have
“Calm contemplationand 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 lurkingspleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered refinementof sentiment! It is like looking at the worldthrough a microscope, where every thing assumes anew character and a new consequence, where thingsare seen in their minutest circ*mstances and slightestshades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic,the deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the magnifier is, to be sure, heldto every thing, but still the exhibition is highlycurious, and we know not whether to be most pleasedor surprised. Such, at least, is the best accountI am able to give of this extraordinary man, withoutdoing injustice to him or others. It is timeto refer to particular instances in his works.—TheRape of the Lock is the best or most ingenious ofthese. It is the most exquisite specimen offillagree work ever invented. It is admirablein proportion as it is made of nothing.
“More subtleweb Arachne cannot spin,
Nor the fine nets,which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew,do not in th’ air more lightly flee.”
It is made of gauze and silver spangles. Themost glittering appearance is given to every thing,to paste, pomatum, billet-doux, and patches.Airs, languid airs, breathe around;—theatmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toiletteis described with the solemnity of an altar raisedto the Goddess of vanity, and the history of a silverbodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, nosplendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanestthings. The balance between the concealed ironyand the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as thebalance of power in Europe. The little is madegreat, and the great little. You hardly knowwhether to laugh or weep. It is the triumphof insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic! I willgive only the two following passages in illustrationof these remarks. Can any thing be more elegantand graceful than the description of Belinda, in thebeginning of the second canto?
“Notwith more glories, in the ethereal plain,
The sun firstrises o’er the purpled main,
Than, issuingforth, the rival of his beams
Launch’don the bosom of the silver Thames.
Fair nymphs, andwell-drest youths around her shone,
But ev’ryeye was fix’d on her alone.
On her white breasta sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews mightkiss, and infidels adore.
Her lively looksa 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
And like the sun,they shine on all alike.
Yet graceful ease,and sweetness void of pride,
Might hide herfaults, if belles had faults to hide:
If to her sharesome female errors fall,
Look on her face,and you’ll forget ’em all.
Thisnymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourish’dtwo locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls,and well conspir’d to deck
With shining ringletsthe smooth iv’ry neck.”
The following is the introduction to the account ofBelinda’s assault upon the baron bold, who haddissevered one of these locks “from her fairhead for ever and for ever.”
“Nowmeet thy fate, incens’d Belinda cry’d,
And drew a deadlybodkin from her side.
(The same hisancient personage to deck,
Her great, greatgrandsire wore about his neck,
In three seal-rings;which after, melted down,
Form’d avast buckle for his widow’s gown:
Her infant grandame’swhistle next it grew,
The bells shejingled, and the whistle blew;
Then in a bodkingrac’d her mother’s hairs,
Which long shewore, and now Belinda wears).”
I do not know how far Pope was indebted for the originalidea, or the delightful execution of this poem, tothe Lutrin of Boileau.
The Rape of the Lock is a double-refined essence ofwit and fancy, as the Essay on Criticism is of witand sense. The quantity of thought and observationin this work, for so young a man as Pope was when hewrote it, is wonderful: unless we adopt the supposition,that most men of genius spend the rest of their livesin teaching others what they themselves have learnedunder twenty. The conciseness and felicity ofthe expression are equally remarkable. Thus inreasoning on the variety of men’s opinion, hesays—
" ’Tis withour judgments, as our watches; none
Go just alike,yet each believes his own.”
Nothing can be more original and happy than the generalremarks and illustrations in the Essay; the criticalrules laid down are too much those of a school, andof a confined one. There is one passage in theEssay on Criticism in which the author speaks withthat eloquent enthusiasm of the fame of ancient writers,which those will always feel who have themselves anyhope or chance of immortality. I have quotedthe passage elsewhere, but I will repeat it here.
“Still greenwith bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reachof sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames,from envy’s fiercer rage,
Destructive war,and all-involving age.
Hail, bards triumphant,born in happier days,
Immortal heirsof universal praise!
Whose honourswith increase of ages grow,
As streams rolldown, enlarging as they flow.”
These lines come with double force and beauty on thereader, as they were dictated by the writer’sdespair of ever attaining that lasting glory whichhe celebrates with such disinterested enthusiasm inothers, from the lateness of the age in which he lived,and from his writing in a tongue, not understood byother nations, and that grows obsolete and unintelligibleto ourselves at the end of every second century. But he needed not have thus antedated his own poeticaldoom—the loss and entire oblivion of thatwhich can never die. If he had known, he mighthave boasted that “his little bark” wafteddown 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 ownpretensions to it.
There is a cant in the present day about genius, asevery thing in poetry: there was a cant in thetime of Pope about sense, as performing all sortsof wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the shibbolethof a critical party of the day. As a proof ofthe exclusive attention which it occupied in theirminds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on Criticism(not a very long poem) there are no less than halfa score successive couplets rhyming to the word sense. This appears almost incredible without giving theinstances, and no less so when they are given.
“But ofthe two, less dangerous is the offence,
To tire our patiencethan mislead our sense.”—lines3, 4.
“In searchof wit these lose their common sense,
And then turncritics in their own defence.”—l.28, 29.
“Pride,where wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up allthe mighty void of sense.”—l.209, 10.
“Some byold words to fame have made pretence,
Ancients in phrase,mere moderns in their sense.”—l.324, 5.
" ’Tis notenough no harshness gives offence;
The sound mustseem an echo to the sense.”—l.364, 5.
“At everytrifle scorn to take offence;
That always shewsgreat pride, or little sense.”—l.386, 7.
“Be silentalways, when you doubt your sense,
And speak, thoughsure, with seeming diffidence.”—l.366, 7.
“Be nigg*rdsof advice on no pretence,
For the worstavarice is that of sense.”—l.578, 9.
“Strainout the last dull dropping of their sense,
And rhyme withall the rage of impotence.”—l.608, 9.
“Horacestill charms with graceful negligence,
And without methodtalks us into sense.”—l. 653,4.
I have mentioned this the more for the sake of thosecritics who are bigotted idolisers of our author,chiefly on the score of his correctness. Thesepersons seem to be of opinion that “there isbut one perfect writer, even Pope.” Thisis, however, a mistake: his excellence is byno means faultlessness. If he had no great faults,he is full of little errors. His grammaticalconstruction is often lame and imperfect. Inthe Abelard and Eloise, he says—
“There diedthe best of passions, Love and Fame.”
This is not a legitimate ellipsis. Fame is nota passion, though love is: but his ear was evidentlyconfused by the meeting of the sounds “loveand fame,” as if they of themselves immediatelyimplied “love, and love of fame.”Pope’s rhymes are constantly defective, beingrhymes to the eye instead of the ear; and this toa greater degree, not only than in later, but thanin preceding writers. The praise of his versificationmust be confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony. In the translation of the Iliad, which has been consideredas his masterpiece in style and execution, he continuallychanges the tenses in the same sentence for the purposesof the rhyme, which shews either a want of technicalresources, or great inattention to punctilious exactness. But to have done with this.
The epistle of Eloise to Abelard is the only exceptionI can think of, to the general spirit of the foregoingremarks; and I should be disingenuous not to acknowledgethat it is an exception. The foundation is inthe letters themselves of Abelard and Eloise, whichare quite as impressive, but still in a differentway. It is fine as a poem: it is fineras a piece of high-wrought eloquence. No womancould be supposed to write a better love-letter inverse. Besides the richness of the historicalmaterials, the high gusto of the original sentimentswhich Pope had to work upon, there were perhaps circ*mstancesin his own situation which made him enter into thesubject 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 soulof love. Perhaps the poem to which it bearsthe greatest similarity in our language, is Dryden’sTancred and Sigismunda, taken from Boccaccio. Pope’s Eloise will bear this comparison; andafter such a test, with Boccaccio for the originalauthor, and Dryden for the translator, it need shrinkfrom no other. There is something exceedinglytender and beautiful in the sound of the concludinglines:
“If everchance two wandering lovers brings
To Paraclete’swhite walls and silver springs,” &c.
The Essay on Man is not Pope’s best work. It is a theory which Bolingbroke is supposed to havegiven him, and which he expanded into verse. But “he spins the thread of his verbosity finerthan the staple of his argument.” All thathe says, “the very words, and to the self-sametune,” would prove just as well that whateveris, is wrong, as that whatever is, is right. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but in generalit is dull, heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasmalready quoted on Settle, the Lord Mayor’s poet,(for at that time there was a city as well as a courtpoet)
“Now nightdescending, the proud scene is o’er,
But lives in Settle’snumbers one day more”—
is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better than his serious apostrophe tothe great heirs of glory, the triumphant bards ofantiquity!
The finest burst of severe moral invective in allPope, is the prophetical conclusion of the epilogueto the Satires:
“Virtuemay chuse the high or low degree,
’Tis justalike to virtue, and to me;
Dwell in a monk,or light upon a king,
She’s stillthe same belov’d, contented thing.
Vice is undoneif she forgets her birth,
And stoops fromangels to the dregs of earth.
But ’tisthe Fall degrades her to a whor*:
Let Greatnessown her, and she’s mean no more.
Her birth, herbeauty, crowds and courts confess,
Chaste matronspraise her, and grave bishops bless;
In golden chainsthe willing world she draws,
And hers the gospelis, and hers the laws;
Mounts the tribunal,lifts her scarlet head,
And sees paleVirtue carted in her stead.
Lo! at the wheelsof her triumphal car,
Old England’sGenius, rough with many a scar,
Dragged in thedust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag invertedtrains along the ground!
Our youth, alllivery’d o’er with foreign gold,
Before her dance;behind her, crawl the old!
See throngingmillions to the Pagod run,
And offer country,parent, wife, or son!
Hear her blacktrumpet through the land proclaim,
That not tobe corrupted is the shame.
In soldier, churchman,patriot, man in pow’r,
’Tis av’riceall, ambition is no more!
See all our noblesbegging to be slaves!
See all our foolsaspiring to be knaves!
The wit of cheats,the courage of a whor*,
Are what ten thousandenvy and adore;
All, all lookup with reverential awe,
At crimes that’scape or triumph o’er the law;
While truth, worth,wisdom, daily they decry:
Nothing is sacrednow but villainy.
Yet may this verse(if such a verse remain)
Show there wasone who held it in disdain.”
His Satires are not in general so good as his Epistles. His enmity is effeminate and petulant from a senseof weakness, as his friendship was tender from a senseof gratitude. I do not like, for instance, hischaracter of Chartres, or his characters of women. His delicacy often borders upon sickliness; his fastidiousnessmakes others fastidious. But his complimentsare divine; they are equal in value to a house or anestate. Take the following. In addressingLord Mansfield, he speaks of the grave as a scene,
“Where Murray, long enoughhis country’s pride,
Shall be no more than Tully, or than Hyde.”
To Bolingbroke he says—
“Whyrail they then if but one wreath of mine,
Oh all-accomplish’dSt. 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) thata descendant of this nobleman, if there be such aperson living, could hardly be guilty of a mean orpaltry action.
The finest piece of personal satire in Pope (perhapsin the world) is his character of Addison; and this,it may be observed, is of a mixed kind, made up ofhis respect for the man, and a cutting sense of hisfailings. 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 arethe Epistles to Arbuthnot, and to Jervas the painter;amiable patterns of the delightful unconcerned life,blending ease with dignity, which poets and paintersthen led. Thus he says to Arbuthnot—
“Whydid I write? What sin to me unknown
Dipp’d mein 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 callingfor this idle trade,
No duty broke,no father disobey’d:
The muse but serv’dto ease some friend, not wife;
To help me throughthis long disease, my life?
To second, Arbuthnot!thy art and care,
And teach thebeing you preserv’d to bear.
Butwhy then publish? Granville the polite,
And knowing Walsh,would tell me I could write;
Well-natur’dGarth inflam’d with early praise,
And Congreve lov’d,and Swift endur’d my lays;
The courtly Talbot,Somers, Sheffield read;
E’en mitredRochester would nod the head;
And St. John’sself (great Dryden’s friend before)
With open armsreceiv’d one poet more.
Happy my studies,when by these approv’d!
Happier theirauthor, when by these belov’d!
From these theworld will judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets,Oldmixons, and Cooks.”
I cannot help giving also the conclusion of the Epistleto Jervas.
“Oh,lasting as those colours may they shine,
Free as thy stroke,yet faultless as thy line;
New graces yearlylike thy works display,
Soft without weakness,without glaring gay;
Led by some rule,that guides, but not constrains;
And finish’dmore through happiness than pains.
The kindred artsshall in their praise conspire,
One dip the pencil,and one string the lyre.
Yet should theGraces all thy figures place,
And breathe anair divine on ev’ry face;
Yet should theMuses bid my numbers roll
Strong as theircharms, and gentle as their soul;
With Zeuxis’Helen thy Bridgewater vie,
And these be sungtill Granville’s Myra die:
Alas! how littlefrom the grave we claim!
Thou but preserv’sta face, and I a name.”
And shall we cut ourselves off from beauties likethese with a theory? Shall we shut up our books,and seal up our senses, to please the dull spite andinordinate vanity of those “who have eyes, butthey see not—ears, but they hear not—andunderstandings, but they understand not,”—andgo about asking our blind guides, whether Pope wasa 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 someother writer. Thus they say that the line, “Ilisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came,”is pretty, but taken from that of Ovid—Etquum conabar scribere, versus erat. Theyare safe in this mode of criticism: there isno danger of any one’s tracing their writingsto the classics.
Pope’s letters and prose writings neither takeaway from, nor add to his poetical reputation. There is, occasionally, a littleness of manner, andan unnecessary degree of caution. He appearsanxious to say a good thing in every word, as wellas every sentence. They, however, give a veryfavourable idea of his moral character in all respects;and his letters to Atterbury, in his disgrace andexile, do equal honour to both. If I had tochoose, there are one or two persons, and but one ortwo, that I should like to have been better than Pope!
Dryden was a better prose-writer, and a bolder andmore varied versifier than Pope. He was a morevigorous thinker, a more correct and logical declaimer,and had more of what may be called strength of mindthan Pope; but he had not the same refinement and delicacyof feeling. Dryden’s eloquence and spiritwere possessed in a higher degree by others, and innearly the same degree by Pope himself; but that bywhich Pope was distinguished, was an essence whichhe alone possessed, and of incomparable value on thatsole account. Dryden’s Epistles are excellent,but inferior to Pope’s, though they appear (particularlythe admirable one to Congreve) to have been the modelon which the latter formed his. His Satiresare better than Pope’s. His Absalom andAchitophel is superior, both in force of invectiveand discrimination of character, to any thing of Pope’sin the same way. The character of Achitophelis very fine; and breathes, if not a sincere love forvirtue, 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’ssatirical portraits and Dryden’s, appears tobe this in a good measure, that Dryden seems to grapplewith his antagonists, and to describe real persons;Pope seems to refine upon them in his own mind, andto make them out just what he pleases, till they arenot real characters, but the mere driveling effusionsof his spleen and malice. Pope describes thething, and then goes on describing his own descriptiontill he loses himself in verbal repetitions.
Dryden recurs to the object often, takes fresh sittingsof nature, and gives us new strokes of character aswell as of his pencil. The Hind and Panther isan allegory as well as a satire; and so far it tellsless home; the battery is not so point-blank. But otherwise it has more genius, vehemence, andstrength of description than any other of Dryden’sworks, not excepting the Absalom and Achitophel. It also contains the finest examples of varied andsounding versification. I will quote the followingas an instance of what I mean. He is complainingof the treatment which the Papists, under James II.received from the church of England.“Besidesthese jolly birds, whose corpse impure
Repaid their commonswith their salt manure,
Another farm hehad behind his house,
Not overstocked,but barely for his use;
Wherein his poordomestic poultry fed,
And from his pioushand “received their bread.”
Our pampered pigeons,with malignant eyes,
Beheld these inmates,and their nurseries;
Though hard theirfare, at evening, and at morn,
(A cruise of water,and an ear of corn,)
Yet still theygrudged that modicum, and thought
A sheaf in everysingle grain was brought.
Fain would theyfilch that little food away,
While unrestrainedthose happy gluttons prey;
And much theygrieved to see so nigh their hall,
The bird thatwarned St. Peter of his fall;
That he shouldraise his mitred crest on high,
And clap his wings,and call his family
To sacred rites;and vex the ethereal powers
With midnightmattins at uncivil hours;
Nay more, hisquiet neighbours should molest,
Just in the sweetnessof their morning rest.
Beast of a bird!supinely when he might
Lie snug and sleep,to rise before the light!
What if his dullforefathers us’d that cry,
Could he not leta bad example die?
The world wasfallen into an easier way:
This age knewbetter than to fast and pray.
Good sense insacred worship would appear,
So to begin asthey might end the year.
Such feats informer times had wrought the falls
Of crowing chanticleersin cloister’d walls.
Expell’dfor this, and for their lands they fled;
And sister Partletwith her hooded head
Was hooted hence,because she would not pray a-bed.”
There is a magnanimity of abuse in some of these epithets,a fearless choice of topics of invective, which maybe 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 denominatedmetaphysical poetry. His Odes in general areof the same stamp; they are the hard-strained offspringof a meagre, meretricious fancy. The famousOde on St. Cecilia deserves its reputation; for, aspiece of poetical mechanism to be set to music, orrecited in alternate strophe and antistrophe, withclassical allusions, and flowing verse, nothing canbe 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 jollygod in triumph comes,
Sound the trumpets,beat the drums;
Flush’dwith a purple grace,
He shews his honestface”—
does not answer, as it ought, to our idea of the God,returning from the conquest of India, with satyrsand wild beasts, that he had tamed, following in histrain; crowned with vine leaves, and riding in a chariotdrawn by leopards—such as we have seen himpainted by Titian or Rubens! Lyrical poetry,of all others, bears the nearest resemblance to painting:it deals in hieroglyphics and passing figures, whichdepend for effect, not on the working out, but onthe selection. It is the dance and pantomimeof poetry. In variety and rapidity of movement,the Alexander’s Feast has all that can be requiredin this respect; it only wants loftiness and truthof character.
Dryden’s plays are better than Pope could havewritten; for though he does not go out of himselfby the force of imagination, he goes out of himselfby 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 thathas ever been written. [5]
His alterations from Chaucer and Boccaccio shew agreater knowledge of the taste of his readers andpower of pleasing them, than acquaintance with thegenius of his authors. He ekes out the lamenessof the verse in the former, and breaks the force ofthe passion in both. The Tancred and Sigismundais the only general exception, in which, I think,he has fully retained, if not improved upon, the impassioneddeclamation of the original. The Honoria hasnone of the bewildered, dreary, preternatural effectof Boccaccio’s story. Nor has the Flowerand the Leaf any thing of the enchanting simplicityand concentrated feeling of Chaucer’s romanticfiction. Dryden, however, sometimes seemed toindulge himself as well as his readers, as in keepingentire that noble line in Palamon’s addressto Venus:
“Thou gladderof the mount of Cithaeron!”
His Tales have been, upon the whole, the most popularof his works; and I should think that a translationof some of the other serious tales in Boccaccio andChaucer, as that of Isabella, the Falcon, of Constance,the Prioress’s Tale, and others, if executedwith taste and spirit, could not fail to succeed inthe present day.
___[5] “To begin then with Shakspeare: he was the man who of all modern,and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them notlaboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than seeit, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, givehim the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed notthe spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found herthere. I cannot say, he is every where alike; were he so, I should dohim injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many timesflat, and insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his seriousswelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasionis presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for hiswit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,Quantum lenta solent inter Viburna Cupressi.”___
It should appear, in tracing the history of our literature,that poetry had, at the period of which we are speaking,in general declined, by successive gradations, fromthe 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 poetryof fancy to that of wit, as in the reign of CharlesII. and Queen Anne. It degenerated into thepoetry of mere common places, both in style and thought,in the succeeding reigns: as in the latter partof the last century, it was transformed, by meansof the French Revolution, into the poetry of paradox.
Of Donne I know nothing but some beautiful versesto his wife, dissuading her from accompanying himon his travels abroad, and some quaint riddles inverse, which the Sphinx could not unravel.
Waller still lives in the name of Sacharissa; andhis lines on the death of Oliver Cromwell shew thathe was a man not without genius and strength of thought.
Marvel is a writer of nearly the same period, andworthy of a better age. Some of his verses areharsh, as the words of Mercury; others musical, asis Apollo’s lute. Of the latter kind arehis boat-song, his description of a fawn, and hislines to Lady Vere. His lines prefixed to ParadiseLost are by no means the most favourable specimen ofhis powers.
Butler’s Hudibras is a poem of more wit thanany other in the language. The rhymes have asmuch genius in them as the thoughts; but there isno story in it, and but little humour. Humouris the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously:wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdityconsciously, and with more or less ill-nature. The fault of Butler’s poem is not that it hastoo much wit, but that it has not an equal quantityof other things. One would suppose that thestarched manners and sanctified grimace of the timesin which he lived, would of themselves have been sufficientlyrich in ludicrous incidents and characters; but theyseem rather to have irritated his spleen, than tohave drawn forth his powers of picturesque imitation.Certainly if we compare Hudibras with Don Quixote inthis respect, it seems rather a meagre and unsatisfactoryperformance.
Rochester’s poetry is the poetry of wit combinedwith the love of pleasure, of thought with licentiousness. His extravagant heedless levity has a sort of passionateenthusiasm in it; his contempt for every thing thatothers 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 Weddingis perfect in its kind, and has a spirit of high enjoymentin 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 alltheir naivete and terseness, it has a Shakspeariangrace and luxuriance about it, which they could nothave reached.
Denham and Cowley belong to the same period, but werequite distinct from each other: the one was graveand prosing, the other melancholy and fantastical. There are a number of good lines and good thoughtsin the Cooper’s Hill. And in Cowley thereis an inexhaustible fund of sense and ingenuity, buriedin inextricable conceits, and entangled in the cobwebsof the schools. He was a great man, not a greatpoet. 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 aremore sacred.
Withers is a name now almost forgotten, and his worksseldom read; but his poetry is not unfrequently distinguishedby a tender and pastoral turn of thought; and thereis one passage of exquisite feeling, describing theconsolations of poetry in the following terms:
“Shedoth tell me where to borrow
Comfort in themidst of sorrow;
Makes the desolatestplace [6]
To her presencebe a grace;
And the blackestdiscontents
Be her fairestornaments.
In my former daysof bliss
Her divine skilltaught me this,
That from everything I saw,
I could some inventiondraw;
And raise pleasureto her height,
Through the meanestobject’s sight,
By the murmurof a spring,
Or the least bough’srusteling,
By a daisy whoseleaves spread
Shut when Titangoes to bed;
Or a shady bushor tree,
She could moreinfuse in me,
Than all Nature’sbeauties can,
In some otherwiser man.
By her help Ialso now
Make this churlishplace allow
Some things thatmay sweeten gladness
In the very gallof sadness.
The dull loneness,the black shade,
That these hangingvaults have made,
The strange musicof the waves,
Beating on thesehollow caves,
This black denwhich rocks emboss,
Overgrown with
The rude portalsthat give light
More to terrorthan delight,
This my chamberof neglect,
Wall’d aboutwith disrespect,
From all theseand this dull air,
A fit object fordespair,
She hath taughtme by her might
To draw comfortand delight.
Therefore, thoubest earthly bliss,
I will cherishthee for this.
Poesie; thou sweet’stcontent
That ere Heav’nto mortals lent:
Though they asa trifle leave thee,
Whose dull thoughtscannot conceive thee,
Though thou beto them a scorn,
That to noughtbut earth are born:
Let my life nolonger be
Than I am in lovewith thee.
Though our wiseones call thee madness,
Let me never tasteof sadness,
If I love notthy maddest fits,
Above all theirgreatest wits.
And though sometoo seeming holy,
Do account thyraptures folly,
Thou dost teachme to contemn
What makes knavesand fools of them.”
___[6] Written in the Fleet Prison.___
LECTURE V.ON THOMSON AND COWPER.
Thomson, the kind-hearted Thomson, was the most indolentof mortals and of poets. But he was also oneof the best both of mortals and of poets. Dr.Johnson makes it his praise that he wrote “noline which dying he would wish to blot.”Perhaps a better proof of his honest simplicity, andinoffensive goodness of disposition, would be thathe wrote no line which any other person living wouldwish that he should blot. Indeed, he himselfwished, on his death-bed, formally to expunge hisdedication 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 sayon the other hand—“Would he had blotteda thousand!”—The same suavity of temperand sanguine warmth of feeling which threw such anatural grace and genial spirit of enthusiasm overhis poetry, was also the cause of its inherent vicesand defects. He is affected through carelessness:pompous from unsuspecting simplicity of character. He is frequently pedantic and ostentatious in hisstyle, because he had no consciousness of these vicesin himself. He mounts upon stilts, not out ofvanity, but indolence. He seldom writes a goodline, but he makes up for it by a bad one. Hetakes advantage of all the most trite and mechanicalcommon-places of imagery and diction as a kindly reliefto 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 differenceworth putting himself to the trouble of accomplishing. He had too little art to conceal his art: ordid not even seem to know that there was any occasionfor it. His art is as naked and undisguisedas his nature; the one is as pure and genuine as the
other is gross, gaudy, and meretricious.—Allthat is admirable in the Seasons, is the emanationof a fine natural genius, and sincere love of hissubject, 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 “cannotbe constrained by mastery.” The feelingof nature, of the changes of the seasons, was in hismind; and he could not help conveying this feelingto the reader, by the mere force of spontaneous expression;but if the expression did not come of itself, he leftthe whole business to chance; or, willing to evadeinstead of encountering the difficulties of his subject,fills up the intervals of true inspiration with themost vapid and worthless materials, pieces out a beautifulhalf line with a bombastic allusion, or overloadsan exquisitely natural sentiment or image with a cloudof painted, pompous, cumbrous phrases, like the showerof roses, in which he represents the Spring, his ownlovely, fresh, and innocent Spring, as descendingto the earth.“Come, gentleSpring! ethereal Mildness! come,
And from the bosomof yon dropping cloud,
While music wakesaround, veil’d in a shower
Of shadowing roses,on our plains descend.”
Who, from such a flimsy, round-about, unmeaning commencementas this, would expect the delightful, unexaggerated,home-felt descriptions of natural scenery, which arescattered in such unconscious profusion through thisand the following cantos? For instance, the verynext passage is crowded with a set of striking images.
“And seewhere surly Winter passes off
Far to the north,and calls his ruffian blasts:
His blasts obey,and quit the howling hill,
The shatter’dforest, and the ravag’d vale;
While softer galessucceed, at whose kind touch
Dissolving snowsin livid torrents lost,
The mountainslift their green heads to the sky.
As yet the tremblingyear is unconfirmed,
And Winter oftat eve resumes the breeze,
Chills the palemorn, and bids his driving sleets
Deform the daydelightless; so that scarce
The bittern knowshis time with bill ingulpht
To shake the soundingmarsh, or from the shore
The plovers whento scatter o’er the heath,
And sing theirwild notes to the list’ning waste.”
Thomson is the best of our descriptive poets:for he gives most of the poetry of natural description. Others have been quite equal to him, or have surpassedhim, as Cowper for instance, in the picturesque partof his art, in marking the peculiar features and curiousdetails of objects;—no one has yet comeup to him in giving the sum total of their effects,their varying influences on the mind. He doesnot go into the minutiae of a landscape, butdescribes the vivid impression which the whole makes
upon his own imagination; and thus transfers the sameunbroken, unimpaired impression to the imaginationof his readers. The colours with which he paintsseem yet wet and breathing, like those of the livingstatue in the Winter’s Tale. Nature inhis descriptions is seen growing around us, freshand lusty as in itself. We feel the effect ofthe atmosphere, its humidity or clearness, its heator cold, the glow of summer, the gloom of winter,the tender promise of the spring, the full overshadowingfoliage, the declining pomp and deepening tints ofautumn. He transports us to the scorching heatof vertical suns, or plunges us into the chillinghorrors and desolation of the frozen zone. Wehear the snow drifting against the broken casem*ntwithout, and see the fire blazing on the hearth within. The first scattered drops of a vernal shower patteron the leaves above our heads, or the coming stormresounds through the leafless groves. In a word,he describes not to the eye alone, but to the othersenses, and to the whole man. He puts his heartinto his subject, writes as he feels, and humaniseswhatever he touches. He makes all his descriptionsteem with life and vivifying soul. His faultswere those of his style—of the author andthe man; but the original genius of the poet, thepith and marrow of his imagination, the fine naturalmould in which his feelings were bedded, were toomuch for him to counteract by neglect, or affectation,or false ornaments. It is for this reason thathe is, perhaps, the most popular of all our poets,treating of a subject that all can understand, andin a way that is interesting to all alike, to theignorant or the refined, because he gives back theimpression which the things themselves make upon usin nature. “That,” said a man ofgenius, seeing a little shabby soiled copy of Thomson’sSeasons lying on the window-seat of an obscure countryalehouse—“That is true fame!”It has been supposed by some, that the Castle of Indolenceis Thomson’s best poem; but that is not thecase. He has in it, indeed, poured out the wholesoul of indolence, diffuse, relaxed, supine, dissolvedinto a voluptuous dream; and surrounded himself witha set of objects and companions, in entire unisonwith the listlessness of his own temper. Nothingcan well go beyond the descriptions of these inmatesof the place, and their luxurious pampered way of life—ofhim who came among them like “a burnished flyin month of June,” but soon left them on hisheedless way; and him,
“For whomthe merry bells had rung, I ween,
If in this nookof quiet, bells had ever been.”
The in-door quiet and cushioned ease, where “allwas one full-swelling bed”; the out-of-doorstillness, broken only by “the stock-dove’splaint amid the forest deep,”
“That drowsyrustled to the sighing gale”—
are in the most perfect and delightful keeping. But still there are no passages in this exquisitelittle production of sportive ease and fancy, equalto the best of those in the Seasons. Warton,in his Essay on Pope, was the first to point out anddo justice to some of these; for instance, to thedescription of the effects of the contagion among ourships at Carthagena—“of the frequentcorse heard nightly plunged amid the sullen waves,”and to the description of the pilgrims lost in thedeserts of Arabia. This last passage, profoundand striking as it is, is not free from those faultsof 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 gath’ring eddies play;Nearer and nearer still they dark’ning come,Till with the gen’ral 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, wond’ring, waits in vain;And Mecca saddens at the long delay.”
There are other passages of equal beauty with these;such as that of the hunted stag, followed by “theinhuman rout,”
“------That from the shady depthExpel him, circling through his ev’ry shift.He sweeps the forest oft, and sobbing seesThe glades mild op’ning 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, inthe Winter, is perhaps even finer and more thoroughlyfelt, as being done from early associations, thanthat of the torrid zone in his Summer. Any thingmore beautiful than the following account of the Siberianexiles is, I think, hardly to be found in the wholerange of poetry.
“There throughthe prison of unbounded wilds,
Barr’d bythe hand of nature from escape,
Wide roams theRussian exile. Nought around
Strikes his sadeye but deserts lost in snow,
And heavy-loadedgroves, and solid floods,
That stretch athwartthe solitary vast
Their icy horrorsto the frozen main;
And cheerlesstowns far distant, never bless’d,
Save when itsannual course the caravan
Bends to the goldencoast of rich Cathay,
With news of humankind.”
The feeling of loneliness, of distance, of lingering,slow-revolving years of pining expectation, of desolationwithin and without the heart, was never more finelyexpressed than it is here.
The account which follows of the employments of thePolar night—of the journeys of the nativesby moonlight, drawn by rein-deer, and of the returnof spring in Lapland—
“Where pureNiemi’s fairy mountains rise,
And fring’dwith roses Tenglio rolls his stream,”
is equally picturesque and striking in a differentway. The traveller lost in the snow, is a well-knownand admirable dramatic episode. I prefer, however,giving one example of our author’s skill in paintingcommon domestic scenery, as it will bear a more immediatecomparison with the style of some later writers onsuch subjects. It is of little consequence whatpassage we take. The following description ofthe first setting in of winter is, perhaps, as pleasingas any.
“Throughthe hush’d air the whitening shower descends,
At first thinwav’ring, till at last the flakes
Fall broad andwide, and fast, dimming the day
With a continualflow. The cherish’d fields
Put on their winter-robeof purest white:
’Tis brightnessall, save where the new snow melts
Along the mazycurrent. Low the woods
Bow their hoarhead; and ere the languid Sun,
Faint, from theWest emits his ev’ning ray,
Earth’suniversal face, deep hid, and chill,
Is one wide dazzlingwaste, that buries wide
The works of man. Drooping, the lab’rer-ox
Stands cover’do’er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of allhis toil. The fowls of heav’n,
Tam’d bythe cruel season, crowd around
The winnowingstore, and claim the little boon
Which Providenceassigns them. One alone,
The red-breast,sacred to the household Gods,
Wisely regardfulof the embroiling sky,
In joyless fieldsand thorny thickets leaves
His shiveringmates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half-afraid, he first
Against the windowbeats; then, brisk, alights
On the warm hearth;then hopping o’er the floor,
Eyes all the smilingfamily askance,
And pecks, andstarts, and wonders where he is:
Till more familiargrown, the table-crumbs
Attract his slenderfeet. The foodless wilds
Pour forth theirbrown inhabitants. The hare,
Though timorousof heart, and hard beset
By death in variousforms, dark snares and dogs,
And more unpityingmen, the garden seeks,
Urg’d onby fearless want. The bleating kind [sic]
Eye the bleakheav’n, and next, the glist’ning earth,
With looks ofdumb despair; then, sad dispers’d,
Dig for the wither’dherb through heaps of snow.”
It is thus that Thomson always gives a moral senseto nature.
Thomson’s blank verse is not harsh, or utterlyuntuneable; but it is heavy and monotonous; it seemsalways labouring up-hill. The selections whichhave been made from his works in Enfield’s Speaker,and other books of extracts, do not convey the mostfavourable idea of his genius or taste; such as Palemonand Lavinia, Damon and Musidora, Celadon and Amelia. Those parts of any author which are most liable tobe stitched in worsted, and framed and glazed, arenot by any means always the best. The moral descriptionsand reflections in the Seasons are in an admirablespirit, and written with great force and fervour.
His poem on Liberty is not equally good: hisMuse was too easy and good-natured for the subject,which required as much indignation against unjustand arbitrary power, as complacency in the constitutionalmonarchy, under which, just after the expulsion ofthe Stuarts and the establishment of the House ofHanover, in contempt of the claims of hereditary pretendersto the throne, Thomson lived. Thomson was butan indifferent hater; and the most indispensable partof the love of liberty has unfortunately hithertobeen the hatred of tyranny. Spleen is the soulof patriotism, and of public good: but you wouldnot expect a man who has been seen eating peachesoff a tree with both hands in his waistcoat pockets,to be “overrun with the spleen,” or toheat himself needlessly about an abstract proposition.
His plays are liable to the same objection. They are never acted, and seldom read. The authorcould 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 ofTancred and Sigismunda, which is taken from a seriousepisode in Gil Blas, is an admirable one, but poorlyhandled: the ground may be considered as stillunoccupied.
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 insimplicity of style, in a certain precision and minutenessof graphical description, and in a more careful andleisurely choice of such topics only as his geniusand peculiar habits of mind prompted him to treatof. The Task has fewer blemishes than the Seasons;but it has not the same capital excellence, the “unboughtgrace” of poetry, the power of moving and infusingthe warmth of the author’s mind into that ofthe reader. If Cowper had a more polished taste,Thomson had, beyond comparison, a more fertile genius,more impulsive force, a more entire forgetfulnessof himself in his subject. If in Thomson youare sometimes offended with the slovenliness of theauthor by profession, determined to get through histask at all events; in Cowper you are no less dissatisfiedwith the finicalness of the private gentleman, whodoes not care whether he completes his work or not;and in whatever he does, is evidently more solicitousto please himself than the public. There isan effeminacy about him, which shrinks from and repelscommon and hearty sympathy. With all his boastedsimplicity and love of the country, he seldom launchesout into general descriptions of nature: he looksat her over his clipped hedges, and from his well-sweptgarden-walks; or if he makes a bolder experiment nowand then, it is with an air of precaution, as if hewere afraid of being caught in a shower of rain, orof not being able, in case of any untoward accident,to make good his retreat home. He shakes handswith nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on,and leads “his Vashti” forth to public
view with a look of consciousness and attention toetiquette, as a fine gentleman hands a lady out todance a minuet. He is delicate to fastidiousness,and glad to get back, after a romantic adventure withcrazy Kate, a party of gypsies or a little child ona common, to the drawing room and the ladies again,to the sofa and the tea-kettle—No, I beghis pardon, not to the singing, well-scoured tea-kettle,but to the polished and loud-hissing urn. Hiswalks and arbours are kept clear of worms and snails,with as much an appearance of petit-maitreshipas of humanity. He has some of the sickly sensibilityand pampered refinements of Pope; but then Pope pridedhimself in them: whereas, Cowper affects to beall simplicity and plainness. He had neitherThomson’s love of the unadorned beauties ofnature, nor Pope’s exquisite sense of the elegancesof art. He was, in fact, a nervous man, afraidof trusting himself to the seductions of the one,and ashamed of putting forward his pretensions to anintimacy 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 deservesall his reputation. His worst vices are amiableweaknesses, elegant trifling. Though there isa frequent dryness, timidity, and jejuneness in hismanner, he has left a number of pictures of domesticcomfort and social refinement, as well as of naturalimagery and feeling, which can hardly be forgottenbut 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’sevening in the country, of the unexpected fall ofsnow, of the frosty morning (with the fine satiricaltransition to the Empress of Russia’s palaceof ice), and most of all, the winter’s walkat noon. Every one of these may be consideredas distinct studies, or highly finished cabinet-pieces,arranged without order or coherence. I shallbe excused for giving the last of them, as what hasalways appeared to me one of the most feeling, elegant,and perfect specimens of this writer’s manner.“The nightwas winter in his roughest mood;
The morning sharpand clear. But now at noon
Upon the southernside of the slant hills,
And where thewoods fence off the northern blast,
The season smiles,resigning all its rage,
And has the warmthof May. The vault is blue,
Without a cloud,and white without a speck
The dazzling splendourof the scene below.
Again the harmonycomes o’er the vale;
And through thetrees I view th’ embattled tow’r,
Whence all themusic. I again perceive
The soothing influenceof the wafted strains,
And settle insoft musings as I tread
The walk, stillverdant, under oaks and elms,
Whose outspreadbranches overarch the glade.
The roof, thoughmoveable through all its length,
And, interceptingin their silent fall
The frequent flakes,has kept a path for me.
No noise is here,or none that hinders thought.
The redbreastwarbles still, but is content
With slender notes,and more than half suppress’d.
Pleas’dwith his solitude, and flitting light
From spray tospray, where’er he rests he shakes
From many a twigthe pendent drop of ice,
That tinkle inthe wither’d leaves below.
Stillness, accompaniedwith sounds so soft,
Charms more thansilence. Meditation here
May think downhours to moments. Here the heart
May give a usefullesson to the head,
And Learning wisergrow without his books.
Knowledge andWisdom, far from being one,
Have oft-timesno connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads repletewith thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in mindsattentive to their own.
Books are notseldom talismans and spells,
By which the magicart of shrewder wits
Holds an unthinkingmultitude enthrall’d.
Some to the fascinationof a name
Surrender judgmenthood-wink’d. Some the style
Infatuates, andthrough labyrinths and wilds
Of error leadsthem, by a tune entranc’d.
While sloth seducesmore, too weak to bear
The insupportablefatigue of thought,
And swallowingtherefore without pause or choice
The total gristunsifted, husks and all.
But trees, andrivulets whose rapid course
Defies the checkof winter, haunts of deer,
And sheep-walkspopulous with bleating lambs,
And lanes, inwhich the primrose ere her time
Peeps throughthe moss that clothes the hawthorn root,
Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth,
Not shy, as inthe world, and to be won
By slow solicitation,seize at once
The roving thought,and fix it on themselves.”
His satire is also excellent. It is pointedand forcible, with the polished manners of the gentleman,and the honest indignation of the virtuous man. His religious poetry, except where it takes a tinctureof controversial heat, wants elevation and fire. His Muse had not a seraph’s wing. I mightrefer, in illustration of this opinion, to the labouredanticipation of the Millennium at the end of the sixthbook. He could describe a piece of shell-workas well as any modern poet: but he could notdescribe the New Jerusalem so well as John Bunyan;—norare his verses on Alexander Selkirk so good as RobinsonCrusoe. 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 comparisonin these poems of the proud and humble believer tothe peaco*ck and the pheasant, and the parallel betweenVoltaire and the poor cottager, are exquisite piecesof eloquence and poetry, particularly the last.
“Yoncottager, who weaves at her own door,
Pillow and bobbinsall her little store;
Content thoughmean, and cheerful if not gay,
Shuffling herthreads about the live-long day,
Just earns a scantypittance, and at night,
Lies down secure,her heart and pocket light;
She, for her humblesphere by nature fit,
Has little understanding,and no wit,
Receives no praise;but, though her lot be such,
(Toilsome andindigent) she renders much;
Just knows, andknows no more, her Bible true—
A truth the brilliantFrenchman never knew;
And in that charterreads with sparkling eyes
Her title to atreasure in the skies.
Ohappy peasant! Oh unhappy bard!
His the mere tinsel,hers the rich reward;
He prais’d,perhaps, for ages yet to come,
She never heardof half a mile from home:
He lost in errorshis vain heart prefers,
She safe in thesimplicity of hers.”
His character of Whitfield, in the poem on Hope, isone of his most spirited and striking things. It is written con amore.
“Butif, unblameable in word and thought,
A man arise, aman whom God has taught,
With all Elijah’sdignity of tone,
And all the loveof the beloved John,
To storm the citadelsthey build in air,
To smite the untemper’dwall (’tis death to spare,)
To sweep awayall refuges of lies,
And place, insteadof quirks, themselves devise,
Lama Sabachthanibefore their eyes;
To show that withoutChrist all gain is loss,
All hope despairthat stands not on his cross;
Except a few hisGod may have impressed,
A tenfold phrensyseizes all the rest.”
These lines were quoted, soon after their appearance,by the Monthly Reviewers, to shew that Cowper wasno poet, though they afterwards took credit to themselvesfor having been the first to introduce his versesto the notice of the public. It is not a littleremarkable that these same critics regularly damned,at its first coming out, every work which has sinceacquired a standard reputation with the public.—Cowper’sverses on his mother’s picture, and his linesto Mary, are some of the most pathetic that ever werewritten. His stanzas on the loss of the RoyalGeorge have a masculine strength and feeling beyondwhat was usual with him. The story of John Gilpinhas perhaps given as much pleasure to as many peopleas any thing of the same length that ever was written.
His life was an unhappy one. It was embitteredby a morbid affection, and by his religious sentiments. Nor are we to wonder at this, or bring it as a chargeagainst religion; for it is the nature of the poeticaltemperament to carry every thing to excess, whetherit be love, religion, pleasure, or pain, as we maysee in the case of Cowper and of Burns, and to findtorment or rapture in that in which others merelyfind a resource from ennui, or a relaxationfrom common occupation.
There are two poets still living who belong to thesame class of excellence, and of whom I shall heresay a few words; I mean Crabbe, and Robert Bloomfield,the author of the Farmer’s Boy. As a painterof simple natural scenery, and of the still life ofthe country, few writers have more undeniable andunassuming pretensions than the ingenious and self-taughtpoet, last-mentioned. Among the sketches ofthis sort I would mention, as equally distinguishedfor delicacy, faithfulness, and naivete, hisdescription of lambs racing, of the pigs going outan acorning, of the boy sent to feed his sheep beforethe break of day in winter; and I might add the innocentlytold story of the poor bird-boy, who in vain throughthe live-long day expects his promised companionsat his hut, to share his feast of roasted sloes withhim, as an example of that humble pathos, in whichthis author excels. The fault indeed of his geniusis that it is too humble: his Muse has somethingnot only rustic, but menial in her aspect. Heseems afraid of elevating nature, lest she shouldbe ashamed of him. Bloomfield very beautifullydescribes the lambs in springtime as racing round thehillocks of green turf: Thomson, in describingthe same image, makes the mound of earth the remainsof an old Roman encampment. Bloomfield nevergets beyond his own experience; and that is somewhatconfined. He gives the simple appearance ofnature, but he gives it naked, shivering, and unclothedwith the drapery of a moral imagination. Hispoetry has much the effect of the first approach ofspring, “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 breathof poverty.—It should seem from this andother instances that have occurred within the lastcentury, that we cannot expect from original geniusalone, without education, in modern and more artificialperiods, the same bold and independent results asin former periods. And one reason appears tobe, that though such persons, from whom we might atfirst expect a restoration of the good old times ofpoetry, are not encumbered and enfeebled by the trammelsof custom, and the dull weight of other men’sideas; yet they are oppressed by the consciousnessof a want of the common advantages which others have;are looking at the tinsel finery of the age, whilethey neglect the rich unexplored mine in their ownbreasts; and instead of setting an example for theworld to follow, spend their lives in aping, or inthe despair of aping, the hackneyed accomplishmentsof their inferiors. Another cause may be, thatoriginal genius alone is not sufficient to producethe highest excellence, without a corresponding stateof manners, passions, and religious belief: thatno single mind can move in direct opposition to thevast machine of the world around it; that the poetcan do no more than stamp the mind of his age uponhis works; and that all that the ambition of the highest
genius can hope to arrive at, after the lapse of oneor two generations, is the perfection of that morerefined and effeminate style of studied elegance andadventitious ornament, which is the result, not ofnature, but of art. In fact, no other style ofpoetry has succeeded, or seems likely to succeed,in the present day. The public taste hangs likea millstone round the neck of all original genius thatdoes not conform to established and exclusive models. The writer is not only without popular sympathy,but without a rich and varied mass of materials forhis mind to work upon and assimilate unconsciouslyto itself; his attempts at originality are lookedupon as affectation, and in the end, degenerate intoit from the natural spirit of contradiction, and theconstant uneasy sense of disappointment and undeservedridicule. But to return.Crabbe is, if not the most natural, the most literalof our descriptive poets. He exhibits the smallestcirc*mstances of the smallest things. He givesthe very costume of meanness; the nonessentials ofevery trifling incident. He is his own landscape-painter,and engraver too. His pastoral scenes seem prickedon paper in little dotted lines. He describesthe interior of a cottage like a person sent thereto distrain for rent. He has an eye to the numberof arms in an old worm-eaten chair, and takes careto inform himself and the reader whether a joint-stoolstands upon three legs or upon four. If a settleby the fire-side stands awry, it gives him as muchdisturbance as a tottering world; and he records therent in a ragged counterpane as an event in history. He is equally curious in his back-grounds and inhis figures. You know the Christian and surnamesof every one of his heroes,—the dates oftheir achievements, whether on a Sunday or a Monday,—theirplace 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 exactlyin 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 carvesa tear, to the life, in stone. Almost all hischaracters are tired of their lives, and you heartilywish them dead. They remind one of anatomicalpreservations; or may be said to bear the same relationto actual life that a stuffed cat in a glass-casedoes to the real one purring on the hearth: theskin is the same, but the life and the sense of heatis gone. Crabbe’s poetry is like a museum,or curiosity-shop: every thing has the same posthumousappearance, the same inanimateness and identity ofcharacter. If Bloomfield is too much of the Farmer’sBoy, Crabbe is too much of the parish beadle, an overseerof the country poor. He has no delight beyondthe walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal wouldconvert the world into a vast infirmary. He isa kind of Ordinary, not of Newgate, but of nature.
His poetical morality is taken from Burn’sJustice, or the Statutes against Vagrants. Hesets 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 circleof rural malefactors. He makes out the poorto be as bad as the rich—a sort of verminfor the others to hunt down and trample upon, andthis he thinks a good piece of work. With himthere are but two moral categories, riches and poverty,authority and dependence. His parish apprentice,Richard Monday, and his wealthy baronet, Sir RichardMonday, of Monday-place, are the same individual—the extremes of the same character, and of his wholesystem. “The latter end of his Commonwealthdoes not forget the beginning.” But hisparish ethics are the very worst model for a state:any thing more degrading and helpless cannot wellbe imagined. He exhibits just the contrary viewof human life to that which Gay has done in his Beggar’sOpera. In a word, Crabbe is the only poet whohas attempted and succeeded in the still lifeof tragedy: who gives the stagnation of hope andfear— the deformity of vice without thetemptation—the pain of sympathy withoutthe interest—and who seems to rely, forthe delight he is to convey to his reader, on thetruth and accuracy with which he describes only whatis disagreeable.The best descriptive poetry is not, after all, tobe found in our descriptive poets. There areset descriptions of the flowers, for instance, inThomson, Cowper, and others; but none equal to thosein Milton’s Lycidas, and in the Winter’sTale.
We have few good pastorals in the language. Our manners are not Arcadian; our climate is not aneternal spring; our age is not the age of gold. We have no pastoral-writers equal to Theocritus, norany landscapes like those of Claude Lorraine. The best parts of Spenser’s Shepherd’sCalendar are two fables, Mother Hubberd’s Tale,and the Oak and the Briar; which last is as splendida piece of oratory as any to be found in the recordsof the eloquence of the British senate! Browne,who came after Spenser, and Withers, have left somepleasing allegorical poems of this kind. Pope’sare as full of senseless finery and trite affectation,as if a peer of the realm were to sit for his picturewith a crook and co*cked hat on, smiling with an insipidair of no-meaning, between nature and fashion. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia is a lasting monumentof perverted power; where an image of extreme beauty,as that of “the shepherd boy piping as thoughhe should never be old,” peeps out once in ahundred folio pages, amidst heaps of intricate sophistryand scholastic quaintness. It is not at alllike Nicholas Poussin’s picture, in which herepresents some shepherds wandering out in a morningof the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription—“Ialso was an Arcadian!” Perhaps the best pastoral
in the language is that prose-poem, Walton’sComplete Angler. That well-known work has a beautyand romantic interest equal to its simplicity, andarising out of it. In the description of a fishing-tackle,you perceive the piety and humanity of the author’smind. It is to be doubted whether Sannazarius’sPiscatory Eclogues are equal to the scenes describedby Walton on the banks of the river Lea. Hegives the feeling of the open air: we walk withhim along the dusty road-side, or repose on the banksof the river under a shady tree; and in watching forthe finny prey, imbibe what he beautifully calls “thepatience and simplicity of poor honest fishermen.”We accompany them to their inn at night, and partakeof their simple, but delicious fare; while Maud, thepretty milk-maid, at her mother’s desire, singsthe classical ditties of the poet Marlow; “Comelive with me, and be my love.” Good cheeris not neglected in this work, any more than in Homer,or any other history that sets a proper value on thegood things of this life. The prints in theComplete Angler give an additional reality and interestto the scenes it describes. While TottenhamCross shall stand, and longer, thy work, amiable andhappy old man, shall last!—It is in thenotes to it that we find that character of “afair and happy milkmaid,” by Sir Thomas Overbury,which may vie in beauty and feeling with Chaucer’scharacter of Griselda.“A fair and happy milk-maid is a countrywench that is so far from making herself beautifulby art, that one look of her’s is able to putall face-physic out of countenance. She knowsa fair look is but a dumb orator to commend virtue,therefore minds it not. All her excellencesstand in her so silently, as if they had stolen uponher without her knowledge. The lining of herapparel (which is herself) is far better than outsidesof tissue; for though she be not arrayed in the spoilof the silkworm, she is decked in innocency, a farbetter wearing. She doth not, with lying longin bed, spoil both her complexion and conditions.Nature hath taught her, too immoderate sleep is rustto the soul: she rises therefore with chanticleer,her dame’s co*ck, and at night makes the lambher curfew. Her breath is her own, which scentsall the year long of June, like a new-made hayco*ck. She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heartsoft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early(sitting at her merry wheel) she sings a defiance tothe giddy wheel of Fortune. She doth all thingswith so sweet a grace, it seems ignorance will notsuffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well.She bestows her year’s wages at next fair; andin choosing her garments, counts no bravery in theworld like decency. The garden and bee-hive areall her physic and chirurgery, and she lives the longerfor’t. She dares go alone, and unfoldsheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, becauseshe means none: yet, to say the truth, she is
never alone, for she is still accompanied with oldsongs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones;yet they have their efficacy, in that they are notpalled 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 livesshe; and all her care is she may die in the spring-time,to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet.”The love of the country has been sung by poets, andechoed by philosophers; but the first have not attempted,and the last have been greatly puzzled to accountfor it. I do not know that any one has everexplained, satisfactorily, the true source of thisfeeling, or of that soothing emotion which the sightof the country, or a lively description of rural objectshardly ever fails to infuse into the mind. Somehave ascribed this feeling to the natural beauty ofthe objects themselves; others to the freedom fromcare, the silence and tranquillity which scenes ofretirement afford; others to the healthy and innocentemployments of a country life; others to the simplicityof country manners, and others to a variety of differentcauses; but none to the right one. All these,indeed, have their effect; but there is another principalone which has not been touched upon, or only slightlyglanced at. I will not, however, imitate Mr.Horne Tooke, who after enumerating seventeen differentdefinitions of the verb, and laughing at them all asdeficient and nugatory, at the end of two quarto volumesdoes not tell us what the verb really is, and hasleft posterity to pluck out “the heart of hismystery.” I will say at once what it isthat distinguishes this interest from others, andthat is its abstractedness. The interestwe feel in human nature is exclusive, and confinedto the individual; the interest we feel in externalnature is common, and transferable from one objectto all others of the same class. Thus.
Rousseau in his Confessions relates, that when hetook possession of his room at Annecy, he found thathe could see “a little spot of green”from his window, which endeared his situation the moreto him, because, he says, it was the first time hehad had this object constantly before him since heleft Boissy, the place where he was at school whena child. [7] Some such feeling as that here describedwill be found lurking at the bottom of all our attachmentsof this sort. Were it not for the recollectionshabitually associated with them, natural objects couldnot interest the mind in the manner they do. No doubt, the sky is beautiful, the clouds sail majesticallyalong its bosom; the sun is cheering; there is somethingexquisitely graceful in the manner in which a plantor tree puts forth its branches; the motion with whichthey bend and tremble in the evening breeze is softand 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, howcanst thou renounce the boundless store
Ofcharms which Nature to her votary yields!
The warbling woodland,the resounding shore,
Thepomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
All that the genialray of morning gilds,
Andall that echoes to the song of even,
All that the mountain’ssheltering bosom shields,
Andall the dread magnificence of heaven,
Oh, how canstthou renounce, and hope to be forgiven!”
___[7] Pope also declares that he had a particular regard for an old postwhich stood in the court-yard before the house where he was brought up.___
It is not, however, the beautiful and magnificentalone that we admire in Nature; the most insignificantand rudest objects are often found connected withthe strongest emotions; we become attached to themost common and familiar images, as to the face ofa friend whom we have long known, and from whom wehave received many benefits. It is because naturalobjects have been associated with the sports of ourchildhood, with air and exercise, with our feelingsin solitude, when the mind takes the strongest holdof things, and clings with the fondest interest towhatever strikes its attention; with change of place,the pursuit of new scenes, and thoughts of distantfriends; it is because they have surrounded us inalmost all situations, in joy and in sorrow, in pleasureand in pain; because they have been one chief sourceand nourishment of our feelings, and a part of ourbeing, that we love them as we do ourselves.
There is, generally speaking, the same foundationfor our love of Nature as for all our habitual attachments,namely, association of ideas. But this is notall. That which distinguishes this attachmentfrom others is the transferable nature of our feelingswith respect to physical objects; the associationsconnected with any one object extending to the wholeclass. Our having been attached to any particularperson does not make us feel the same attachment tothe next person we may chance to meet; but, if wehave once associated strong feelings of delight withthe objects of natural scenery, the tie becomes indissoluble,and we shall ever after feel the same attachment toother objects of the same sort. I remember whenI was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves,rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed tobe as much English, to be as much the same trees andgrass, that I had always been used to, as the sunshining over my head was the same sun which I sawin England; the faces only were foreign to me. Whence comes this difference? It arises fromour always imperceptibly connecting the idea of theindividual with man, and only the idea of the classwith natural objects. In the one case, the externalappearance or physical structure is the least thingto 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 knownothing, and in which I have no share. Each individualis a world to himself, governed by a thousand contradictoryand wayward impulses. I can, therefore, makeno inference from one individual to another; nor canmy habitual sentiments, with respect to any individual,extend beyond himself to others. A crowd ofpeople presents a disjointed, confused, and unsatisfactoryappearance to the eye, because there is nothing toconnect the motley assemblage into one continuous orgeneral impression, unless when there is some commonobject of interest to fix their attention, as in thecase of a full pit at the play-house. The sameprinciple will also account for that feeling of littleness,vacuity, and perplexity, which a stranger feels onentering the streets of a populous city. Everyindividual he meets is a blow to his personal identity. Every new face is a teazing, unanswered riddle. He feels the same wearisome sensation in walkingfrom Oxford Street to Temple Bar, as a person woulddo who should be compelled to read through the firstleaf of all the volumes in a library. But itis otherwise with respect to nature. A flockof sheep is not a contemptible, but a beautiful sight.The greatest number and variety of physical objectsdo not puzzle the will, or distract the attention,but are massed together under one uniform and harmoniousfeeling. The heart reposes in greater securityon the immensity of Nature’s works, “expatiatesfreely there,” and finds elbow room and breathingspace. We are always at home with Nature. There is neither hypocrisy, caprice, nor mental reservationin her favours. Our intercourse with her is notliable to accident or change, suspicion or disappointment:she smiles on us still the same. A rose is alwayssweet, a lily is always beautiful: we do not hatethe one, nor envy the other. If we have onceenjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulledinto a deep repose by the sound of a brook runningat its foot, we are sure that wherever we can finda shady stream, we can enjoy the same pleasure again;so that when we imagine these objects, we can easilyform a mystic personification of the friendly powerthat inhabits them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its coolfountain or its tempting shade. Hence the originof the Grecian mythology. All objects of thesame kind being the same, not only in their appearance,but in their practical uses, we habitually confoundthem together under the same general idea; and whateverfondness we may have conceived for one, is immediatelyplaced to the common account. The most oppositekinds and remote trains of feeling gradually go toenrich the same sentiment; and in our love of nature,there is all the force of individual attachment, combinedwith the most airy abstraction. It is this circ*mstancewhich gives that refinement, expansion, and wild interest,to feelings of this sort, when strongly excited, whichevery one must have experienced who is a true loverof nature.It is the same setting sun that we see and rememberyear after year, through summer and winter, seed-timeand harvest. The moon that shines above ourheads, or plays through the checquered shade, is thesame moon that we used to read of in Mrs. Radcliffe’sromances. We see no difference in the treesfirst covered with leaves in the spring. Thedry reeds rustling on the side of a stream—thewoods swept by the loud blast—the darkmassy foliage of autumn—the grey trunksand naked branches of the trees in winter—thesequestered copse, and wide-extended heath—theglittering sunny showers, and December snows —arestill the same, or accompanied with the same thoughtsand feelings: there is no object, however triflingor rude, that does not in some mood or other findits way into the heart, as a link in the chain ofour living being; and this it is that makes good thatsaying of the poet—
“To me themeanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts thatdo often lie too deep for tears.”
Thus nature is a kind of universal home, and everyobject it presents to us an old acquaintance withunaltered looks; for there is that consent and mutualharmony among all her works, one undivided spirit pervadingthem throughout, that to him who has well acquaintedhimself with them, they speak always the same well-knownlanguage, striking on the heart, amidst unquiet thoughtsand the tumult of the world, like the music of one’snative tongue heard in some far-off country.
“My heartleaps up when I behold
A rainbow in thesky:
So was it whenmy life began,
So is it now Iam a man,
So shall it bewhen I grow old and die.
The child’sthe father of the man,
And I would havemy years to be
Linked each toeach by natural piety.”
The daisy that first strikes the child’s eyein trying to leap over his own shadow, is the sameflower that with timid upward glance implores thegrown man not to tread upon it. Rousseau, inone of his botanical excursions, meeting with theperiwinkle, fell upon his knees, crying out—Ah!voila de la pervenche! It was because he had thirtyyears before brought home the same flower with himin one of his rambles with Madame de Warens, nearChambery. It struck him as the same identicallittle blue flower that he remembered so well; andthirty years of sorrow and bitter regret were effacedfrom his memory. That, or a thousand other flowersof the same name, were the same to him, to the heart,and to the eye; but there was but one Madame Warensin the world, whose image was never absent from histhoughts; with whom flowers and verdure sprung upbeneath his feet, and without whom all was cold andbarren in nature and in his own breast. The cuckoo,“that wandering voice,” that comes andgoes with the spring, mocks our ears with one notefrom youth to age; and the lapwing, screaming roundthe traveller’s path, repeats for ever the samesad story of Tereus and Philomel!
LECTURE VI.
ON SWIFT, YOUNG, GRAY, COLLINS, &c.
I shall in the present Lecture go back to the ageof Queen Anne, and endeavour to give a cursory accountof the most eminent of our poets, of whom I have notalready spoken, from that period to the present.
The three principal poets among the wits of QueenAnne’s reign, next to Pope, were Prior, Swift,and Gay. Parnell, though a good-natured, easyman, and a friend to poets and the Muses, was himselflittle more than an occasional versifier; and Arbuthnot,who had as much wit as the best of them, chose toshew it in prose, and not in verse. He had avery notable share in the immortal History of JohnBull, and the inimitable and praiseworthy Memoirsof Martinus Scriblerus. There has been a greatdeal 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 TristramShandy’s father from Martin’s, the elderScriblerus. The original idea of the character,that is, of the opinionated, captious old gentleman,who is pedantic, not from profession, but choice, belongsto Arbuthnot.—Arbuthnot’s style isdistinguished from that of his contemporaries, evenby a greater degree of terseness and conciseness.He leaves out every superfluous word; is sparing ofconnecting particles, and introductory phrases; usesalways the simplest forms of construction; and ismore a master of the idiomatic peculiarities and internalresources of the language than almost any other writer. There is a research in the choice of a plain, aswell as of an ornamented or learned style; and, infact, a great deal more. Among common Englishwords, there may be ten expressing the same thing withdifferent degrees of force and propriety, and onlyone of them the very word we want, because it is theonly one that answers exactly with the idea we havein our minds. Each word in familiar use hasa different set of associations and shades of meaningattached to it, and distinguished from each otherby inveterate custom; and it is in having the wholeof these at our command, and in knowing which to choose,as they are called for by the occasion, that the perfectionof a pure conversational prose-style consists. But in writing a florid and artificial style, neitherthe same range of invention, nor the same quick senseof propriety—nothing but learning is required. If you know the words, and their general meaning,it is sufficient: it is impossible you shouldknow the nicer inflections of signification, dependingon an endless variety of application, in expressionsborrowed from a foreign or dead language. Theyall impose upon the ear alike, because they are notfamiliar to it; the only distinction left is betweenthe pompous and the plain; the sesquipedalia verbahave 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. Themistoclesthought that the same sounding epithets could notsuit all subjects, as the same dress does not fitall persons. The style of our modern prose writersis very fine in itself; but it wants variety of inflectionand adaptation; it hinders us from seeing the differencesof the things it undertakes to describe.
What I have here insisted on will be found to be theleading distinction between the style of Swift, Arbuthnot,Steele, and the other writers of the age of QueenAnne, and the style of Dr. Johnson, which succeededto it. The one is English, and the other is not. The writers first mentioned, in order to expresstheir thoughts, looked about them for the properestword to convey any idea, that the language which theyspoke, and which their countrymen understood, afforded:Dr. Johnson takes the first English word that offers,and by translating it at a venture into the firstGreek or Latin word he can think of, only retainingthe English termination, produces an extraordinaryeffect upon the reader, by much the same sort of mechanicalprocess that Trim converted the old jack-boots intoa pair of new mortars.
Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man, who liked to thinkand 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 shewsthe facilities afforded by this style of imposinggeneralization, is, that it was instantly adoptedwith success by all those who were writers by profession,or who were not; and that at present, we cannot seea lottery puff or a quack advertisem*nt pasted againsta wall, that is not perfectly Johnsonian in style. Formerly, the learned had the privilege of translatingtheir notions into Latin; and a great privilege itwas, as it confined the reputation and emolumentsof learning to themselves. Dr. Johnson may besaid to have naturalised this privilege, by inventinga sort of jargon translated half-way out of one languageinto the other, which raised the Doctor’s reputation,and confounded all ranks in literature.
In the short period above alluded to, authors professedto write as other men spoke; every body now affectsto speak as authors write; and any one who retainsthe use of his mother tongue, either in writing orconversation, is looked upon as a very illiterate character.
Prior and Gay belong, in the characteristic excellencesof their style, to the same class of writers withSuckling, Rochester, and Sedley: the former imbibedmost of the licentious levity of the age of CharlesII. and carried it on beyond the Revolution under KingWilliam. Prior has left no single work equalto Gay’s Fables, or the Beggar’s Opera. But in his lyrical and fugitive pieces he has showneven more genius, more playfulness, more mischievousgaiety. No one has exceeded him in the laughinggrace with which he glances at a subject that willnot bear examining, with which he gently hints at whatcannot be directly insisted on, with which he halfconceals, and half draws aside the veil from someof the Muses’ nicest mysteries. His Museis, in fact, a giddy wanton flirt, who spends hertime in playing at snap-dragon and blind-man’sbuff, who tells what she should not, and knows more
than she tells. She laughs at the tricks sheshews us, and blushes, or would be thought to do so,at what she keeps concealed. Prior has translatedseveral of Fontaine’s Tales from the French;and they have lost nothing in the translation, eitherof their wit or malice. I need not name them:but the one I like the most, is that of Cupid in searchof Venus’s doves. No one could insinuatea knavish plot, a tender point, a loose moral, withsuch unconscious archness, and careless raillery, asif he gained new self-possession and adroitness fromthe perplexity and confusion into which he throwsscrupulous imaginations, and knew how to seize onall the ticklish parts of his subject, from their involuntarilyshrinking under his grasp. Some of his imitationsof Boileau’s servile addresses to Louis XIV.which he has applied with a happy mixture of wit andpatriotic enthusiasm to King William, or as he familiarlycalls him, to“LittleWill, the scourge of France,
No Godhead, butthe first of men,”
are excellent, and shew the same talent for double-entendreand the same gallantry of spirit, whether in the softerlyric, or the more lively heroic. Some of Prior’sbon mots are the best that are recorded.—Hisserious poetry, as his Solomon, is as heavyas his familiar style was light and agreeable. His moral Muse is a Magdalen, and should not haveobtruded herself on public view. Henry and Emmais a paraphrase of the old ballad of the Nut-brownMaid, and not so good as the original. In short,as we often see in other cases, where men thwart theirown genius, Prior’s sentimental and romanticproductions are mere affectation, the result not ofpowerful impulse or real feeling, but of a consciousnessof his deficiencies, and a wish to supply their placeby labour and art.
Gay was sometimes grosser than Prior, not systematically,but inadvertently—from not being so wellaware of what he was about; nor was there the samenecessity for caution, for his grossness is by nomeans so seductive or inviting.
Gay’s Fables are certainly a work of great merit,both as to the quantity of invention implied, andas to the elegance and facility of the execution. They are, however, spun out too long; the descriptionsand narrative are too diffuse and desultory; and themoral is sometimes without point. They are morelike Tales than Fables. The best are, perhaps,the Hare with Many Friends, the Monkeys, and the Foxat the Point of Death. His Pastorals are pleasingand poetical. But his capital work is his Beggar’sOpera. It is indeed a masterpiece of wit andgenius, not to say of morality. In composingit, he chose a very unpromising ground to work upon,and he has prided himself in adorning it with allthe 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 thatit appears to me one of the most refined productions
in the language. The elegance of the compositionis in exact proportion to the coarseness of the materials:by “happy alchemy of mind,” the authorhas extracted an essence of refinement from the dregsof 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 intothe mouths of highwaymen, turnkeys, their mistresses,wives, or daughters, he has converted this motleygroup into a set of fine gentlemen and ladies, satiristsand philosophers. He has also effected this transformationwithout once violating probability, or “o’ersteppingthe modesty of nature.” In fact, Gay hasturned the tables on the critics; and by the assumedlicence of the mock-heroic style, has enabled himselfto do justice to nature, that is, to give allthe force, truth, and locality of real feeling tothe thoughts and expressions, without being calledto the bar of false taste and affected delicacy. The extreme beauty and feeling of the song, “Womanis like the fair flower in its lustre,” areonly equalled by its characteristic propriety and naivete. Polly describes her lover going to the gallows,with the same touching simplicity, and with all thenatural fondness of a young girl in her circ*mstances,who sees in his approaching catastrophe nothing butthe misfortunes and the personal accomplishments ofthe object of her affections. “I see himsweeter than the nosegay in his hand; the admiringcrowd lament that so lovely a youth should come toan untimely end:—even butchers weep, andJack Ketch refuses his fee rather than consent totie the fatal knot.” The preservation ofthe character and costume is complete. It hasbeen said by a great authority—“Thereis some soul of goodness in things evil":—andthe Beggar’s Opera is a good-naturedbut instructive comment on this text. The poethas thrown all the gaiety and sunshine of the imagination,all the intoxication of pleasure, and the vanity ofdespair, round the shortlived existence of his heroes;while Peachum and Lockitt are seen inthe back-ground, parcelling out their months and weeksbetween them. The general view exhibited ofhuman life is of the most subtle and abstracted kind. The author has, with great felicity, brought outthe good qualities and interesting emotions almostinseparable from the lowest conditions; and with thesame penetrating glance, has detected the disguiseswhich rank and circ*mstances lend to exalted vice. Every line in this sterling comedy sparkles withwit, and is fraught with the keenest sarcasm. The very wit, however, takes off from the offensivenessof the satire; and I have seen great statesmen, verygreat statesmen, heartily enjoying the joke, laughingmost immoderately at the compliments paid to them asnot much worse than pickpockets and cut-throats ina different line of life, and pleased, as it were,to see themselves humanised by some sort of fellowshipwith their kind. Indeed, it may be said thatthe moral of the piece is to shew the vulgarityof vice; or that the same violations of integrityand decorum, the same habitual sophistry in palliatingtheir want of principle, are common to the great andpowerful, with the meanest and most contemptible ofthe species. What can be more convincing thanthe arguments used by these would-be politicians, toshew that in hypocrisy, selfishness, and treachery,they do not come up to many of their betters?The exclamation of Mrs. Peachum, when her daughtermarries Macheath, “Hussy, hussy, you willbe as ill used, and as much neglected, as if you hadmarried a lord,” is worth all Miss Hannah More’slaboured invectives on the laxity of the manners ofhigh life!I shall conclude this account of Gay with his verseson Sir Richard Blackmore, which may serve at onceas a specimen of his own manner, and as a characterof a voluminous contemporary poet, who was admiredby Mr. Locke, and knighted by King William III.
“Seewho ne’er was nor will be half-read,
Who first sungArthur, then sung Alfred;
Praised greatEliza in God’s anger,
Till all trueEnglishmen cried, ’Hang her!’—
Maul’d humanwit in one thick satire;
Next in threebooks spoil’d human nature:
Undid Creationat a jerk,
And of Redemptionmade damn’d work.
Then took hisMuse at once, and dipt her
Full in the middleof the Scripture.
What wonders therethe man, grown old, did?
Sternhold himselfhe out Sternholded.
Made David seemso mad and freakish,
All thought himjust what thought King Achish.
No mortal readhis Solomon
But judg’dRe’boam his own son.
Moses he serv’das Moses Pharaoh,
And Deborah asshe Siserah,
Made Jeremy fullsore to cry,
And Job himselfcurse God and die.
What punishmentall this must follow?
Shall Arthur usehim like King Tollo?
Shall David asUriah slay him?
Or dextrous DeborahSiserah him?
No!—noneof these! Heaven spare his life!
But send him,honest Job, thy wife!”
Gay’s Trivia, or Art of Walking the Streets,is as pleasant as walking the streets must have beenat the time when it was written. His balladof Black Eyed Susan is one of the most delightful thatcan be imagined; nor do I see that it is a bit theworse for Mr. Jekyll’s parody on it.
Swift’s reputation as a poet has been in a mannerobscured by the greater splendour, by the naturalforce and inventive genius of his prose writings;but if he had never written either the Tale of a Tubor Gulliver’s Travels, his name merely as apoet would have come down to us, and have gone downto posterity with well earned honours. His Imitationsof Horace, and still more his Verses on his own Death,place him in the first rank of agreeable moralistsin verse. There is not only a dry humour, anexquisite tone of irony, in these productions of hispen; but there is a touching, unpretending pathos,mixed up with the most whimsical and eccentric strokesof pleasantry and satire. His Description ofthe Morning in London, and of a City Shower, whichwere first published in the Tatler, are among themost delightful of the contents of that very delightfulwork. Swift shone as one of the most sensibleof the poets; he is also distinguished as one of themost nonsensical of them. No man has writtenso many lack-a-daisical, slip-shod, tedious, trifling,foolish, fantastical verses as he, which are so littlean 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 asto invent a new stanza of fourteen and sixteen syllablelines 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!—TheTale of a Tub is one of the most masterly compositionsin the language, whether for thought, wit, or style. It is so capital and undeniable a proof of the author’stalents, that Dr. Johnson, who did not like Swift,would not allow that he wrote it. It is hardthat the same performance should stand in the wayof a man’s promotion to a bishopric, as wantinggravity, and at the same time be denied to be his,as having too much wit. It is a pity the Doctordid not find out some graver author, for whom he felta critical kindness, on whom to father this splendidbut unacknowledged production. Dr. Johnson couldnot deny that Gulliver’s Travels were his; hetherefore disputed their merits, and said that afterthe first idea of them was conceived, they were easyto execute; all the rest followed mechanically. I do not know how that may be; but the mechanism employedis something very different from any that the authorof Rasselas was in the habit of bringing to bear onsuch occasions. There is nothing more futile,as well as invidious, than this mode of criticisinga work of original genius. Its greatest meritis supposed to be in the invention; and you say, verywisely, that it is not in the execution. You might as well take away the merit of the inventionof the telescope, by saying that, after its uses wereexplained and understood, any ordinary eyesight couldlook through it. Whether the excellence of Gulliver’sTravels is in the conception or the execution, is of
little consequence; the power is somewhere, and itis a power that has moved the world. The poweris not that of big words and vaunting common places. Swift left these to those who wanted them; and hasdone what his acuteness and intensity of mind alonecould enable any one to conceive or to perform.His object was to strip empty pride and grandeur ofthe imposing air which external circ*mstances throwaround them; and for this purpose he has cheated theimagination of the illusions which the prejudices ofsense and of the world put upon it, by reducing everything to the abstract predicament of size. Heenlarges or diminishes the scale, as he wishes toshew the insignificance or the grossness of our overweeningself-love. That he has done this with mathematicalprecision, with complete presence of mind and perfectkeeping, in a manner that comes equally home to theunderstanding of the man and of the child, does nottake away from the merit of the work or the geniusof the author. He has taken a new view of humannature, such as a being of a higher sphere might takeof it; he has torn the scales from off his moral vision;he has tried an experiment upon human life, and siftedits pretensions from the alloy of circ*mstances; hehas 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. Nothingsolid, nothing valuable is left in his system butvirtue and wisdom. What a libel is this uponmankind! What a convincing proof of misanthropy!What presumption and what malice prepense,to shew men what they are, and to teach them whatthey ought to be! What a mortifying stroke aimedat national glory, is that unlucky incident of Gulliver’swading across the channel and carrying off the wholefleet of Blefuscu! After that, we have only toconsider which of the contending parties was in theright. What a shock to personal vanity is givenin the account of Gulliver’s nurse Glumdalcl*tch!Still, notwithstanding the disparagement to her personalcharms, her good-nature remains the same amiable qualityas before. I cannot see the harm, the misanthropy,the immoral and degrading tendency of this. The moral lesson is as fine as the intellectual exhibitionis amusing. It is an attempt to tear off themask of imposture from the world; and nothing butimposture has a right to complain of it. It is,indeed, the way with our quacks in morality to preachup the dignity of human nature, to pamper pride andhypocrisy with the idle mockeries of the virtues theypretend to, and which they have not: but it wasnot Swift’s way to cant morality, or any thingelse; nor did his genius prompt him to write unmeaningpanegyrics on mankind!I do not, therefore, agree with the estimate of Swift’smoral or intellectual character, given by an eminentcritic, who does not seem to have forgotten the partypolitics of Swift. I do not carry my politicalresentments so far back: I can at this time ofday forgive Swift for having been a Tory. Ifeel little disturbance (whatever I might think ofthem) at his political sentiments, which died withhim, considering how much else he has left behindhim of a more solid and imperishable nature!If he had, indeed, (like some others) merely left behindhim 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 apreconcerted theory, savoured of the morbid affectionof which he died. There is nothing more likelyto drive a man mad, than the being unable to get ridof the idea of the distinction between right and wrong,and an obstinate, constitutional preference of thetrue 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 inmodern times; but their wit was of a peculiar kindin each. They are little beholden to each other;there is some resemblance between Lord Peter in theTale of a Tub, and Rabelais’ Friar John; butin general they are all three authors of a substantivecharacter in themselves. Swift’s wit (particularlyin his chief prose works) was serious, saturnine, andpractical; 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 indifferenceto both. The ludicrous in Swift arises out ofhis keen sense of impropriety, his soreness and impatienceof the least absurdity. He separates, with asevere and caustic air, truth from falsehood, follyfrom wisdom, “shews vice her own image, scornher own feature”; and it is the force, the precision,and the honest abruptness with which the separationis made, that excites our surprise, our admiration,and laughter. He sets a mark of reprobationon that which offends good sense and good manners,which cannot be mistaken, and which holds it up toour ridicule and contempt ever after. His occasionaldisposition to trifling (already noticed) was a relaxationfrom the excessive earnestness of his mind. Indignatiofacit versus. His better genius was his spleen. It was the biting acrimony of his temper that sharpenedhis other faculties. The truth of his perceptionsproduced the pointed coruscations of his wit; hisplayful irony was the result of inward bitterness ofthought; his imagination was the product of the literal,dry, incorrigible tenaciousness of his understanding. He endeavoured to escape from the persecution ofrealities into the regions of fancy, and invented hisLilliputians and Brobdingnagians, Yahoos, and Houynhyms,
as a diversion to the more painful knowledge of theworld around him: they only made him laugh,while men and women made him angry. His feverishimpatience made him view the infirmities of that greatbaby the world, with the same scrutinizing glanceand jealous irritability that a parent regards thefailings of its offspring; but, as Rousseau has wellobserved, parents have not on this account been supposedto have more affection for other people’s childrenthan their own. In other respects, and exceptfrom the sparkling effervescence of his gall, Swift’sbrain was as “dry as the remainder biscuit aftera voyage.” He hated absurdity—Rabelais loved it, exaggerated it with supreme satisfaction,luxuriated in its endless varieties, rioted in nonsense,“reigned there and revelled.” Hedwelt on the absurd and ludicrous for the pleasurethey gave him, not for the pain. He lived uponlaughter, and died laughing. He indulged hisvein, and took his full swing of folly. He didnot baulk his fancy or his readers. His witwas to him “as riches fineless”; he sawno end of his wealth in that way, and set no limitsto his extravagance: he was communicative, prodigal,boundless, and inexhaustible. His were the Saturnaliaof wit, the riches and the royalty, the health andlong life. He is intoxicated with gaiety, madwith folly. His animal spirits drown him in aflood of mirth: his blood courses up and downhis veins like wine. His thirst of enjoymentis as great as his thirst of drink: his appetitefor good things of all sorts is unsatisfied, and thereis a never-ending supply. Discourse is dry;so they moisten their words in their cups, and relishtheir dry jests with plenty of Botargos and driedneats’ tongues. It is like Camacho’swedding in Don Quixote, where Sancho ladled out wholepullets and fat geese from the soup-kettles at a pull. The flagons are setting a running, their tongueswag 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 dexterouslyhe contrives to throw the sheep overboard! Howmuch Pantagruel behaves like a wise king! HowGargantua mewls, and pules [sic], and slabbers hisnurse, 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 noless prodigious than his matter. His words areof marrow, unctuous, dropping fatness. He wasa mad wag, the king of good fellows, and prince ofpractical philosophers!Rabelais was a Frenchman of the old school—Voltaireof the new. The wit of the one arose from anexuberance of enjoyment—of the other, froman excess of indifference, real or assumed. Voltairehad no enthusiasm for one thing or another: hemade light of every thing. In his hands allthings turn to chaff and dross, as the pieces of silvermoney 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 neverviolent: he treats things with the most provokingsang froid; and expresses his contempt by themost indirect hints, and in the fewest words, as ifhe hardly thought them worth even his contempt. He retains complete possession of himself and of hissubject. He does not effect his purpose by theeagerness of his blows, but by the delicacy of histact. The poisoned wound he inflicted was sofine, as scarcely to be felt till it rankled and festeredin its “mortal consequences.” Hiscallousness was an excellent foil for the antagonistshe had mostly to deal with. He took knaves andfools on his shield well. He stole away its cloakfrom grave imposture. If he reduced other thingsbelow their true value, making them seem worthlessand hollow, he did not degrade the pretensions oftyranny and superstition below their true value, bymaking them seem utterly worthless and hollow, as contemptibleas they were odious. This was the service herendered to truth and mankind! His Candideis a masterpiece of wit. It has been called “thedull product of a scoffer’s pen”; it isindeed the “product of a scoffer’s pen”;but after reading the Excursion, few people will thinkit dull. It is in the most perfect keeping,and without any appearance of effort. Everysentence tells, and the whole reads like one sentence.There is something sublime in Martin’s scepticalindifference to moral good and evil. It is therepose of the grave. It is better to sufferthis living death, than a living martyrdom. “Nothingcan touch him further.” The moral of Candide(such as it is) is the same as that of Rasselas:the execution is different. Voltaire says, “Agreat book is a great evil.” Dr. Johnsonwould have laboured this short apophthegm into a voluminouscommon-place. Voltaire’s traveller (inanother work) being asked “whether he likesblack or white mutton best,” replies that “heis indifferent, provided it is tender.”Dr. Johnson did not get at a conclusion by so shorta way as this. If Voltaire’s licentiousnessis objected to me, I say, let it be placed to itstrue account, the manners of the age and court inwhich he lived. The lords and ladies of thebedchamber in the reign of Louis XV. found no faultwith the immoral tendency of his writings. Whythen should our modern purists quarrel withthem?—But to return.Young is a gloomy epigrammatist. He has abusedgreat powers both of thought and language. Hismoral reflections are sometimes excellent; but hespoils their beauty by overloading them with a religioushorror, and at the same time giving them all the smartturns and quaint expression of an enigma or reparteein verse. The well-known lines on Procrastinationare in his best manner:
“Bewise to-day; ’tis madness to defer;
Next day the fatalprecedent will plead;
Thus on, tillwisdom is push’d out of life.
Procrastinationis the thief of time;
Year after yearit steals, till all are fled,
And to the merciesof a moment leaves
The vast concernsof an eternal scene.
Ofman’s miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm, “Thatall men are about to live,”
For ever on thebrink of being born.
All pay themselvesthe compliment to think
They, one day,shall not drivel; and their pride
On this reversiontakes up ready praise;
At least, theirown; their future selves applauds;
How excellentthat life they ne’er will lead!
Time lodg’din their own hands is Folly’s vails:
That lodg’din Fate’s, to Wisdom they consign;
The thing theycan’t but purpose, they postpone.
’Tis notin Folly, not to scorn a fool;
And scarce inhuman Wisdom to do more.
All Promise ispoor dilatory man,
And that throughevery stage. When young, indeed,
In full contentwe, sometimes, nobly rest,
Un-anxious forourselves; and only wish,
As duteous sons,our fathers were more wise.
At thirty mansuspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty,and reforms his plan;
At fifty chideshis infamous delay,
Pushes his prudentpurpose to Resolve;
In all the magnanimityof thought
Resolves, andre-resolves; then dies the same.
Andwhy? Because he thinks himself immortal.
All men thinkall men mortal, but themselves;
Themselves, whensome alarming shock of fate
Strikes throughtheir wounded hearts the sudden dread;
But their heartswounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; wherepast the shaft, no trace is found.
As from the wingno scar the sky retains;
The parted waveno furrow from the keel;
So dies in humanhearts the thought of death.
Ev’n withthe tender tear which nature sheds
O’er thosewe love, we drop it in their grave.”
His Universal Passion is a keen and powerful satire;but the effort takes from the effect, and oppressesattention by perpetual and violent demands upon it. His tragedy of the Revenge is monkish and scholastic.Zanga is a vulgar caricature of Iago. The finestlines in it are the burst of triumph at the end, whenhis revenge is completed:
“Let Europeand her pallid sons go weep,
Let Afric on herhundred thrones rejoice,” &c.
Collins is a writer of a very different stamp, whohad perhaps less general power of mind than Young;but he had that true vivida vis, that genuineinspiration, which alone can give birth to the highestefforts of poetry. He leaves stings in the mindsof his readers, certain traces of thought and feelingswhich never wear out, because nature had left themin his own mind. He is the only one of the minorpoets of whom, if he had lived, it cannot be saidthat he might not have done the greatest things. The germ is there. He is sometimes affected,unmeaning, and obscure; but he also catches rich glimpsesof the bowers of Paradise, and has lofty aspirationsafter the highest seats of the Muses. With agreat deal of tinsel and splendid patch-work, he hasnot been able to hide the solid sterling ore of genius. In his best works there is an attic simplicity, apathos, and fervour of imagination, which make usthe more lament that the efforts of his mind were atfirst depressed by neglect and pecuniary embarrassment,and at length buried in the gloom of an unconquerableand fatal malady. How many poets have gone throughall the horrors of poverty and contempt, and endedtheir days in moping melancholy or moody madness!
“We poetsin our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comesin the end despondency and madness.”
Is this the fault of themselves, of nature in temperingthem of too fine a clay, or of the world, that spurnerof living, and patron of dead merit? Read theaccount of Collins—with hopes frustrated,with faculties blighted, at last, when it was toolate for himself or others, receiving the deceitfulfavours of relenting Fortune, which served only tothrow their sunshine on his decay, and to light himto an early grave. He was found sitting withevery spark of imagination extinguished, and withonly the faint traces of memory and reason left —withonly one book in his room, the Bible; “but that,”he said, “was the best.” A melancholydamp hung like an unwholesome mildew upon his faculties—acanker had consumed the flower of his life. Heproduced works of genius, and the public regardedthem with scorn: he aimed at excellence thatshould be his own, and his friends treated his effortsas the wanderings of fatuity. The proofs of hiscapacity are, his Ode on Evening, his Ode on the Passions(particularly the fine personification of Hope), hisOde to Fear, the Dirge in Cymbeline, the Lines onThomson’s Grave, and his Eclogues, parts of whichare admirable. But perhaps his Ode on the PoeticalCharacter is the best of all. A rich distilledperfume emanates from it like the breath of genius;a golden cloud envelopes it; a honeyed paste of poeticdiction encrusts it, like the candied coat of theauricula. His Ode to Evening shews equal geniusin the images and versification. The sounds stealslowly over the ear, like the gradual coming on ofevening itself:
“If aughtof oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chasteEve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Likethy own solemn springs,
Thysprings and dying gales,
O nymph reserv’d,while now the bright-haired sun
Sits on yon westerntent, whose cloudy skirts
Withbrede ethereal wove,
O’erhanghis wavy bed:
Now air is hush’d,save where the weak-ey’d bat,
With short shrillshriek flits by on leathern wing,
Orwhere the beetle winds
Hissmall but sullen horn,
As oft he risesmidst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrimborne in heedless hum.
Nowteach me, maid compos’d,
Tobreathe some soften’d strain,
Whose numbersstealing through thy darkling vale
May not unseemlywith its stillness suit,
Asmusing slow, I hail
Thygenial, lov’d return!
For when thy foldingstar arising shews
His paly circlet,at his warning lamp
Thefragrant Hours and Elves
Whoslept in flow’rs the day,
And many a nymphwho wreathes her brows with sedge,
And sheds thefresh’ning dew, and lovelier still,
Thepensive Pleasures sweet
Preparethy shadowy car;
Then lead, calmVotress, where some sheety lake
Cheers the loneheath, or some time-hallow’d pile,
Orupland fallows grey
Reflectit* last cool gleam.
But when chillblust’ring winds, or driving rain,
Forbid my willingfeet, be mine the hut,
Thatfrom the mountain’s side
Viewswilds and swelling floods,
And hamlets brown,and dim discover’d spires,
And hears theirsimple bell, and marks o’er all
Thydewy fingers draw
Thegradual dusky veil.
While Spring shallpour his show’rs, as oft he wont,
And bathe thybreathing tresses, meekest Eve!
WhileSummer loves to sport
Beneaththy lingering light;
While sallow Autumnfills thy lap with leaves;
Or Winter yellingthrough the troublous air,
Affrightsthy shrinking train,
Andrudely rends thy robes;
So long, sure-foundbeneath the sylvan shed,
Shall Fancy, Friendship,Science, rose-lipp’d Health,
Thygentlest influence own,
Andhymn 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 year1740, 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 greaterpoetical genius than Gray: he had more of thatfine madness which is inseparable from it, of itsturbid effervescence, of all that pushes it to theverge of agony or rapture. Gray’s PindaricOdes are, I believe, generally given up at present:they are stately and pedantic, a kind of methodicalborrowed phrenzy. But I cannot so easily giveup, nor will the world be in any haste to part withhis Elegy in a Country Church-yard: it is oneof the most classical productions that ever was pennedby a refined and thoughtful mind, moralising on humanlife. Mr. Coleridge (in his Literary Life) says,that his friend Mr. Wordsworth had undertaken to shewthat the language of the Elegy is unintelligible:it has, however, been understood! The Ode ona Distant Prospect of Eton College is more mechanicaland common-place; but it touches on certain stringsabout the heart, that vibrate in unison with it toour latest breath. No one ever passes by Windsor’s“stately heights,” or sees the distantspires of Eton College below, without thinking ofGray. 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 ofhumanity.”—His Letters are inimitablyfine. If his poems are sometimes finical andpedantic, his prose is quite free from affectation. He pours his thoughts out upon paper as they arisein his mind; and they arise in his mind without pretence,or constraint, from the pure impulse of learned leisureand contemplative indolence. He is not hereon 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 “thosereverend bedlams, colleges and schools!” He hadnothing to do but to read and to think, and to tellhis friends what he read and thought. His lifewas a luxurious, thoughtful dream. “Bemine,” he says in one of his Letters, “toread eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.”And in another, to shew his contempt for action andthe turmoils of ambition, he says to someone, “Don’tyou remember Lords ------ and ------, who are nowgreat 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 equivalentfor not being wise or great, to be always young!What a happiness never to lose or gain any thing inthe game of human life, by being never any thing morethan a looker-on!
How different from Shenstone, who only wanted to belooked at: who withdrew from the world to befollowed by the crowd, and courted popularity by affectingprivacy! His Letters shew him to have lived ina continual fever of petty vanity, and to have beena finished literary coquet. He seems alwaysto say, “You will find nothing in the world soamiable as Nature and me: come, and admire us.”His poems are indifferent and tasteless, except hisPastoral Ballad, his Lines on Jemmy Dawson, and hisSchool-mistress, which last is a perfect piece ofwriting.
Akenside had in him the materials of poetry, but hewas hardly a great poet. He improved his Pleasuresof the Imagination in the subsequent editions, bypruning away a great many redundances of style andornament. Armstrong is better, though he hasnot chosen a very exhilarating subject—TheArt of Preserving Health. Churchill’sSatires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players,are as good as the subjects deserved—theyare strong, coarse, and full of an air of hardenedassurance. I ought not to pass over without mentionGreen’s Poem on the Spleen, or Dyer’sGrongar Hill.
The principal name of the period we are now come tois that of Goldsmith, than which few names stand higheror fairer in the annals of modern literature. One should have his own pen to describe him as heought to be described—amiable, various,and bland, with careless inimitable grace touchingon every kind of excellence—with mannersunstudied, but a gentle heart—performingmiracles of skill from pure happiness of nature, andwhose greatest fault was ignorance of his own worth. As a poet, he is the most flowing and elegant of ourversifiers since Pope, with traits of artless naturewhich Pope had not, and with a peculiar felicity inhis turns upon words, which he constantly repeatedwith delightful effect: such as—
“------His lot, though small,He sees that little lot, the lot of all.”
* * * * *
“And turn’dand look’d, and turn’d to look again.”
As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmedall Europe. What reader is there in the civilisedworld, who is not the better for the story of thewashes which the worthy Dr. Primrose demolished sodeliberately with the poker—for the knowledgeof the guinea which the Miss Primroses kept unchangedin their pockets—the adventure of the pictureof the Vicar’s family, which could not be gotinto the house— and that of the Flamboroughfamily, all painted with oranges in their hands—orfor the story of the case of shagreen spectacles andthe cosmogony?
As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth newpowers from Mr. Liston’s face. That aloneis praise enough for it. Poor Goldsmith! howhappy 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 relievingthe necessities of others, and the consolation ofbeing harassed to death with his own! He is themost amusing and interesting person, in one of themost amusing and interesting books in the world, Boswell’sLife of Johnson. His peach-coloured coat shallalways bloom in Boswell’s writings, and his famesurvive in his own!— His genius was a mixtureof originality and imitation: he could do nothingwithout some model before him, and he could copy nothingthat 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 JosephAndrews; but the circ*mstances I have mentioned aboveare not.
The finest things he has left behind him in verseare his character of a country school-master, andthat prophetic description of Burke in the Retaliation. His moral Essays in the Citizen of the World, areas agreeable chit-chat as can be conveyed in the formof didactic discourses.
Warton was a poet and a scholar, studious with ease,learned without affectation. He had a happinesswhich some have been prouder of than he, who deservedit less—he was poet-laureat.
“And thatgreen wreath which decks the bard when dead,
That laurel garlandcrown’d his living head.”
But he bore his honours meekly, and performed hishalf-yearly task regularly. I should not havementioned him for this distinction alone (the highestwhich a poet can receive from the state), but for anothercirc*mstance; I mean his being the author of some ofthe finest sonnets in the language—at leastso they appear to me; and as this species of compositionhas the necessary advantage of being short (thoughit is also sometimes both “tedious and brief"),I will here repeat two or three of them, as treatingpleasing subjects in a pleasing and philosophicalway.
Written ina blank leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon
“Deem not,devoid of elegance, the sage,
By Fancy’sgenuine feelings unbeguil’d,
Of painful pedantrythe poring child;
Who turns of theseproud domes the historic page,
Now sunk by Time,and Henry’s fiercer rage.
Think’stthou the warbling Muses never smil’d
On his lone hours? Ingenuous views engage
His thoughts,on themes unclassic falsely styl’d,
Intent. While cloister’d piety displays
Her moulderingroll, the piercing eye explores
New manners, andthe pomp of elder days,
Whence culls thepensive bard his pictur’d stores.
Not rough norbarren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity,but strewn with flowers.”
Sonnet. Written at Stonehenge.
“Thou noblestmonument of Albion’s isle,
Whether, by Merlin’said, from Scythia’s shore
To Amber’sfatal plain Pendragon bore,
Huge frame ofgiant hands, the mighty pile,
T’entombhis Britons slain by Hengist’s guile:
Or Druid priests,sprinkled with human gore,
Taught mid thymassy maze their mystic lore:
Or Danish chiefs,enrich’d with savage spoil,
To victory’sidol vast, an unhewn shrine,
Rear’d therude heap, or in thy hallow’d ground
Repose the kingsof Brutus’ genuine line;
Or here thosekings in solemn state were crown’d;
Studious to tracethy wondrous origin,
We muse on manyan ancient tale renown’d.”
Nothing can be more admirable than the learning heredisplayed, or the inference from it, that it is ofno use but as it leads to interesting thought andreflection.
That written after seeing Wilton House is in the samestyle, but I prefer concluding with that to the riverLodon, which has a personal as well as poetical interestabout it.
“Ah! whata weary race my feet have run,
Since first Itrod thy banks with alders crown’d,
And thought myway was all through fairy ground,
Beneath the azuresky and golden sun:
When first myMuse to lisp her notes begun!
While pensivememory traces back the round
Which fills thevaried interval between;
Much pleasure,more of sorrow, marks the scene.—
Sweet native stream!those skies and suns so pure
No more return,to cheer my evening road!
Yet still onejoy remains, that not obscure
Nor useless, allmy vacant days have flow’d
From youth’sgay dawn to manhood’s prime mature,
Nor with the Muse’slaurel unbestow’d.”
I have thus gone through all the names of this periodI could think of, but I find that there are othersstill 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 thinkit will be best to let them pass and say nothing aboutthem. It will be hard to persuade so many respectablepersons that they are dull writers, and if we givethem any praise, they will send others.
But here comes one whose claims cannot be so easilyset aside: they have been sanctioned by learning,hailed by genius, and hallowed by misfortune—Imean Chatterton. Yet I must say what I thinkof 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 hewas to be placed after Shakspeare and Dryden, or tocome after Shakspeare alone. A living poet hasborne a better testimony to him—
“I thought of Chatterton,the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;
And him [8] who walked in glory and in joy
Beside his plough along the mountain side.”
I am loth to put asunder whom so great an authorityhas joined together; but I cannot find in Chatterton’sworks any thing so extraordinary as the age at whichthey 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, butextraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe hewould have written better, had he lived. Heknew this himself, or he would have lived. Greatgeniuses, like great kings, have too much to thinkof to kill themselves; for their mind to them also“a kingdom is.” With an unaccountablepower coming over him at an unusual age, and with theyouthful confidence it inspired, he performed wonders,and was willing to set a seal on his reputation bya tragic catastrophe. He had done his best;and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into AEtna,to ensure immortality. The brazen slippers aloneremain!—
___[8] Burns.—These lines are taken from the introduction to Mr.Wordsworth’s poem of the LEECH-GATHERER.___
LECTURE VII.ON BURNS, AND THE OLD ENGLISH BALLADS.
I am sorry that what I said in the conclusion of thelast Lecture respecting Chatterton, should have givendissatisfaction to some persons, with whom I wouldwillingly agree on all such matters. What Imeant was less to call in question Chatterton’sgenius, than to object to the common mode of estimatingits magnitude by its prematureness. The listsof fame are not filled with the dates of births ordeaths; and the side-mark of the age at which theywere done, wears out in works destined for immortality. Had Chatterton really done more, we should have thoughtless of him, for our attention would then have beenfixed on the excellence of the works themselves, insteadof the singularity of the circ*mstances in which theywere produced. But because he attained to thefull powers of manhood at an early age, I do not seethat he would have attained to more than those powers,had he lived to be a man. He was a prodigy, becausein him the ordinary march of nature was violentlyprecipitated; and it is therefore inferred, that hewould have continued to hold on his course, “unslackedof motion.” On the contrary, who knowsbut he might have lived to be poet-laureat? Itis much better to let him remain as he was. Of his actual productions, any one may think as highlyas he pleases; I would only guard against adding tothe account of his quantum meruit, those possibleproductions by which the learned rhapsodists of histime raised his gigantic pretensions to an equalitywith those of Homer and Shakspeare. It is amusingto read some of these exaggerated descriptions, eachrising above the other in extravagance. In Anderson’sLife, we find that Mr. Warton speaks of him “asa prodigy of genius,” as “a singular instanceof prematurity of abilities”: that maybe true enough, and Warton was at any rate a competentjudge; but Mr. Malone “believes him to have beenthe greatest genius that England has produced sincethe 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 hispraises; he asserts, that “no such being, atany period of life, has ever been known, or possiblyever will be known.” He runs a parallelbetween Chatterton and Milton; and asserts, that “anarmy of Macedonian and Swedish mad butchers fly beforehim,” meaning, I suppose, that Alexander theGreat and Charles the Twelfth were nothing to him;“nor,” he adds, “does my memory supplyme with any human being, who at such an age, withsuch advantages, has produced such compositions. Under the heathen mythology, superstition and admirationwould have explained all, by bringing Apollo on earth;nor would the God ever have descended with more credit
to himself.”—Chatterton’s physiognomywould at least have enabled him to pass incognito. It is quite different from the look of timid wonderand delight with which Annibal Caracci has painteda young Apollo listening to the first sounds he drawsfrom a Pan’s pipe, under the tutelage of theold Silenus! If Mr. Croft is sublime on the occasion,Dr. Knox is no less pathetic. “The testimonyof Dr. Knox,” says Dr. Anderson, (Essays, p.144.), “does equal credit to the classical tasteand amiable benevolence of the writer, and the geniusand reputation of Chatterton.” “WhenI read,” says the Doctor, “the researchesof those learned antiquaries who have endeavouredto prove that the poems attributed to Rowley were reallywritten by him, I observe many ingenious remarks inconfirmation of their opinion, which it would be tedious,if not difficult, to controvert.”Now this is so far from the mark, that the whole controversymight have been settled by any one but the learnedantiquaries themselves, who had the smallest shareof their learning, from this single circ*mstance,that the poems read as smooth as any modern poems,if you read them as modern compositions; and thatyou cannot read them, or make verse of them at all,if you pronounce or accent the words as they were spokenat the time when the poems were pretended to havebeen written. The whole secret of the imposture,which nothing but a deal of learned dust, raised bycollecting and removing a great deal of learned rubbish,could have prevented our laborious critics from seeingthrough, lies on the face of it (to say nothing ofthe burlesque air which is scarcely disguised throughout)in the repetition of a few obsolete words, and inthe mis-spelling of common ones.
“No sooner,” proceeds the Doctor, “doI turn to the poems, than the labour of the antiquariesappears only waste of time; and I am involuntarilyforced to join in placing that laurel, which he seemsso 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 attentionof polite scholars, and are considered as the mostremarkable productions in modern poetry. Wehave many instances of poetical eminence at an earlyage; but neither Cowley, Milton, nor Pope, ever producedany thing while they were boys, which can justly becompared to the poems of Chatterton. The learnedantiquaries do not indeed dispute their excellence. They extol it in the highest terms of applause. They raise their favourite Rowley to a rivalry withHomer: but they make the very merits of the worksan argument against their real author. Is itpossible, say they, that a boy should produce compositionsso beautiful and masterly? That a common boyshould produce them is not possible,” rejoinsthe Doctor; “but that they should be producedby a boy of an extraordinary genius, such as was thatof Homer or Shakspeare, though a prodigy, is sucha one as by no means exceeds the bounds of rationalcredibility.”
Now it does not appear that Shakspeare or Homer weresuch early prodigies; so that by this reasoning hemust take precedence of them too, as well as of Milton,Cowley, and Pope. The reverend and classicalwriter then breaks out into the following melancholyraptures:—
“Unfortunateboy! short and evil were thy days, but thy fame shall
be immortal. Hadst thou been known to the munificentpatrons of genius . . .
“Unfortunateboy! poorly wast thou accommodated during thy short
sojourning here among us;—rudely wast thoutreated—sorely did thy feelings sufferfrom the scorn of the unworthy; and there are at lastthose who wish to rob thee of thy only meed, thy posthumousglory. Severe too are the censures of thy morals. In the gloomy moments of despondency, I fear thouhast uttered impious and blasphemous thoughts.But let thy more rigid censors reflect, that thou wastliterally and strictly but a boy. Let many ofthy bitterest enemies reflect what were their ownreligious principles, and whether they had any at theage of fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Surelyit is a severe and an unjust surmise that thou wouldstprobably 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 ofthe classical and benevolent testimony of Dr. Knox.Chatterton was, indeed, badly enough off; but he wasat least saved from the pain and shame of reading thiswoful lamentation over fallen genius, which circulatessplendidly bound in the fourteenth edition, whilehe is a prey to worms. As to those who are reallycapable of admiring Chatterton’s genius, or offeeling an interest in his fate, I would only say,that I never heard any one speak of any one of hisworks as if it were an old well-known favourite, andhad become a faith and a religion in his mind. It is his name, his youth, and what he might havelived to have done, that excite our wonder and admiration. He has the same sort of posthumous fame that an actorof the last age has—an abstracted reputationwhich is independent of any thing we know of his works. The admirers of Collins never think of him withoutrecalling to their minds his Ode on Evening, or onthe Poetical Character. Gray’s Elegy,and his poetical popularity, are identified together,and inseparable even in imagination. It is thesame with respect to Burns: when you speak ofhim as a poet, you mean his works, his Tam o’Shanter,or his Cotter’s Saturday Night. But theenthusiasts for Chatterton, if you ask for the proofsof his extraordinary genius, are obliged to turn tothe volume, and perhaps find there what they seek;but it is not in their minds; and it is of thatI spoke. The Minstrel’s song in AEllais I think the best.
“O! syngeuntoe my roundelaie,
O! droppe thebrynie teare wythe mee,
Daunce ne moeatte hallie daie,
Lycke a rennyngeryver bee.
Mielove ys dedde,
Gonneto hys deathe-bedde,
Alunder the wyllowe-tree.
Black hys cryneas the wyntere nyght,
Whyte hys rodeas the sommer snowe,
Rodde hys faceas the mornynge lyghte,
Cale he lyes ynnethe grave belowe.
Mielove ys dedde,
Gonneto hys deathe-bedde,
Alunder the wyllowe-tree.
Swote hys tongueas the throstles note,
Quycke ynne daunceas thought cann bee,
Defte his taboure,codgelle stote,
O! hee lys biethe wyllowe-tree.
Mielove ys dedde,
Gonneto hys deathe-bedde,
Alunder the wyllowe-tree.
Harke! the ravenneflappes hys wynge,
In the briereddell belowe;
Harke! the dethe-owleloude dothe synge,
To the nygthe-maresas theie goe.
Mielove ys dedde,
Goneto hys deathe-bedde,
Alunder the wyllowe-tree.
See! the whytemoone sheenes onne hie;
Whyterre ys mietrue loves shroude;
Whyterre yannethe mornynge skie,
Whyterre yannethe evenynge cloude.
Mielove ys dedde,
Gonneto hys deathe-bedde,
Alunder the wyllowe-tree.
Heere, upon mietrue loves grave,
Schalle the barenfleurs be layde,
Ne one hallieseyncte to save
Al the celnessof a mayde.
Mielove ys dedde,
Gonneto his deathe-bedde,
Alunder the wyllowe-tree.
Wythe mie hondesI’ll dent the brieres
Rounde hys halliecorse to gre,
Ouphante fairies,lyghte your fyres,
Heere mie boddiestille schalle bee.
Mielove ys dedde,
Gonneto hys deathe-bedde,
Alunder the wyllowe-tree.
Comme, wythe acorne-coppeand thorne,
Drayne my hartysblodde awaie;
Lyfe and all yttesgoode I scorne,
Daunce bie nete,or feaste by daie.
Mielove ys dedde,
Gonneto hys deathe-bedde,
Alunder the wyllowe-tree.
Water wytches,crownede whthe reytes,
Bere mee to yerleathalle tyde.
I die; I comme;mie true love waytes.
Thos the damsellespake, and dyed.”
To proceed to the more immediate subject of the presentLecture, the character and writings of Burns.—Shakspearesays of some one, that “he was like a man madeafter supper of a cheese-paring.” Burns,the poet, was not such a man. He had a strongmind, and a strong body, the fellow to it. Hehad a real heart of flesh and blood beating in hisbosom— you can almost hear it throb. Some one said, that if you had shaken hands withhim, his hand would have burnt yours. The Gods,indeed, “made him poetical”; but naturehad a hand in him first. His heart was in theright place. He did not “create a soulunder the ribs of death,” by tinkling siren
sounds, or by piling up centos of poetic diction; butfor the artificial flowers of poetry, he plucked themountain-daisy under his feet; and a field-mouse,hurrying from its ruined dwelling, could inspire himwith the sentiments of terror and pity. He heldthe 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 hisgenius; but there is something of the same magnanimity,directness, and unaffected character about him. He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a namby-pambypoet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more thanShakspeare. He would as soon hear “a brazencandlestick tuned, or a dry wheel grate on the axletree.”He was as much of a man—not a twentiethpart as much of a poet as Shakspeare. With butlittle of his imagination or inventive power, he hadthe same life of mind: within the narrow circleof personal feeling or domestic incidents, the pulseof his poetry flows as healthily and vigorously. He had an eye to see; a heart to feel:—nomore. His pictures of good fellowship, of socialglee, of quaint humour, are equal to any thing; theycome up to nature, and they cannot go beyond it. The sly jest collected in his laughing eye at thesight of the grotesque and ludicrous in manners—thelarge tear rolled down his manly cheek at the sightof another’s distress. He has made usas well acquainted with himself as it is possible tobe; has let out the honest impulses of his nativedisposition, the unequal conflict of the passionsin his breast, with the same frankness and truth ofdescription. His strength is not greater thanhis weakness: his virtues were greater than hisvices. His virtues belonged to his genius:his vices to his situation, which did not correspondto his genius.It has been usual to attack Burns’s moral character,and the moral tendency of his writings at the sametime; and Mr. Wordsworth, in a letter to Mr. Gray,Master of the High School at Edinburgh, in attemptingto defend, has only laid him open to a more seriousand unheard-of responsibility. Mr. Gray mightvery well have sent him back, in return for his epistle,the answer of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’sLost:—“Via goodman Dull, thouhast spoken no word all this while.” Theauthor of this performance, which is as weak in effectas it is pompous in pretension, shews a great dislikeof Robespierre, Buonaparte, and of Mr. Jeffrey, whomhe, by some unaccountable fatality, classes togetheras the three most formidable enemies of the human racethat have appeared in his (Mr. Wordsworth’s)remembrance; but he betrays very little liking toBurns. He is, indeed, anxious to get him outof the unhallowed clutches of the Edinburgh Reviewers(as a mere matter of poetical privilege), only tobring him before a graver and higher tribunal, whichis his own; and after repeating and insinuating ponderous
charges against him, shakes his head, and declinesgiving any opinion in so tremendous a case; so thatthough the judgment of the former critic is set aside,poor Burns remains just where he was, and nobody gainsany thing by the cause but Mr. Wordsworth, in an increasingopinion of his own wisdom and purity. “Outupon this half-faced fellowship!” The authorof the Lyrical Ballads has thus missed a fine opportunityof doing Burns justice and himself honour. Hemight have shewn himself a philosophical prose-writer,as well as a philosophical poet. He might haveoffered as amiable and as gallant a defence of theMuses, as my uncle Toby, in the honest simplicity ofhis heart, did of the army. He might have saidat once, instead of making a parcel of wry faces overthe matter, that Burns had written Tam o’Shanter,and that that alone was enough; that he could hardlyhave described the excesses of mad, hairbrained, roaringmirth and convivial indulgence, which are the soulof it, if he himself had not “drunk full ofterof the ton than of the well”—unless“the act and practique part of life had beenthe mistress of his theorique.” Mr. Wordsworthmight have quoted such lines as—“The landladyand Tam grew gracious,
Wi’ favourssecret, sweet, and precious";—
or,
“Care, madto see a man so happy,
E’en drown’dhimself among the nappy";—
and fairly confessed that he could not have writtensuch lines from a want of proper habits and previoussympathy; and that till some great puritanical geniusshould arise to do these things equally well withoutany knowledge of them, the world might forgive Burnsthe injuries he had done his health and fortune inhis poetical apprenticeship to experience, for thepleasure he had afforded them. Instead of this,Mr. Wordsworth hints, that with different personalhabits and greater strength of mind, Burns would havewritten differently, and almost as well as hedoes. He might have taken that line of Gay’s,
“The flythat sips treacle is lost in the sweets,”—
and applied it in all its force and pathos to thepoetical character. He might have argued thatpoets are men of genius, and that a man of geniusis not a machine; that they live in a state of intellectualintoxication, and that it is too much to expect themto be distinguished by peculiar sang froid,circ*mspection, and sobriety. Poets are by naturemen of stronger imagination and keener sensibilitiesthan others; and it is a contradiction to supposethem at the same time governed only by the cool, dry,calculating dictates of reason and foresight. Mr. Wordsworth might have ascertained the boundariesthat part the provinces of reason and imagination:—thatit is the business of the understanding to exhibitthings in their relative proportions and ultimateconsequences—of the imagination to insiston their immediate impressions, and to indulge their
strongest impulses; but it is the poet’s officeto pamper the imagination of his readers and his ownwith the extremes of present ecstacy or agony, tosnatch the swift-winged golden minutes, the torturinghour, and to banish the dull, prosaic, monotonousrealities of life, both from his thoughts and fromhis practice. Mr. Wordsworth might have shewnhow it is that all men of genius, or of originalityand independence of mind, are liable to practicalerrors, from the very confidence their superiorityinspires, which makes them fly in the face of customand prejudice, always rashly, sometimes unjustly;for, after all, custom and prejudice are not withoutfoundation in truth and reason, and no one individualis a match for the world in power, very few in knowledge. The world may altogether be set down as older andwiser than any single person in it.Again, our philosophical letter-writer might haveenlarged on the temptations to which Burns was exposedfrom his struggles with fortune and the uncertaintyof his fate. He might have shewn how a poet,not born to wealth or title, was kept in a constantstate of feverish anxiety with respect to his fameand the means of a precarious livelihood: that“from being chilled with poverty, steeped incontempt, 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 continuanceof success, but was, “like the giddy sailor onthe mast, ready with every blast to topple down intothe fatal bowels of the deep!” He might havetraced his habit of ale-house tippling to the lastlong precious draught of his favourite usquebaugh,which he took in the prospect of bidding farewel forever to his native land; and his conjugal infidelitiesto his first disappointment in love, which would nothave happened to him, if he had been born to a smallestate in land, or bred up behind a counter!
Lastly, Mr. Wordsworth might have shewn the incompatibilitybetween the Muses and the Excise, which never agreedwell together, or met in one seat, till they wereunaccountably reconciled on Rydal Mount. Hemust know (no man better) the distraction created bythe opposite calls of business and of fancy, the tormentof extents, the plague of receipts laid in order ormislaid, the disagreeableness of exacting penaltiesor paying the forfeiture; and how all this (togetherwith the broaching of casks and the splashing of beer-barrels)must have preyed upon a mind like Burns, with morethan his natural sensibility and none of his acquiredfirmness.
Mr. Coleridge, alluding to this circ*mstance of thepromotion of the Scottish Bard to be “a gaugerof ale-firkins,” in a poetical epistle to hisfriend Charles Lamb, calls upon him in a burst of heartfeltindignation, 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 letterin defence of Burns, how different would it have beenfrom this of Mr. Wordsworth’s! How muchbetter than I can even imagine it to have been done!
It is hardly reasonable to look for a hearty or genuinedefence of Burns from the pen of Mr. Wordsworth; forthere is no common link of sympathy between them. Nothing can be more different or hostile than thespirit of their poetry. Mr. Wordsworth’spoetry is the poetry of mere sentiment and pensivecontemplation: Burns’s is a very highlysublimated essence of animal existence. WithBurns, “self-love and social are the same”—
“And we’lltak a cup of kindness yet,
For auld langsyne.”
Mr. Wordsworth is “himself alone,” a reclusephilosopher, or a reluctant spectator of the scenesof many-coloured life; moralising on them, not describing,not entering into them. Robert Burns has exertedall the vigour of his mind, all the happiness of hisnature, in exalting the pleasures of wine, of love,and good fellowship: but in Mr. Wordsworth thereis a total disunion and divorce of the faculties ofthe mind from those of the body; the banns are forbid,or a separation is austerely pronounced from bed andboard—a mensa et thoro. Fromthe Lyrical Ballads, it does not appear that men eator drink, marry or are given in marriage. Ifwe lived by every sentiment that proceeded out of mouths,and not by bread or wine, or if the species were continuedlike trees (to borrow an expression from the greatSir Thomas Brown), Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry wouldbe 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. Forthis, it seems, he has fallen under the displeasureof the Edinburgh Reviewers, and the still more formidablepatronage of Mr. Wordsworth’s pen.
“This, thiswas the unkindest cut of all.”
I was going to give some extracts out of this compositionin support of what I have said, but I find them tootedious. Indeed (if I may be allowed to speakmy whole mind, under correction) Mr. Wordsworth couldnot be in any way expected to tolerate or give a favourableinterpretation to Burns’s constitutional foibles—evenhis best virtues are not good enough for him. He is repelled and driven back into himself, notless 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, thathe gives pleasure to so few people. It is notevery 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 pieceof description, both as it respects the animal andhuman creation, and conveys a very vivid idea of themanners both of high and low life. The burlesquepanegyric of the first dog,
“His locked,lettered, braw brass collar
Shew’d himthe gentleman and scholar”—
reminds one of Launce’s account of his dog Crabbe,where he is said, as an instance of his being in theway of promotion, “to have got among three orfour gentleman-like dogs under the Duke’s table.”The “Halloween” is the most striking andpicturesque description of local customs and scenery. The Brigs of Ayr, the Address to a Haggis, ScotchDrink, and innumerable others are, however, full ofthe same kind of characteristic and comic painting. But his master-piece in this way is his Tam o’Shanter. I shall give the beginning of it, but I am afraidI shall hardly know when to leave off.
“Whenchapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neebors,neebors meet,
As market-daysare wearing late,
And folk beginto tak the gate;
While we sit bousingat the nappy,
And getting fouand unco happy,
We think na onthe lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters,slaps, and stiles,
That lie betweenus and our hame,
Whare sits oursulky, sullen dame,
Gathering herbrows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrathto keep it warm.
Thistruth fand honest Tam o’Shanter,
As he frae Ayrae night did canter;
(Auld Ayr, whamne’er a town surpasses,
For honest menand bonny lasses.)
OTam! hadst thou but been sae wise,
As ta’enthy ain wife Kate’s advice!
She tauld theeweel thou was a skellum,
A blethering,blustering, drunken blellum;
That frae Novembertill October
Ae market-daythou was na sober;
That ilka melder,wi’ the miller,
Thou sat as langas thou had siller;
That ev’rynaig was ca’d a shoe on,
The smith andthee gat roaring fou on;
That at the Lord’shouse, ev’n on Sunday,
Thou drank wi’Kirton Jean till Monday—
She prophesy’d,that late or soon,
Thou wad be founddeep drown’d in Doon;
Or catch’twi’ warlocks in the mirk,
By Alloway’sauld haunted kirk.
Ah,gentle dames! it gars me greet,
To think how monycounsels sweet,
How mony lengthen’d,sage advices,
The husband fraethe wife despises!
Butto our tale: Ae market night,
Tam had got plantedunco right
Fast by an ingle,bleezing finely,
Wi’ reamingswats, that drank divinely;
And at his elbow,Souter Johnny,
His ancient, trusty,drouthy crony;
Tam lo’edhim like a vera brither;
They had beenfou for weeks thegither.
The night draveon wi’ sangs an clatter,
And aye the alewas growing better:
The landlady andTam grew gracious
Wi’ favourssecret, sweet, and precious:
The Souter tauldhis queerest stories;
The landlord’slaugh was ready chorus:
The storm withoutmight rair and rustle,
Tam did na mindthe storm a whistle.
Care,mad to see a man sae happy,
E’en drown’dhimsel amang the nappy;
As bees flee hamewi’ lades o’ treasure,
The minutes wing’dtheir way wi’ pleasure:
Kings may be blest,but Tam was glorious,
O’er a’the ills of life victorious!
Butpleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize theflow’r—its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow,falls in the river,
A moment white—thenmelts for ever;
Or like the Borealisrace,
That flit ereyou can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’slovely form,
Evanishing amidthe storm.—
Nae man can tethertime or tide,
The hour approaches,Tam maun ride;
That hour o’night’s black arch the key-stane,
That dreary hourhe mounts his beast in,
And sic a nighthe taks the road in,
As ne’erpoor sinner was abroad in.
Thewind blew as ’twad blawn its last;
The rattling showersrose on the blast,
The speedy gleamsthe darkness swallow’d,
Loud, deep, andlang, the thunder bellow’d:
That night a childmight understand,
The Deil had businesson his hand.
Weelmounted on his grey mare, Meg,
A better neverlifted leg,
Tam skelpit onthro’ dub and mire,
Despising wind,and rain, and fire;
Whiles hauldingfast his gude blue bonnet;
Whiles crooningo’er some auld Scots sonnet;
Whiles glowringround wi’ prudent cares,
Lest bogles catchhim unawares;
Kirk-Alloway wasdrawing nigh,
Whare ghaistsand houlets nightly cry.—
Bythis time Tam was cross the ford,
Whare in the snaw,the chapman smoor’d;
And past the birksand meikle stane,
Whare drunkenCharlie brak’s neck-bane;
And thro’the whins, and by the cairn,
Where huntersfand the murder’d bairn;
And near the thorn,aboon the well,
Whare Mungo’smither hang’d hersel.—
Before him Doonpours all his floods;
The doubling stormroars thro’ the woods;
The lightningsflash from pole to pole;
Near and morenear the thunders roll:
Whan, glimmeringthro’ the groaning trees,
Kirk-Alloway seem’din a bleeze;
Thro’ ilkabore the beams were glancing;
And loud resoundedmirth and dancing.
Inspiringbold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thoucanst make us scorn!
Wi’ Tippenny,we fear nae evil,
Wi’ Usqueba,we’ll face the devil!
The swats saeream’d in Tammie’s noddle,
Fair play, hecar’d na de’ils a boddle.
But Maggie stoodright sair astonish’d,
Till by the heeland hand admonish’d,
She ventur’dforward on the light,
And, vow!Tam saw an unco sight!
Nae light cotillionnew frae France,
But hornpipes,jigs, strathspeys, and reels,
Put life and mettlein their heels.
As winnock-bunker,in the east,
There sat auldNick, in shape o’ beast;
A touzie tyke,black, grim, and large,
To gie them musicwas his charge;
He screw’dthe pipes, and gart them skirl,
Till roof andrafters a’ did dirl.—
Coffins stoodround like open presses,
That shaw’dthe dead in their last dresses;
And, by some devilishcantrip slight,
Each in its cauldhand held a light—
By which heroicTam was able
To note upon thehaly table,
A murderer’sbanes in gibbet-airns;
Twa span-lang,wee, unchristen’d bairns;
A thief, new cuttedfrae a rape,
Wi’ hislast gasp his gab did gape;
Five tomahawks,wi’ bluid red rusted;
Five scimitars,wi’ murder crusted;
A garter, whicha babe had strangled;
A knife, a father’sthroat had mangled,
Whom his ain sono’ life bereft,
The grey hairsyet stack to the heft;
Wi’ mair,o’ horrible and awfu’,
Which e’ento name wad be unlawfu’.
AsTammie glowr’d amaz’d, and curious,
The mirth andfun grew fast and furious:
The Piper loudand louder blew;
The dancers quickand quicker flew;
They reel’d,they set, they cross’d, they cleekit,
Till ilka Carlinswat and reekit,
And coost herduddies to the wark,
And linket atit in her sark!
NowTam, O Tam! had they been queans
A’ plumpand strapping in their teens;
Their sarks, insteado’ creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-whiteseventeen hundred linen!
Thir breeks o’mine, my only pair,
That ance wereplush, o’ guid blue hair,
I wad hae gi’enthem aff my hurdies,
For ae blink o’the bonnie burdies!
Butwither’d beldams, auld and droll,
Rigwoodie hagswad spean a foal,
Louping and flingingon a crummock,
I wonder did naturn thy stomach.
ButTam ken’d what was what fu’ brawly,
There was ae winsomewench and waly,
That night enlistedin the core,
(Lang after ken’don Carrick shore;
For mony a beastto dead she shot,
And perish’dmony a bonnie boat,
And shook baithmeikle corn and bear,
And kept the country-sidein fear—)
Her cutty sarko’ Paisley harn,
That while a lassieshe had worn,
In longitude tho’sorely scanty,
It was her best,and she was vaunty.—
Ah! little ken’dthy reverend grannie,
That sark shecoft for her wee Nannie,
Wi’ twapund Scots (’twas a’ her riches),
Wad ever grac’da dance of witches!
Buthere my Muse her wing maun cour;
Sic flights arefar beyond her power:
To sing how Nannielap and flang,
(A souple jadeshe was, and strang)
And how Tam stoodlike ane bewitch’d,
And thought hisvery een enrich’d;
Ev’n Satanglowr’d and fidg’d fu’ fain,
And hotch’t,and blew wi’ might and main;
Till first aecaper, syne anither,
Tam tint his reasona’ thegither,
And roars out,“Weel done, Cutty Sark!”
And in an instantall was dark;
And scarcely hadhe Maggie rallied,
When out the hellishlegion sallied.
Asbees biz out wi’ angry fyke
When plunderingherds assail their byke;
As open puss*e’smortal foes,
When, pop! shestarts before their nose;
As eager rinsthe market-crowd,
When “Catchthe thief!” resounds aloud;
So Maggie rins—thewitches follow,
Wi’ monyan eldritch skreech and hollow,
Ah,Tam! ah, Tam! thou ‘ll get thy fairin’!
In hell they’llroast thee like a herrin’!
In vain thy Kateawaits thy comin’!
Kate soon willbe a waefu’ woman!
Now, do thy speedyutmost, Meg,
And win the key-staneo’ the brig;
There, at themthou thy tail may toss,
A running streamthey dare na cross;
But ere the key-staneshe could make,
The fient a tailshe had to shake!
For Nannie, farbefore the rest,
Hard upon nobleMaggie prest,
And flew at Tamwi’ furious ettle;
But little wistshe Maggie’s mettle—
Ae spring broughtoff her master hale,
But left behind,her ain grey tail:
The Carlin claughther by the rump,
And left poorMaggie scarce a stump.
Now,wha this tale o’ truth shall read,
Ilk man and mother’sson tak heed:
Whane’erto drink you are inclin’d,
Or Cutty Sarksrin in your mind,
Think, ye maybuy the joys owre dear;
Remember Tam o’Shanter’s mare.”
Burns has given the extremes of licentious eccentricityand convivial enjoyment, in the story of this scape-grace,and of patriarchal simplicity and gravity in describingthe old national character of the Scottish peasantry. The Cotter’s Saturday Night is a noble and patheticpicture of human manners, mingled with a fine religiousawe. It comes over the mind like a slow andsolemn strain of music. The soul of the poetaspires from this scene of low-thoughted care, andreposes, in trembling hope, on “the bosom ofits Father and its God.” Hardly any thingcan be more touching than the following stanzas, forinstance, whether as they describe human interests,or breathe a lofty devotional spirit.
“The toil-wornCotter frae his labour goes,
Thisnight his weekly moil is at an end,
Collects his spades,his mattocks, and his hoes,
Hopingthe morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o’erthe moor, his course does hameward bend.
At length hislonely cot appears in view,
Beneaththe shelter of an aged tree;
Th’ expectantwee-things, toddlin, stacher through
Tomeet their dad, wi’ flichterin noise and glee.
His wee-bit ingle,blinkin bonilie,
Hisclean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie’s smile,
The lisping infant,prattling on his knee,
Doesa’ his weary carking cares beguile,
And makes himquite forget his labour and his toil.
Belyve, the elderbairns come drapping in,
Atservice out, amang the farmers roun’,
Some ca’the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin
Acannie errand to a neebor town;
Their eldest hope,their Jenny, woman-grown,
Inyouthfu’ bloom, love sparkling in her e’e,
Comes hame, perhaps,to shew a braw new gown,
Ordeposit her sair-won penny-fee,
To help her parentsdear, if they in hardship be.
Wi’ joyunfeign’d, brothers and sisters meet,
An’each for other’s welfare kindly spiers;
The social hours,swift-winged, unnotic’d fleet;
Eachtells the uncos that he sees or hears:
The parents, partial,eye their hopeful years;
Anticipationforward points the view;
The mither, wi’her needle an’ her shears,
Garsauld claes look amaist as weel’s the new;
The father mixesa’ wi’ admonition due.
* * * * * * *
But, hark! a rapcomes gently to the door;
Jenny,wha kens the meaning o’ the same,
Tells how a neeborlad cam o’er the moor,
Todo some errands, and convoy her hame.
The wily mothersees the conscious flame
Sparklein Jenny’s e’e, and flush her cheek;
With heart-struck,anxious care, inquires his name,
WhileJenny hafflins is afraid to speak;
Weel pleas’dthe mother hears it’s nae wild, worthless rake.
Wi’ kindlywelcome, Jenny brings him ben;
Astrappan youth; he taks the mother’s eye;
Blithe Jenny seesthe visit’s no ill ta’en;
Thefather craks of horses, pleughs, and kye.
The youngster’sartless heart o’erflows wi’ joy,
Butblate an’ laithfu’, scarce can weel behave;
The mother, wi’a woman’s wiles, can spy
Whatmakes the youth sae bashfu’ an’ sae grave;
Weel-pleas’dto think her bairn’s respected like the lave.
But now the suppercrowns their simple board,
Thehalesome parritch, chief o’ Scotia’s food:
The soupe theironly hawkie does afford,
That’yont the hallan snugly chows her cood:
The dame bringsforth, in complimental mood,
Tograce the lad, her weel-hain’d kebbuck, fell,
An’ afthe’s prest, an’ aft he ca’s it guid;
Thefrugal wifie, garrulous, will tell,
How ‘twasa 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 turnso’er, with patriarchal grace,
Thebig ha’-Bible, ance his father’s pride:
His bonnet rev’rentlyis laid aside,
Hislyart haffets wearing thin an’ bare;
Those strainsthat once did sweet in Zion glide,
Hewales a portion wi’ judicious care;
And “Letus worship God!” he says, with solemn air.
They chant theirartless notes in simple guise;
Theytune their hearts, by far the noblest aim:
Perhaps Dundee’swild-warbling measures rise,
Orplaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name;
Or noble Elginbeets the heav’n-ward flame,
Thesweetest far of Scotia’s holy lays:
Compar’dwith these, Italian trills are tame;
Thetickled ears no heart-felt raptures raise;
Nae unison haethey with our Creator’s praise.”—
Burns’s poetical epistles to his friends areadmirable, whether for the touches of satire, thepainting of character, or the sincerity of friendshipthey display. Those to Captain Grose, and toDavie, a brother poet, are among the best:—theyare “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 forhis wit, and is expected on all occasions to shine. Those in which he expresses his ideas of naturalbeauty in reference to Alison’s Essay on Taste,and advocates the keeping up the remembrances of oldcustoms and seasons, are the most powerfully written. His English serious odes and moral stanzas are, ingeneral, failures, such as The Lament, Man was madeto Mourn, &c. nor do I much admire his “Scotswha hae wi’ Wallace bled.” In thisstrain of didactic or sentimental moralising, the linesto Glencairn are the most happy, and impressive. His imitations of the old humorous ballad style ofFerguson’s songs are no whit inferior to theadmirable originals, such as “John Anderson,my Joe,” and many more. But of all hisproductions, the pathetic and serious love-songs whichhe has left behind him, in the manner of the old ballads,are perhaps those which take the deepest and mostlasting hold of the mind. Such are the linesto Mary Morison, and those entitled Jessy.
“Here’sa health to ane I lo’e dear—
Here’s ahealth to ane I lo’e dear—
Thou art sweetas the smile when fond lovers meet,
Andsoft as their parting tear—Jessy!
Altho’ thoumaun never be mine,
Altho’even hope is denied;
’Tis sweeterfor thee despairing,
Thanaught in the world beside—Jessy!”
The conclusion of the other is as follows.
“Yestreen,when to the trembling string
Thedance gaed through the lighted ha’,
To thee my fancytook its wing,
Isat, but neither heard nor saw.
Tho’ thiswas fair, and that was bra’,
Andyon the toast of a’ the town,
I sighed and saidamong them a’,
Yeare na’ Mary Morison.”
That beginning, “Oh gin my love were a bonnyred rose,” is a piece of rich and fantasticdescription. One would think that nothing couldsurpass these in beauty of expression, and in truepathos: and nothing does or can, but some ofthe old Scotch ballads themselves. There is inthem a still more original cast of thought, a moreromantic imagery— the thistle’s glitteringdown, the gilliflower on the old garden-wall, thehorseman’s silver bells, the hawk on its perch—acloser intimacy with nature, a firmer reliance onit, as the only stock of wealth which the mind hasto resort to, a more infantine simplicity of manners,a greater strength of affection, hopes longer cherishedand longer deferred, sighs that the heart dare hardlyheave, and “thoughts that often lie too deepfor tears.” We seem to feel that those whowrote and sung them (the early minstrels) lived inthe open air, wandering on from place to place withrestless feet and thoughts, and lending an ever-openear to the fearful accidents of war or love, floatingon the breath of old tradition or common fame, andmoving the strings of their harp with sounds thatsank into a nation’s heart. How fine anillustration 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 drivinghis mules to plough before break of day, “singingthe ancient ballad of Roncesvalles.” SirThomas Overbury describes his country girl as stillaccompanied with fragments of old songs. Oneof the best and most striking descriptions of theeffects of this mixture of national poetry and musicis to be found in one of the letters of ArchbishopHerring, giving an account of a confirmation-tourin the mountains of Wales.
“That pleasure over, our work became veryarduous, for we were to mount a rock, and in manyplaces of the road, over natural stairs of stone. I submitted to this, which they told me was but ataste of the country, and to prepare me for worsethings to come. However, worse things did notcome that morning, for we dined soon after out of ourown wallets; and though our inn stood in a place ofthe most frightful solitude, and the best formed forthe habitation of monks (who once possessed it) inthe world, yet we made a cheerful meal. The noveltyof the thing gave me spirits, and the air gave meappetite 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 Hogarthwould have given any price for. The harper wasin his true place and attitude; a man and woman stood
before him, singing to his instrument wildly, but notdisagreeably; a little dirty child was playing withthe bottom of the harp; a woman in a sick night-caphanging over the stairs; a boy with crutches fixedin a staring attention, and a girl carding wool inthe 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; andone reflection gave me a particular comfort, thatthe assembly before us demonstrated, that even here,the influential sun warmed poor mortals, and inspiredthem with love and music.”I could wish that Mr. Wilkie had been recommendedto take this group as the subject of his admirablepencil; he has painted a picture of Bathsheba, instead.
In speaking of the old Scotch ballads, I need do nomore than mention the name of Auld Robin Gray. The effect of reading this old ballad is as if allour hopes and fears hung upon the last fibre of theheart, and we felt that giving way. What silence,what loneliness, what leisure for grief and despair!
“My fatherpressed me sair,
Thoughmy mother did na’ speak;
But she lookedin my face
Tillmy heart was like to break.”
The irksomeness of the situations, the sense of painfuldependence, is excessive; and yet the sentiment ofdeep-rooted, patient affection triumphs over all,and is the only impression that remains. LadyAnn Bothwell’s Lament is not, I think, quiteequal to the lines beginning—
“O waly,waly, up the bank,
Andwaly, waly, down the brae,
And waly, waly,yon burn side,
WhereI and my love wont to gae.
I leant my backunto an aik,
Ithought it was a trusty tree;
But first it bow’d,and syne it brak,
Saemy true-love’s forsaken me.
O waly, waly,love is bonny,
Alittle time while it is new;
But when its auld,it waxeth cauld,
Andfades awa’ like the morning dew.
When co*ckle-shellsturn siller bells,
Andmuscles grow on every tree,
Whan frost andsnaw sall warm us aw,
Thensall my love prove true to me.
Now Arthur seatsall be my bed,
Thesheets sall ne’er be fyld by me:
Saint Anton’swell sall be my drink,
Sincemy true-love’s forsaken me.
Martinmas wind,when wilt thou blaw,
Andshake the green leaves aff the tree?
O gentle death,whan wilt thou cum,
Andtak’ a life that wearies me!
’Tis notthe frost that freezes sae,
Norblawing snaw’s inclemencie,
’Tis notsic cauld, that makes me cry,
Butmy love’s heart grown cauld to me.
Whan we came inby Glasgow town,
Wewere a comely sight to see,
My love was cladin black velvet,
AndI myself in cramasie.
But had I wistbefore I kist,
Thatlove had been sae hard to win;
I’d locktmy heart in case of gowd,
Andpinn’d it with a siller pin.
And oh! if mypoor babe were born,
Andset upon the nurse’s knee,
And I mysel inthe cold grave!
Sincemy true-love ’s forsaken me.”
The finest modern imitation of this style is the Braesof Yarrow; and perhaps the finest subject for a storyof the same kind in any modern book, is that toldin Turner’s History of England, of a Mahometanwoman, who having fallen in love with an English merchant,the father of Thomas a Becket, followed him all theway to England, knowing only the word London, andthe name of her lover, Gilbert.
But to have done with this, which is rather too seriousa subject.— The old English ballads areof a gayer and more lively turn. They are adventurousand romantic; but they relate chiefly to good livingand good fellowship, to drinking and hunting scenes. Robin Hood is the chief of these, and he still, inimagination, haunts Sherwood Forest. The archersgreen glimmer under the waving branches; the printon the grass remains where they have just finishedtheir noon-tide meal under the green-wood tree; andthe echo of their bugle-horn and twanging bows resoundsthrough the tangled mazes of the forest, as the tallslim deer glances startled by.
“The treesin Sherwood Forest are old and good;
Thegrass beneath them now is dimly green:
Arethey deserted all? Is no young mien,
With loose-slungbugle, met within the wood?
No arrow found—foil’dof its antler’d food—
Struckin the oak’s rude side?—Is there noughtseen
Tomark the revelries which there have been,
In the sweet daysof merry Robin Hood?
Go there withsummer, and with evening—go
Inthe soft shadows, like some wand’ring man—
Andthou shalt far amid the forest know
The archer-menin green, with belt and bow,
Feastingon pheasant, river-fowl, and swan,
WithRobin at their head, and Marian.” [9]
___[9] Sonnet on Sherwood Forest, by J.H. Reynolds, Esq.___
LECTURE VIII.ON THE LIVING POETS.
“No moreof talk where God or Angel guest
With man, as withhis friend, familiar us’d
To sit indulgent.”------
Genius is the heir of fame; but the hard conditionon which the bright reversion must be earned is theloss of life. Fame is the recompense not ofthe living, but of the dead. The temple of famestands upon the grave: the flame that burns uponits altars is kindled from the ashes of great men. Fame itself is immortal, but it is not begot tillthe breath of genius is extinguished. For fameis not popularity, the shout of the multitude, the
idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff, the soothingflattery of favour or of friendship; but it is thespirit of a man surviving himself in the minds andthoughts of other men, undying and imperishable. It is the power which the intellect exercises overthe intellect, and the lasting homage which is paidto it, as such, independently of time and circ*mstances,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 themighty ocean. He who has ears truly touchedto this music, is in a manner deaf to the voice ofpopularity.—The love of fame differs frommere vanity in this, that the one is immediate andpersonal, the other ideal and abstracted. Itis 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 eternalforms of truth and beauty as they are reflected inhis mind, that gives him confidence and hope. The love of nature is the first thing in the mindof the true poet: the admiration of himself thelast. A man of genius cannot well be a coxcomb;for his mind is too full of other things to be muchoccupied with his own person. He who is consciousof great powers in himself, has also a high standardof excellence with which to compare his efforts:he appeals also to a test and judge of merit, whichis the highest, but which is too remote, grave, andimpartial, 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 greatnessof mind, whether a man can wait patiently and calmlyfor the award of posterity, satisfied with the unweariedexercise of his faculties, retired within the sanctuaryof his own thoughts; or whether he is eager to forestalhis own immortality, and mortgage it for a newspaperpuff. He who thinks much of himself, will bein 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. Ifthe restless candidate for praise takes no pleasure,no sincere and heartfelt delight in his works, butas they are admired and applauded by others, whatshould others see in them to admire or applaud?They cannot be expected to admire them because theyare his; but for the truth and nature containedin them, which must first be inly felt and copiedwith 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 Virginand Child in all their inconceivable truth and beautyof 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 colouristin the world, or making himself so by looking at nature?Do you imagine that Shakspeare, when he wrote Learor Othello, was thinking of any thing but Lear andOthello? Or that Mr. Kean, when he plays thesecharacters, is thinking of the audience?—No:he who would be great in the eyes of others, must firstlearn to be nothing in his own. The love of fame,as it enters at times into his mind, is only anothername for the love of excellence; or it is the ambitionto attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by thehighest authority—that of time.Those minds, then, which are the most entitled toexpect it, can best put up with the postponement oftheir claims to lasting fame. They can affordto wait. They are not afraid that truth and naturewill ever wear out; will lose their gloss with novelty,or their effect with fashion. If their workshave 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 havegot of them in the race of everlasting renown, orof the impossibility of attaining the honours whichtime alone can give, during the term of their naturallives. They know that no applause, however loudand violent, can anticipate or over-rule the judgmentof posterity; that the opinion of no one individual,nor of any one generation, can have the weight, theauthority (to say nothing of the force of sympathyand prejudice), which must belong to that of successivegenerations. The brightest living reputationcannot be equally imposing to the imagination, withthat which is covered and rendered venerable withthe hoar of innumerable ages. No modern productioncan have the same atmosphere of sentiment around it,as the remains of classical antiquity. But thenour moderns may console themselves with the reflection,that they will be old in their turn, and will eitherbe remembered with still increasing honours, or quiteforgotten!
I would speak of the living poets as I have spokenof 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 sanctionmy opinion. I cannot be absolutely certain thatany body, twenty years hence, will think any thingabout any of them; but we may be pretty sure that Miltonand Shakspeare will be remembered twenty years hence. We are, therefore, not without excuse if we husbandour enthusiasm a little, and do not prematurely layout our whole stock in untried ventures, and what mayturn out to be false bottoms. I have myself out-livedone generation of favourite poets, the Darwins, theHayleys, the Sewards. Who reads them now?—If,however, I have not the verdict of posterity to bearme out in bestowing the most unqualified praises ontheir 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 ungratefulpart of the subject; but something of the sort is expected
from me, and I must run the gauntlet as well as Ican. Another circ*mstance that adds to the difficultyof doing justice to all parties is, that I happen tohave had a personal acquaintance with some of thesejealous votaries of the Muses; and that is not thelikeliest way to imbibe a high opinion of the rest. Poets do not praise one another in the language ofhyperbole. I am afraid, therefore, that I labourunder a degree of prejudice against some of the mostpopular poets of the day, from an early habit of deferenceto the critical opinions of some of the least popular. I cannot say that I ever learnt much about Shakspeareor Milton, Spenser or Chaucer, from these professedguides; 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 intercoursewith living authors, while it takes away all realrelish or freedom of opinion with regard to theircontemporaries, greatly enhances our respect for themselves. Poets are not ideal beings; but have their prose-sides,like the commonest of the people. We often hearpersons say, What they would have given to have seenShakspeare! For my part, I would give a greatdeal not to have seen him; at least, if he was atall like any body else that I have ever seen. But why should he; for his works are not! Thisis, doubtless, one great advantage which the deadhave over the living. It is always fortunatefor ourselves and others, when we are prevented fromexchanging admiration for knowledge. The splendidvision that in youth haunts our idea of the poeticalcharacter, fades, upon acquaintance, into the lightof common day; as the azure tints that deck the mountain’sbrow are lost on a nearer approach to them. Itis well, according to the moral of one of the LyricalBallads,—“To leave Yarrow unvisited.”But to leave this “face-making,” and begin.—I am a great admirer of the female writers of thepresent day; they appear to me like so many modernMuses. I could be in love with Mrs. Inchbald,romantic with Mrs. Radcliffe, and sarcastic with MadameD’Arblay: but they are novel-writers, and,like Audrey, may “thank the Gods for not havingmade them poetical.” Did any one here everread Mrs. Leicester’s School? If they havenot, I wish they would; there will be just time beforethe next three volumes of the Tales of My Landlordcome out. That is not a school of affectation,but of humanity. No one can think too highlyof the work, or highly enough of the author.
The first poetess I can recollect is Mrs. Barbauld,with whose works I became acquainted before thoseof any other author, male or female, when I was learningto spell words of one syllable in her story-booksfor children. I became acquainted with her poeticalworks long after in Enfield’s Speaker; and rememberbeing much divided in my opinion at that time, betweenher Ode to Spring and Collins’s Ode to Evening.
I wish I could repay my childish debt of gratitudein terms of appropriate praise. She is a verypretty poetess; and, to my fancy, strews the flowersof poetry most agreeably round the borders of religiouscontroversy. She is a neat and pointed prose-writer. Her “Thoughts on the Inconsistency of HumanExpectations,” is one of the most ingeniousand sensible essays in the language. There isthe same idea in one of Barrow’s Sermons.Mrs. Hannah More is another celebrated modern poetess,and I believe still living. She has writtena 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 illustrateeach of the passions, separately from the rest, areheresies in the dramatic art. She is a Unitarianin poetry. With her the passions are, like theFrench republic, one and indivisible: they arenot so in nature, or in Shakspeare. Mr. Southeyhas, I believe, somewhere expressed an opinion, thatthe Basil of Miss Baillie is superior to Romeo andJuliet. I shall not stay to contradict him. On the other hand, I prefer her De Montfort, whichwas condemned on the stage, to some later tragedies,which have been more fortunate—to the Remorse,Bertram, and lastly, Fazio. There is in the chiefcharacter of that play a nerve, a continued unityof interest, a setness of purpose and precision ofoutline 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 whichjust suited Mr. Kemble, I mean to pay a complimentto both. He was not “a man of no mark orlikelihood”: and what he could be supposedto do particularly well, must have a meaning in it. As to the other tragedies just mentioned, there isno reason why any common actor should not “makemouths in them at the invisible event,”—oneas well as another. Having thus expressed mysense of the merits of this authoress, I must add,that her comedy of the Election, performed last summerat the Lyceum with indifferent success, appears tome the perfection of baby-house theatricals. Every thing in it has such a do-me-good air,is so insipid and amiable. Virtue seems sucha pretty playing at make-believe, and vice is sucha naughty word. It is a theory of some Frenchauthor, that little girls ought not to be sufferedto have dolls to play with, to call them prettydears, to admire their black eyes and cherry cheeks,to lament and bewail over them if they fall down andhurt their faces, to praise them when they are good,and scold them when they are naughty. It is aschool of affectation: Miss Baillie has profitedof it. She treats her grown men and women aslittle girls treat their dolls—makes moralpuppets of them, pulls the wires, and they talk virtueand act vice, according to their cue and the titleprefixed to each comedy or tragedy, not from any realpassions of their own, or love either of virtue orvice.
The transition from these to Mr. Rogers’s Pleasuresof Memory, is not far: he is a very lady-likepoet. He is an elegant, but feeble writer.He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering coverof fine words; is full of enigmas with no meaningto them; is studiously inverted, and scrupulouslyfar-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly becauseno particle, line, or syllable of them reads likeprose. He differs from Milton in this respect,who is accused of having inserted a number of prosaiclines in Paradise Lost. This kind of poetry,which is a more minute and inoffensive species ofthe Della Cruscan, is like the game of asking whatone’s thoughts are like. It is a tortuous,tottering, wriggling, fidgetty translation of everything from the vulgar tongue, into all the tantalizing,teasing, tripping, lisping mimminee-pimmineeof the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction. You have nothing like truth of nature or simplicityof expression. The fastidious and languid readeris never shocked by meeting, from the rarest chancein the world, with a single homely phrase or intelligibleidea. You cannot see the thought for the ambiguityof the language, the figure for the finery, the picturefor the varnish. The whole is refined, and fritteredaway into an appearance of the most evanescent brilliancyand tremulous imbecility.—There is no otherfault to be found with the Pleasures of Memory, thana want of taste and genius. The sentiments areamiable, 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, inmemory of her last parting with her good and piousmother in the same place in the year 1616—
“To shewthat power of love, how great
Beyond all humanestimate.”
This story is also told in the poem, but with so manyartful innuendos and tinsel words, that it is hardlyintelligible; and still less does it reach the heart.
Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope is of the sameschool, in which a painful attention is paid to theexpression in proportion as there is little to express,and the decomposition of prose is substituted for thecomposition of poetry. How much the sense andkeeping in the ideas are sacrificed to a jingle ofwords and epigrammatic turn of expression, may beseen in such lines as the following:—oneof the characters, an old invalid, wishes to end hisdays under
“Some hamletshade, to yield his sickly form
Health in thebreeze, and shelter in the storm.”
Now the antithesis here totally fails: for itis the breeze, and not the tree, or as it is quaintlyexpressed, hamlet shade, that affords health,though it is the tree that affords shelter in or fromthe storm. Instances of the same sort of curiosainfelicitas are not rare in this author. His verses on the Battle of Hohenlinden have considerablespirit and animation. His Gertrude of Wyomingis his principal performance. It is a kind ofhistorical paraphrase of Mr. Wordsworth’s poemof Ruth. It shews little power, or power enervatedby extreme fastidiousness. It is
“------Of outward showElaborate; of inward less exact.”
There are painters who trust more to the setting oftheir pictures than to the truth of the likeness. Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be thinking howhis poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressedon superfine wove paper, to have a disproportionateeye to points and commas, and dread of errors of thepress. He is so afraid of doing wrong, of makingthe smallest mistake, that he does little or nothing.Lest he should wander irretrievably from the rightpath, he stands still. He writes according toestablished etiquette. He offers the Muses noviolence. If he lights upon a good thought, heimmediately drops it for fear of spoiling a good thing. When he launches a sentiment that you think willfloat him triumphantly for once to the bottom of thestanza, he stops short at the end of the first orsecond line, and stands shivering on the brink ofbeauty, afraid to trust himself to the fathomlessabyss. Tutus nimium, timidusque procellarum. His very circ*mspection betrays him. The poet,as well as the woman, that deliberates, is undone. He is much like a man whose heart fails him justas he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks hisneck by flinging himself out of it when it is toolate. Mr. Campbell too often maims and mangleshis ideas before they are full formed, to fit themto the Procustes’ bed of criticism; or strangleshis intellectual offspring in the birth, lest theyshould come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh Review. He plays the hypercritic on himself, and starves hisgenius to death from a needless apprehension of aplethora. No writer who thinks habitually ofthe critics, either to tremble at their censures orset them at defiance, can write well. It isthe business of reviewers to watch poets, not of poetsto watch reviewers.—There is one admirablesimile in this poem, of the European child broughtby the sooty Indian in his hand, “like morningbrought by night.” The love-scenes in Gertrudeof Wyoming breathe a balmy voluptuousness of sentiment;but they are generally broken off in the middle; theyare like the scent of a bank of violets, faint andrich, which the gale suddenly conveys in a differentdirection. Mr. Campbell is careful of his ownreputation, and economical of the pleasures of hisreaders. He treats them as the fox in the fabletreated his guest the stork; or, to use his own expression,his fine things are
“Like angels’visits, few, and far between.” [10]
There is another fault in this poem, which is themechanical structure of the fable. The moststriking events occur in the shape of antitheses.The story is cut into the form of a parallelogram. There is the same systematic alternation of goodand evil, of violence and repose, that there is oflight and shade in a picture. The Indian, whois the chief agent in the interest of the poem, vanishesand returns after long intervals, like the periodical
revolutions of the planets. He unexpectedlyappears just in the nick of time, after years of absence,and without any known reason but the convenience ofthe author and the astonishment of the reader; asif nature were a machine constructed on a principleof complete contrast, to produce a theatrical effect. Nec Deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus. Mr. Campbell’s savage never appears but upongreat occasions, and then his punctuality is preternaturaland alarming. He is the most wonderful instanceon record of poetical reliability. Themost dreadful mischiefs happen at the most mortifyingmoments; and when your expectations are wound up tothe highest pitch, you are sure to have them knockedon the head by a premeditated and remorseless strokeof the poet’s pen. This is done so oftenfor the convenience of the author, that in the endit ceases to be for the satisfaction of the reader.___[10] There is the same idea in Blair’s Grave.
“------Its visits,Like those of angels, short, and far between.”
Mr. Campbell in altering the expression has spoiledit. “Few,” and “far between,”are the same thing. ___
Tom Moore is a poet of a quite different stamp. He is as heedless, gay, and prodigal of his poeticalwealth, as the other is careful, reserved, and parsimonious. The genius of both is national. Mr. Moore’sMuse is another Ariel, as light, as tricksy, as indefatigable,and as humane a spirit. His fancy is for everon the wing, flutters in the gale, glitters in thesun. Every thing lives, moves, and sparkles inhis poetry, while over all love waves his purple light. His thoughts are as restless, as many, and as brightas the insects that people the sun’s beam. “So work the honey-bees,” extracting liquidsweets from opening buds; so the butterfly expandsits wings to the idle air; so the thistle’ssilver down is wafted over summer seas. An airyvoyager on life’s stream, his mind inhales thefragrance of a thousand shores, and drinks of endlesspleasures under halcyon skies. Wherever his footstepstend over the enamelled ground of fairy fiction—
“Aroundhim the bees in play flutter and cluster,
And gaudy butterfliesfrolic around.”
The fault of Mr. Moore is an exuberance of involuntarypower. His facility of production lessens theeffect of, and hangs as a dead weight upon, what heproduces. His levity at last oppresses. The infinite delight he takes in such an infinitenumber of things, creates indifference in minds lesssusceptible of pleasure than his own. He exhaustsattention by being inexhaustible. His varietycloys; his rapidity dazzles and distracts the sight. The graceful ease with which he lends himself toevery subject, the genial spirit with which he indulgesin every sentiment, prevents him from giving theirfull force to the masses of things, from connectingthem into a whole. He wants intensity, strength,
and grandeur. His mind does not brood over thegreat and permanent; it glances over the surfaces,the first impressions of things, instead of grapplingwith the deep-rooted prejudices of the mind, its inveteratehabits, and that “perilous stuff that weighsupon the heart.” His pen, as it is rapidand fanciful, wants momentum and passion. Itrequires the same principle to make us thoroughly likepoetry, that makes us like ourselves so well, the feelingof continued identity. The impressions of Mr.Moore’s poetry are detached, desultory, andphysical. Its gorgeous colours brighten and fadelike the rainbow’s. Its sweetness evaporateslike the effluvia exhaled from beds of flowers!His gay laughing style, which relates to the immediatepleasures of love or wine, is better than his sentimentaland romantic vein. His Irish melodies are notfree from affectation and a certain sickliness ofpretension. His serious descriptions are aptto run into flowery tenderness. His pathos sometimesmelts into a mawkish sensibility, or crystallizesinto 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 aperfect “nest of spicery”; where the Cayenneis not spared. The politician there sharpensthe poet’s pen. In this too, our bard resemblesthe bee—he has its honey and its sting.Mr. Moore ought not to have written Lalla Rookh, evenfor three thousand guineas. His fame is worthmore than that. He should have minded the adviceof Fadladeen. It is not, however, a failure,so much as an evasion and a consequent disappointmentof public expectation. He should have left itto others to break conventions with nations, and faithwith the world. He should, at any rate, havekept his with the public. Lalla Rookh is notwhat people wanted to see whether Mr. Moore coulddo; 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 executionstill turns to the effeminate and voluptuous side.Fortitude of mind is the first requisite of a tragicor epic writer. Happiness of nature and felicityof genius are the pre-eminent characteristics of thebard of Erin. If he is not perfectly contentedwith what he is, all the world beside is. Hehad no temptation to risk any thing in adding to thelove and admiration of his age, and more than onecountry.
“Thereforeto be possessed with double pomp,
To guard a titlethat was rich before,
To gild refinedgold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfumeon the violet,
To smooth theice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow,or with taper light
To seek the beauteouseye of heav’n to garnish,
Is wasteful andridiculous excess.”
The same might be said of Mr. Moore’s seekingto bind an epic crown, or the shadow of one, roundhis other laurels.
If Mr. Moore has not suffered enough personally, LordByron (judging from the tone of his writings) mightbe thought to have suffered too much to be a trulygreat poet. If Mr. Moore lays himself too opento all the various impulses of things, the outwardshews of earth and sky, to every breath that blows,to every stray sentiment that crosses his fancy; LordByron shuts himself up too much in the impenetrablegloom of his own thoughts, and buries the naturallight of things in “nook monastic.”The Giaour, the Corsair, Childe Harold, are all thesame person, and they are apparently all himself. The everlasting repetition of one subject, the samedark ground of fiction, with the darker colours ofthe poet’s mind spread over it, the unceasingaccumulation of horrors on horror’s head, steelsthe mind against the sense of pain, as inevitablyas the unwearied Siren sounds and luxurious monotonyof Mr. Moore’s poetry make it inaccessible topleasure. Lord Byron’s poetry is as morbidas 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 unaccountablecharacter, at once violent and sullen, fierce andgloomy. It is not the passion of a mind strugglingwith misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires,but of a mind preying upon itself, and disgusted with,or indifferent to all other things. There isnothing less poetical than this sort of unaccommodatingselfishness. There is nothing more repulsivethan this sort of ideal absorption of all the interestsof others, of the good and ills of life, in the rulingpassion and moody abstraction of a single mind, asif it would make itself the centre of the universe,and there was nothing worth cherishing but its intellectualdiseases. It is like a cancer, eating into theheart of poetry. But still there is power; andpower rivets attention and forces admiration. “He hath a demon:” and that is thenext thing to being full of the God. His browcollects the scattered gloom: his eye flasheslivid fire that withers and consumes. But stillwe 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, hehas great unity and truth of keeping. He chooseselements and agents congenial to his mind, the darkand glittering ocean, the frail bark hurrying beforethe storm, pirates and men that “house on thewild sea with wild usages.” He gives thetumultuous eagerness of action, and the fixed despairof thought. In vigour of style and force ofconception, he in one sense surpasses every writerof the present day. His indignant apothegms arelike oracles of misanthropy. He who wishes for“a curse to kill with,” may find it inLord Byron’s writings. Yet he has beautylurking underneath his strength, tenderness sometimesjoined with the phrenzy of despair. A flashof golden light sometimes follows from a stroke ofhis pencil, like a falling meteor. The flowersthat adorn his poetry bloom over charnel-houses andthe grave!
There is one subject on which Lord Byron is fond ofwriting, on which I wish he would not write—Buonaparte. Not that I quarrel with his writing for him, or againsthim, but with his writing both for him and againsthim. What right has he to do this? Buonaparte’scharacter, be it what else it may, does not changeevery hour according to his Lordship’s varyinghumour. He is not a pipe for Fortune’sfinger, or for his Lordship’s Muse, to playwhat stop she pleases on. Why should Lord Byronnow laud him to the skies in the hour of his success,and then peevishly wreak his disappointment on theGod of his idolatry? The man he writes of doesnot rise or fall with circ*mstances: but “lookson tempests and is never shaken.” Besides,he is a subject for history, and not for poetry.
“Great princes’favourites their fair leaves spread,
Butas the marigold at the sun’s eye,
And in themselvestheir pride lies buried;
Forat a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior,famoused for fight,
Aftera thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the bookof honour razed quite,
Andall the rest forgot for which he toil’d.”
If Lord Byron will write any thing more on this hazardoustheme, let him take these lines of Shakspeare forhis guide, and finish them in the spirit of the original—theywill then be worthy of the subject.
Walter Scott is the most popular of all the poetsof the present day, and deservedly so. He describesthat which is most easily and generally understoodwith more vivacity and effect than any body else. He has no excellences, either of a lofty or reconditekind, which lie beyond the reach of the most ordinarycapacity to find out; but he has all the good qualitieswhich all the world agree to understand. Hisstyle is clear, flowing, and transparent: hissentiments, of which his style is an easy and naturalmedium, are common to him with his readers. Hehas none of Mr. Wordsworth’s idiosyncracy. He differs from his readers only in a greater rangeof knowledge and facility of expression. Hispoetry belongs to the class of improvisatoripoetry. It has neither depth, height, nor breadthin it; neither uncommon strength, nor uncommon refinementof thought, sentiment, or language. It has nooriginality. But if this author has no research,no moving power in his own breast, he relies withthe greater safety and success on the force of hissubject. He selects a story such as is sure toplease, full of incidents, characters, peculiar manners,costume, and scenery; and he tells it in a way thatcan offend no one. He never wearies or disappointsyou. He is communicative and garrulous; but heis not his own hero. He never obtrudes himselfon your notice to prevent your seeing the subject. What passes in the poem, passes much as it wouldhave done in reality. The author has little or
nothing to do with it. Mr. Scott has great intuitivepower of fancy, great vividness of pencil in placingexternal objects and events before the eye. Theforce of his mind is picturesque, rather than moral. He gives more of the features of nature than thesoul of passion. He conveys the distinct outlinesand visible changes in outward objects, rather than“their mortal consequences.” He isvery inferior to Lord Byron in intense passion, toMoore in delightful fancy, to Mr. Wordsworth in profoundsentiment: but he has more picturesque powerthan any of them; that is, he places the objects themselves,about which they might feel and think, in amuch more striking point of view, with greater varietyof dress and attitude, and with more local truth ofcolouring. His imagery is Gothic and grotesque. The manners and actions have the interest and curiositybelonging to a wild country and a distant period oftime. Few descriptions have a more completereality, 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, fromtheir concealment under the fern, and disappear againin an instant. The Lay of the Last Minstreland Marmion are the first, and perhaps the best ofhis 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’spictures, which always seem fac-similes of thepersons represented, with ancient costume and a theatricalair. This may be a compliment to Mr. Westall,but it is not one to Walter Scott. The truthis, there is a modern air in the midst of the antiquarianresearch of Mr. Scott’s poetry. It ishistory or tradition in masquerade. Not onlythe crust of old words and images is worn off withtime,—the substance is grown comparativelylight 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 tohis pencil for extreme fidelity, though it has beenno obstacle to its drawing-room success. He hasjust hit the town between the romantic and the fashionable;and between the two, secured all classes of readerson his side. In a word, I conceive that he isto the great poet, what an excellent mimic is to agreat actor. There is no determinate impressionleft on the mind by reading his poetry. It hasno results. The reader rises up from the perusalwith new images and associations, but he remains thesame man that he was before. A great mind isone that moulds the minds of others. Mr. Scotthas put the Border Minstrelsy and scattered traditionsof the country into easy, animated verse. Butthe Notes to his poems are just as entertaining asthe 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 defectsand excellences. He has nearly all that theother wants, and wants all that the other possesses. His poetry is not external, but internal; it doesnot depend upon tradition, or story, or old song;he furnishes it from his own mind, and is his ownsubject. He is the poet of mere sentiment. Of many of the Lyrical Ballads, it is not possibleto speak in terms of too high praise, such as Hart-leapWell, the Banks of the Wye, Poor Susan, parts of theLeech-gatherer, the lines to a Cuckoo, to a Daisy,the Complaint, several of the Sonnets, and a hundredothers of inconceivable beauty, of perfect originalityand pathos. They open a finer and deeper veinof thought and feeling than any poet in modern timeshas done, or attempted. He has produced a deeperimpression, and on a smaller circle, than any otherof his contemporaries. His powers have been mistakenby the age, nor does he exactly understand them himself. He cannot form a whole. He has not the constructivefaculty. He can give only the fine tones ofthought, drawn from his mind by accident or nature,like the sounds drawn from the AEolian harp by thewandering gale.—He is totally deficientin all the machinery of poetry. His Excursion,taken as a whole, notwithstanding the noble materialsthrown away in it, is a proof of this. The linelabours, the sentiment moves slow, but the poem standsstock-still. The reader makes no way from thefirst line to the last. It is more than anything in the world like Robinson Crusoe’s boat,which would have been an excellent good boat, and wouldhave carried him to the other side of the globe, butthat he could not get it out of the sand where itstuck fast. I did what little I could to helpto launch it at the time, but it would not do. I am not, however, one of those who laugh at theattempts or failures of men of genius. It isnot 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 meritshave been understood, the more necessary is it to insistupon them. This is not the place to repeat whatI have already said on the subject. The readermay turn to it in the Round Table. I do not think,however, there is any thing in the larger poem equalto many of the detached pieces in the Lyrical Ballads. As Mr. Wordsworth’s poems have been little knownto the public, or chiefly through garbled extractsfrom them, I will here give an entire poem (one thathas always been a favourite with me), that the readermay know what it is that the admirers of this authorfind to be delighted with in his poetry. Thosewho do not feel the beauty and the force of it, maysave themselves the trouble of inquiring farther.
HART-LEAP WELL.
The knight hadridden down from Wensley moor
Withthe slow motion of a summer’s cloud;
He turned asidetowards a vassal’s door,
And,“Bring another horse!” he cried aloud.
“Anotherhorse!”—That shout the vassal heard,
Andsaddled his best steed, a comely gray;
Sir Walter mountedhim; he was the third
Whichhe had mounted on that glorious day.
Joy sparkled inthe prancing courser’s eyes:
Thehorse and horseman are a happy pair;
But, though SirWalter like a falcon flies,
Thereis a doleful silence in the air.
A rout this morningleft Sir Walter’s hall,
Thatas they galloped made the echoes roar;
But horse andman are vanished, one and all;
Suchrace, I think, was never seen before.
Sir Walter, restlessas a veering wind,
Callsto the few tired dogs that yet remain:
Brach, Swift,and Music, noblest of their kind,
Follow,and up the weary mountain strain.
The knight hallooed,he chid and cheered them on
Withsuppliant gestures and upbraidings stern;
But breath andeye-sight fail; and, one by one,
Thedogs are stretched among the mountain fern.
Where is the throng,the tumult of the race?
Thebugles that so joyfully were blown?
—Thischase it looks not like an earthly chase;
SirWalter and the hart are left alone.
The poor harttoils along the mountain side;
Iwill not stop to tell how far he fled,
Nor will I mentionby what death he died;
Butnow the knight beholds him lying dead.
Dismounting then,he leaned against a thorn;
Hehad no follower, dog, nor man, nor boy:
He neither smackedhis whip, nor blew his horn,
Butgazed upon the spoil with silent joy.
Close to the thornon which Sir Walter leaned,
Stoodhis dumb partner in this glorious act;
Weak as a lambthe hour that it is yeaned;
Andfoaming like a mountain cataract.
Upon his sidethe hart was lying stretched:
Hisnose half-touched a spring beneath a hill,
And with the lastdeep groan his breath had fetched
Thewaters of the spring were trembling still.
And now, too happyfor repose or rest,
(Wasnever man in such a joyful case!)
Sir Walter walkedall round, north, south, and west,
Andgazed, and gazed upon that darling place.
And climbing upthe hill—(it was at least
Nineroods of sheer ascent) Sir Walter found,
Three severalhoof-marks which the hunted beast
Hadleft imprinted on the verdant ground.
Sir Walter wipedhis face and cried, “Till now
Suchsight was never seen by living eyes:
Three leaps haveborne him from this lofty brow,
Downto the very fountain where he lies.
I’ll builda pleasure-house upon this spot,
Anda small arbour, made for rural joy;
’Twill bethe traveller’s shed, the pilgrim’s cot,
Aplace of love for damsels that are coy.
A cunning artistwill I have to frame
Abason for that fountain in the dell;
And they, whodo make mention of the same
Fromthis day forth, shall call it HART-LEAP WELL.
And, gallant brute!to make thy praises known,
Anothermonument shall here be raised;
Three severalpillars, each a rough-hewn stone,
Andplanted where thy hoofs the turf have grazed.
And, in the summer-timewhen days are long,
Iwill come hither with my paramour;
And with the dancers,and the minstrel’s song,
Wewill make merry in that pleasant bower.
Till the foundationsof the mountains fail,
Mymansion with its arbour shall endure;—
The joy of themwho till the fields of Swale,
Andthem who dwell among the woods of Ure!”
Then home he went,and left the hart, stone-dead,
Withbreathless nostrils stretched above the spring.
—Soondid the knight perform what he had said,
Andfar and wide the fame thereof did ring.
Ere thrice themoon into her port had steered,
Acup of stone received the living well;
Three pillarsof rude stone Sir Walter reared,
Andbuilt a house of pleasure in the dell.
And near the fountain,flowers of stature tall
Withtrailing plants and trees were intertwined,—
Which soon composeda little sylvan hall,
Aleafy shelter from the sun and wind.
And thither, whenthe summer-days were long,
SirWalter journeyed with his paramour;
And with the dancersand the minstrel’s song
Mademerriment within that pleasant bower.
The knight, SirWalter, died in course of time,
Andhis bones lie in his paternal vale.—
But there is matterfor a second rhyme,
AndI to this would add another tale.”
PART SECOND.
“The movingaccident is not my trade:
Tofreeze the blood I have no ready arts:
’Tis mydelight, alone in summer shade,
Topipe a simple song for thinking hearts.
As I from Hawesto Richmond did repair,
Itchanced that I saw standing in a dell
Three aspens atthree corners of a square,
Andone, not four yards distant, near a well.
What this importedI could ill divine:
And,pulling now the rein my horse to stop,
I saw three pillarsstanding in a line,
Thelast stone pillar on a dark hill-top.
The trees weregray, with neither arms nor head;
Half-wastedthe square mound of tawny green;
So that you justmight say, as then I said,
“Herein old time the hand of man hath been.”
I looked uponthe hill both far and near,
Moredoleful place did never eye survey;
It seemed as ifthe spring-time came not here,
AndNature here were willing to decay.
I stood in variousthoughts and fancies lost,
Whenone, who was in shepherd’s garb attired,
Came up the hollow:—Himdid I accost,
Andwhat this place might be I then inquired.
The shepherd stopped,and that same story told
Whichin my former rhyme I have rehearsed.
“A jollyplace,” said he, “in times of old!
Butsomething ails it now; the spot is curst.
You see theselifeless stumps of aspen wood—
Somesay that they are beeches, others elms—
These were thebower; and here a mansion stood,
Thefinest palace of a hundred realms!
The arbour doesits own condition tell;
Yousee the stones, the fountain, and the stream;
But as to thegreat lodge! you might as well
Hunthalf a day for a forgotten dream.
There’sneither dog nor heifer, horse nor sheep,
Willwet his lips within that cup of stone;
And oftentimes,when all are fast asleep,
Thiswater doth send forth a dolorous groan.
Some say thathere a murder has been done,
Andblood cries out for blood: but, for my part,
I’ve guessed,when I’ve been sitting in the sun,
Thatit was all for that unhappy hart.
What thoughtsmust through the creature’s brain have passed!
Evenfrom the top-most stone, upon the steep,
Are but threebounds—and look, Sir, at this last—
—OMaster! it has been a cruel leap.
For thirteen hourshe ran a desperate race;
Andin my simple mind we cannot tell
What cause thehart might have to love this place,
Andcome and make his death-bed near the well.
Here on the grassperhaps asleep he sank,
Lulledby this fountain in the summer-tide;
This water wasperhaps the first he drank
Whenhe had wandered from his mother’s side.
In April herebeneath the scented thorn
Heheard the birds their morning carols sing;
And he, perhaps,for aught we know, was born
Nothalf a furlong from that self-same spring.
But now here’sneither grass nor pleasant shade;
Thesun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be,as I have often said,
Tilltrees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.”
“Gray-headedShepherd, thou hast spoken well;
Smalldifference lies between thy creed and mine:
This beast notunobserved by Nature fell;
Hisdeath was mourned by sympathy divine.
The Being, thatis in the clouds and air,
Thatis in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep,and reverential care
Forthe unoffending creatures whom he loves.
The pleasure-houseis dust:—behind, before,
Thisis no common waste, no common gloom;
But Nature, indue course of time, once more
Shallhere put on her beauty and her bloom.
She leaves theseobjects to a slow decay,
Thatwhat we are, and have been, may be known;
But at the comingof the milder day,
Thesemonuments shall all be overgrown.
One lesson, Shepherd,let us two divide,
Taughtboth by what she shews, and what conceals,
Never to blendour pleasure or our pride
Withsorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”
Mr. Wordsworth is at the head of that which has beendenominated the Lake school of poetry; a school which,with all my respect for it, I do not think sacredfrom criticism or exempt from faults, of some of whichfaults I shall speak with becoming frankness; for Ido not see that the liberty of the press ought tobe shackled, or freedom of speech curtailed, to screeneither its revolutionary or renegado extravagances.This school of poetry had its origin in the Frenchrevolution, or rather in those sentiments and opinionswhich produced that revolution; and which sentimentsand opinions were indirectly imported into this countryin translations from the German about that period. Our poetical literature had, towards the close ofthe last century, degenerated into the most trite,insipid, and mechanical of all things, in the handsof the followers of Pope and the old French schoolof poetry. It wanted something to stir it up,and it found that some thing in the principles andevents of the French revolution. From the impulseit thus received, it rose at once from the most servileimitation and tamest common-place, to the utmost pitchof singularity and paradox. The change in thebelles-lettres was as complete, and to many personsas startling, as the change in politics, with whichit went hand in hand. There was a mighty fermentin the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According to the prevailing notions, all was to benatural and new. Nothing that was establishedwas to be tolerated. All the common-place figuresof poetry, tropes, allegories, personifications, withthe whole heathen mythology, were instantly discarded;a classical allusion was considered as a piece ofantiquated foppery; capital letters were no more allowedin print, than letters-patent of nobility were permittedin real life; kings and queens were dethroned fromtheir rank and station in legitimate tragedy or epicpoetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere; rhymewas looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, andregular metre was abolished along with regular government.
Authority and fashion, elegance or arrangement, werehooted 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 absolutelevel; and a singularly affected and outrageous simplicityprevailed 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, extravagantor childish, was all that was aimed at, or consideredas compatible with sound philosophy and an age ofreason. 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 Adam-wits, was to share itsfate and begin de novo. It was a timeof promise, a renewal of the world and of letters;and the Deucalions, who were to perform this feat ofregeneration, were the present poet-laureat and thetwo authors of the Lyrical Ballads. The Germans,who made heroes of robbers, and honest women of cast-offmistresses, had already exhausted the extravagant andmarvellous in sentiment and situation: our nativewriters adopted a wonderful simplicity of style andmatter. The paradox they set out with was, thatall things are by nature equally fit subjects for poetry;or that if there is any preference to be given, thosethat are the meanest and most unpromising are thebest, as they leave the greatest scope for the unboundedstores of thought and fancy in the writer’s ownmind. Poetry had with them “neither buttressnor coigne of vantage to make its pendant bed andprocreant cradle.” It was not “bornso high: its aiery buildeth in the cedar’stop, and dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.”It grew like a mushroom out of the ground; or was hiddenin it like a truffle, which it required a particularsagacity and industry to find out and dig up. They founded the new school on a principle of sheerhumanity, on pure nature void of art. It couldnot be said of these sweeping reformers and dictatorsin the republic of letters, that “in their trainwalked 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 Bayconvicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughtersin 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 distinctionsof birth, the vicissitudes of fortune, did not enterinto their abstracted, lofty, and levelling calculationof human nature. He who was more than man, withthem was none. They claimed kindred only withthe commonest of the people: peasants, pedlars,and village-barbers were their oracles and bosom friends. Their poetry, in the extreme to which it professedlytended, and was in effect carried, levels all distinctionsof nature and society; has “no figures nor nofantasies,” which the prejudices of superstitionor the customs of the world draw in the brains of men;“no trivial fond records” of all thathas existed in the history of past ages; it has noadventitious pride, pomp, or circ*mstance, to set itoff; “the marshal’s truncheon, nor thejudge’s robe;” neither tradition, reverence,nor ceremony, “that to great ones ’longs”:it breaks in pieces the golden images of poetry, anddefaces its armorial bearings, to melt them down inthe mould of common humanity or of its own upstartself-sufficiency. They took the same method intheir new-fangled “metre ballad-mongering”scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes—of exciting attention by reversing the establishedstandards of opinion and estimation in the world. They were for bringing poetry back to its primitivesimplicity and state of nature, as he was for bringingsociety back to the savage state: so that theonly thing remarkable left in the world by this change,would be the persons who had produced it. Athorough adept in this school of poetry and philanthropyis jealous of all excellence but his own. Hedoes not even like to share his reputation with hissubject; for he would have it all proceed from hisown power and originality of mind. Such a oneis slow to admire any thing that is admirable; feelsno interest in what is most interesting to others,no grandeur in any thing grand, no beauty in anythingbeautiful. He tolerates only what he himselfcreates; he sympathizes only with what can enter intono competition with him, with “the bare treesand 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 insome respects a madness; for he scorns even the admirationof himself, thinking it a presumption in any one tosuppose that he has taste or sense enough to understandhim. He hates all science and all art; he hateschemistry, he hates conchology; he hates Voltaire;he hates Sir Isaac Newton; he hates wisdom; he hateswit; he hates metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible,and yet he would be thought to understand them; hehates prose; he hates all poetry but his own; he hatesthe 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 reasonthat so few people take an interest in his writings,because he takes an interest in nothing that othersdo!—The effect has been perceived as somethingodd; but the cause or principle has never been distinctlytraced to its source before, as far as I know.The proofs are to be found every where—inMr. Southey’s Botany Bay Eclogues, in his bookof Songs and Sonnets, his Odes and Inscriptions, sowell parodied in the Anti-Jacobin Review, in his Joanof Arc, and last, though not least, in his Wat Tyler:“When Adamdelved, and Eve span,
Where was thenthe gentleman?”
(—or the poet laureat either, we may ask?)—InMr. Coleridge’s Ode to an Ass’s Foal,in his Lines to Sarah, his Religious Musings; and inhis and Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, passim.
Of Mr. Southey’s larger epics, I have but afaint recollection at this distance of time, but allthat I remember of them is mechanical and extravagant,heavy and superficial. His affected, disjointedstyle is well imitated in the Rejected Addresses. The difference between him and Sir Richard Blackmoreseems to be, that the one is heavy and the other light,the one solemn and the other pragmatical, the one phlegmaticand the other flippant; and that there is no Gay inthe present time to give a Catalogue Raisonne of theperformances of the living undertaker of epics. Kehama is a loose sprawling figure, such as we seecut out of wood or paper, and pulled or jerked withwire or thread, to make sudden and surprising motions,without meaning, grace, or nature in them. Byfar the best of his works are some of his shorter personalcompositions, in which there is an ironical mixtureof the quaint and serious, such as his lines on apicture of Gaspar Poussin, the fine tale of Gualberto,his Description of a Pig, and the Holly-tree, whichis an affecting, beautiful, and modest retrospecton his own character. May the aspiration withwhich it concludes be fulfilled! [11]—Butthe little he has done of true and sterling excellence,is overloaded by the quantity of indifferent matterwhich 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 thatclass.
___[11]“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, itsleaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;
But as they grow where nothing is to fear,
Smooth and unarm’d the pointless leavesappear.
I love to view these things withcurious eyes,
And moralize;
And in the wisdom of the Holly Tree
Can emblems see
Wherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme,
Such as may profit in the after time.
So, though abroad perchance Imight appear
Harsh and austere,
To those who on my leisure would intrude
Reserved and rude,
Gentle at home amid my friends I’d be,
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.
And should my youth, as youthis apt I know,
Some harshness show,
All vain asperities I day by day
Would wear away,
Till the smooth temper of my age should be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.
And as when all the summer treesare seen
So bright and green,
The Holly leaves their fadeless hues display
Less bright than they,
But when the bare and wintry woods we see,
What then so cheerful as the Holly Tree?
So serious should my youth appearamong
The thoughtless throng,
So would I seem amid the young and gay
More grave than they,
That in my age as cheerful I might be
As the green winter of the Holly Tree.”—
___
It remains that I should say a few words of Mr. Coleridge;and there is no one who has a better right to saywhat he thinks of him than I have. “Isthere here any dear friend of Caesar? To him Isay, that Brutus’s love to Caesar was no lessthan his.” But no matter.—HisAncient Mariner is his most remarkable performance,and the only one that I could point out to any oneas 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 answerableto it; they are, except a few poetical passages, drawlingsentiment and metaphysical jargon. He has nogenuine dramatic talent. There is one fine passagein his Christobel, that which contains the descriptionof the quarrel between Sir Leoline and Sir Rolandde Vaux of Tryermaine, who had been friends in youth.
“Alas!they had been friends in youth,
But whisperingtongues can poison truth;
And constancylives in realms above;
And life is thorny;and youth is vain;
And to be wrothwith one we love,
Doth work likemadness in the brain:
And thus it chanc’das I divine,
With Roland andSir Leoline.
Each spake wordsof high disdain
And insult tohis heart’s best brother,
And parted ne’erto meet again!
But neither everfound another
To free the hollowheart from paining—
Theystood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs whichhad been rent asunder:
A dreary sea nowflows between,
But neither heat,nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly doaway I ween
The marks of thatwhich once hath been.
SirLeoline a moment’s space
Stood gazing onthe damsel’s face;
And the youthfullord of Tryermaine
Came back uponhis heart again.”
It might seem insidious if I were to praise his odeentitled Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, as an effusionof high poetical enthusiasm, and strong politicalfeeling. His Sonnet to Schiller conveys a finecompliment to the author of the Robbers, and an equallyfine idea of the state of youthful enthusiasm in whichhe composed it.
“Schiller!that hour I would have wish’d to die,
Ifthrough the shudd’ring midnight I had sent
Fromthe dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,
That fearful voice,a famish’d father’s cry—
That in no aftermoment aught less vast
Mightstamp me mortal! A triumphant shout
BlackHorror scream’d, and all her goblin rout
From the morewith’ring scene diminish’d pass’d.
Ah! Bardtremendous in sublimity!
CouldI behold thee in thy loftier mood,
Wand’ringat eve, with finely frenzied eye,
Beneathsome vast old tempest-swinging wood!
Awhile,with mute awe gazing, I would brood,
Then weep aloudin a wild ecstacy!”—
His Conciones ad Populum, Watchman, &c. aredreary trash. Of his Friend, I have spoken thetruth elsewhere. But I may say of him here,that he is the only person I ever knew who answeredto the idea of a man of genius. He is the onlyperson from whom I ever learnt any thing. Thereis only one thing he could learn from me in return,but that he has not. He was the firstpoet I ever knew. His genius at that time hadangelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked onfor ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour andeffort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, andas if the wings of his imagination lifted him fromoff his feet. His voice rolled on the ear likethe pealing organ, and its sound alone was the musicof thought. His mind was clothed with wings;and raised on them, he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions, you then saw the progress ofhuman happiness and liberty in bright and never-endingsuccession, like the steps of Jacob’s ladder,with airy shapes ascending and descending, and withthe voice of God at the top of the ladder. Andshall I, who heard him then, listen to him now? Not I! . . . That spell is broke; that timeis gone for ever; that voice is heard no more:but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughtsof long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dyingsound.
“Whatthough the radiance which was once so bright,
Be now for evertaken from my sight,
Though nothingcan bring back the hour
Of glory in thegrass, of splendour in the flow’r;
Ido not grieve, but rather find
Strengthin what remains behind;
Inthe primal sympathy,
Whichhaving been, must ever be;
Inthe soothing thoughts that spring
Outof human suffering;
In years thatbring the philosophic mind!”—
I have thus gone through the task I intended, andhave come at last to the level ground. I havefelt my subject gradually sinking from under me asI advanced, and have been afraid of ending in nothing. The interest has unavoidably decreased at almostevery successive step of the progress, like a playthat has its catastrophe in the first or second act. This, however, I could not help. I have doneas well as I could.
